Not to run the slightest risk of suffering Mr. Walker's scheme to be confounded with any of the absurdities of the present Cabinet, we subjoin the passage in which he pointedly excludes the inference: The ochlocratic, or mob principle, though it may appear to be founded on the principle of self-government, is virtually the reverse, and for this reason, that its tendency is to throw the management of affairs into the hands of a few, and those the most unworthy; whilst apathy and disgust keep the best as much aloof, as if they were by law excluded from interference. This is an inevitable result in the long run. It is witnessed continually in ochlocratically organized parishes and corporations, and has, from the first, been visible in different degrees in the new overgrown parliamentary constituencies. The excitement of the moment is producing a partial activity, but which is factitious, and not essential. The cumbrous machines will only be towed into action by party steamers, in the shape of clubs and associations, and, in ordinary times, will be completely water-logged, while corruption and misrule will gradually creep in undisturbed. It will require far more statesman-like contrivances to draw men from their business, their pleasure, and their ease, and induce them sufficiently to interest themselves in public affairs to keep public affairs in their proper course. The spirit of party will not accomplish this. Zealots in liberty are apt to suppose that it consists entirely in independence of all government; that is, that the less power is lodged with government, the more freedom is left to the citizens. But the most perfect state of liberty consists in the most complete security of person and property, not only from government, but from individuals; and in this point of view, I apprehend, liberty is enjoyed to far greater extent in England than in any other country in the world. In this point of view, honesty and peaceable behaviour are essential to the enjoyment of liberty..... Whether a man has his pocket picked by a sharper, or by an oppressive impost; whether his plate or jewels are seized by an order of government, or are carried away by a housebreaker; whether his estate is cleared of its game by the king's purveyor, or by a gang of poachers; or whether he is confined to his house after a certain hour by a regulation of police, or by the fear of being robbed or murdered,-in neither predicament can he be said to enjoy perfect liberty, which consists in security of person and property, without molestation or restraint, provided there is no molestation or restraint of others. To attain this liberty, strong government is necessary, but strong without being vexatious, and the only form is that which, in the true spirit of our constitution, consists of a simple supreme government, presiding over and keeping duly organized a scale of self-governments below it. It is by moral influence alone that liberty, as I have just defined it, can be secured, and it is only in self-governments that the proper moral influence exists. In proportion as the supreme government takes upon itself the control of local affaire, apathy, feebleness, and corruption will creep in, and our our increasing wealth, which should prove a blessing, will only hasten our ruin.' We shall conclude with a sentiment in perfect harmony and exact unison with our own:— 'I like comfortable generous times. I loathe the base, malignant, destroying spirit now in the ascendant, chilling and poisoning as it works; and I would fain see the present age of calculation and economy pass away, to be succeeded by a glorious one of high-minded morals. To inspirit the rich, to enrich the industrious, and to ensure a sound and brilliant prosperity, what this great country wants, is not a sour system of paring and pulling down, but a statesman-like infusion of the splendour and energies of war into the conduct of peace-the same prompt and liberal application of means to ends— the same excitements to action-the same encouragements to those who serve their country.' Mr. Walker has discontinued his labours during a brief interval, but he promises to resume them within a month or two, and we shall then be most happy to renew our acquaintance with the 'Original.' We now take leave of him with the sincerest feelings of respect. ART. VIII.-Dramas. By Joanna Baillie. 3 vols. 8vo. London, 1836. THE HE name of Joanna Baillie commands attention from all true lovers of dramatic poetry. No female, we assert without scruple, has ever struck at once into so high a vein of poetry, or obtained so much success in the noblest and most consummate branch of poetic composition-the tragic drama. We are not old enough to remember the sensation caused by the first anonymous appearance of the Plays on the Passions,' but we have often heard it described; the curiosity excited in the literary circle, which was then much more narrow and concentrated than at present; the incredulity, with which the first rumour that these vigorous and original compositions came from a female hand, was received; and the astonishment, when, after all the ladies who then enjoyed any literary celebrity had been tried and found totally wanting in the splendid faculties developed in those dramas, they were acknowledged by a gentle, quiet, and retiring young woman, whose most intimate friends, we believe, had never suspected her extraordinary powers. There may have been some national pride, and some personal feeling of regard in the high-toned praise awarded to the 'bold enchantress' in one of Sir Walter Scott's earlier poems :— Till Avon's swans-while rung the grove Awakening Awakening at the inspired strain, Deem'd their own Shakspeare lived again!' Yet not only must the peculiar excellence of her tragedies, but the state of English dramatic literature at the time when they made their appearance, be taken into the account, when we would appreciate the genius of Joanna Baillie. At any time she must have commanded high admiration by her masculine vigour both of conception and language, tempered with feminine grace and tenderness; by the bold grappling with the strongest passions of human nature; by the fearless confidence in her own invention in the construction and development of her plots; by the constant, and frequently successful, attempt to give character to all the inferior incidents and personages of her drama; by the language, if not always perfectly pure or free from inversion, yet in its simpler flow, as well as in its imagery, peculiarly her own; even by the versification, which shook off at once the artificial and monotonous stateliness in which English tragedy had spoken since the days of Rowe. But, when these dramas first flashed across the poetic atmosphere-what was, what had long been the state of the English tragic drama? We are unwilling to disturb the slumbers of the dead: if, as Ariosto imagined, there be a limbo in the heavenly regions for things lost on earth, we cannot suppose that the tragic writers of that age can be much nearer to the sun, or inhabit a more genial climate than the planet Saturn. If these works were yet on earth we should recommend a consignment in the next Arctic expedition; they would, no doubt, be very stirring and effective translated into the Esquimaux tongue. Seriously speaking, when Miss Baillie first wrote, the drama, throughout Europe, seemed expiring, never to revive. Voltaire had long exhausted himself in his Zaire, his Mahomet, and his Tancrede. Alfieri, if any of his dramas had been published, had not been heard of in this country. Schiller, if known, was known only by his earlier and wilder plays. In England, the only tragedy of vigour and originality (Horace Walpole's Mysterious Mother) was interdicted from the theatre, and indeed from the library of more scrupulous readers, by the repulsive nature of the subject, in our opinion rendered more revolting by the misconception of the author. Walpole imagined that he made the horrible crime, on which his tragedy was founded, less improbable, by representing it as perpetrated at the time when the mother's mind was unhinged by the recent loss of her husband. To the calmer reason this might be true, but tragedy appeals not to the reason, but to the moral sentiment; perhaps metaphysically right, he was dramatically wrong in this first conception of his plot. Among the other serious dramas of this period, Douglas alone, from from the romantic interest of the story, and the opportunity for fine acting in the part of Lady Randolph, maintains its place on the stage. The rest, monotonous alike in plot, in character, in language, in versification, are perhaps best known by Sheridan's humorous satire in the Critic, which is no less true than it is comic. From this thraldom English dramatic poetry was at once emancipated, and by a young and meek woman. It cannot be denied that, notwithstanding her manly tone of originality both in thought and expression, the influence of her sex is still manifest in the works of Miss Baillie. Her range, both of events, and of the passions which she exhibits in their fiercer workings, is in some degree limited; and no female writer ever submitted to these natural restrictions with so much dignity and grace as Joanna Baillie. There is none of that artificial prudery and delicacy which is ever watching itself lest it should be betrayed into indecorous warmth, lest passion should break through the rigid boundaries of propriety: it is the inborn and native modesty of a pure mind, too virtuous to condescend to the display of virtue, too inwardly sensitive of the becoming to parade any studied and fastidious nicety. Throughout Miss Baillie's writings there is the constant charm of a simplicity of character which disdains to strain after effect. This straining, we are almost ungallant enough to say, is the common fault of female writers. She never labours to produce stronger emotion than naturally arises out of the incident; her tenderness (and in the expression of the softer affections she is often a consummate mistress) never degenerates into sentimentality; her playfulness-the innocent and cheerful coquetry with which she delights in enlivening her younger female characters-is easy and unstudied; her moral sentiments arise naturally out of her situations; these are never pompously enunciated, as though they were philosophical discoveries: always on the side of virtue, she does not think it necessary to lecture upon it. She lays out all her strength in being a powerful and pleasing dramatist, but never ventures out of her own province. Even her religion is in the same quiet and harmonious tone-the motive is always in its place -and the feeling, when it necessarily finds its way into the language, is as easy and unaffected as the rest; it has the force and authority of perfect sincerity; it is more impressive, because it makes no display. Still, highly as this kind of native feminine sense of propriety enhances, in some respects, our admiration of Miss Baillie's works, it confines her within a narrower sphere of poetic conception. She cannot-it is contrary to her nature-assert perfect freedom in ranging through all the infinite varieties of human nature, which form the great and inexhaustible treasure-house for tragic poetry. There are some of its darker and more retired cells cells which are closed against her. There are passions which she must develope with a trembling hand. Among the most singular endowments indeed of our nature, is the power possessed by minds of true genius of embodying passions utterly foreign to their own disposition; of passing, as it were, into the persons of others, and expressing the genuine language of grief, which they never felt, of jealousy, to which they have never been subject, of ambition, which has no real hold upon their hearts. How is the link-boy in the street-who rose by degrees into an actor of no very splendid success, whose knowledge of human nature was obtained in his disorderly frolics in Warwickshire, in the streets of then circumscribed London, or the convivial meetings at the Mitre, perhaps occasionally in the hospitable hall of Lord Southampton-how is this Proteus of the imagination by turns the delicate maiden, the haughty Roman, the blood-stained usurper, the misanthropic Athenian, the blind old banished King, Miranda, and Coriolanus, and Macbeth, and Timon, and Lear? Of all passions, hatred, we venture to assert, is that which is most opposite to the nature of Joanna Baillie. It is a feeling with which it is impossible that experience should have given her the slightest acquaintance; yet with what terrific energy, with what awful truth, has she developed its secret workings, its subtle irritability, its intense madness! Still, though thus possessing a command over emotions so totally alien from her own disposition-with such an intuitive perception of the manner in which certain events would work on minds of the most strange and peculiar temperament—able to place the persons of her drama in the most trying situations, and to make them act and speak with the force and the truth of naturein woman there yet appear some limitations to the exercise of this wonderful and comprehensive faculty. There are depths in the human heart which her imagination must shrink from exploringnot those alone which the sense of propriety would interdict, but the agitations of some of the fiercer and more stormy emotions, the concentrated vehemence, the whirlwind of certain passionsat least in their strongest development. Above all, some larger acquaintance with human life seems essential to that infinite variety of incident, that rich multiplicity of character, which belongs to Shakspeare and his school. It is singular how many of Miss Baillie's plays-especially in the volumes before us-turn on the crime of murder; it is with her the great source of strong emotion-her tragic Decalogue seems confined to the sixth commandment. The consciousness of the power with which she pourtrays the irresolution, the terror, the agony, the desperate frenzy, before the first commission of the horrid act the remorse, the prostration of spirit, the deep ineradicable despondency, after the perpetration of the crime has |