But if you inspect the long list from
which Charles Lamb took his "Specimens," you will find few British
names.
Casting our eyes on the dramatic efforts of the recent English poetic
celebrities, we perceive that Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley, all
abandoned, in every instance, native ground. The only dramatic work of
a great modern, the scene of which is laid within the British limits,
is "The Borderers," of Wordsworth, which, though having the
poetic advantage of remoteness in time--being thrown back to the reign
of Henry III.--is, in strictness, neither a drama nor a poem,
Wordsworth's deficiency in dramatic gifts being so signal as to cause,
by the impotent struggle in an uncongenial element, a partial
paralysis even of his high poetic genius.
Glance now across the Channel. French poetic tragedy is in its
subjects almost exclusively ancient--Greek, Roman, and Biblical. In
the works of the great comic genius of France, Moliere, we have a
salient exception to the practice of all other eminent dramatists. The
scene of his plays is Paris; the time is the year in which each was
written.
Let us look for the cause of this remarkable isolation.
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