There is, we cannot help remarking, a peculiar awkwardness in introducing a veritable poet amongst the personages of a drama. We cannot dissociate his name from the remembrance of the works he has written, and the heroes whom he has celebrated. Tasso--is it not another name for the _Jerusalem Delivered_? and can he be summoned up in our memory without bringing with him the shades of Godfrey and Tancred? We expect to hear him singing of these champions of the cross; this was his life, and we have a difficulty in according to him any other. It is only after some effort that we separate the man from the poet--that we can view him standing alone, on the dry earth, unaccompanied by the creations of his fancy, his imaginative existence suspended, acting and suffering in the same personal manner as the rest of us. The poet brought into the ranks of the _dramatis personae!_--the creator of fictions converted himself into a fictitious personage!--there seems some strange confusion here. It is as if the magic wand were waved over the magician himself--a thing not unheard of in the annals of the black art. But then the second magician should be manifestly more powerful than the first. The second poet should be capable of overlooking and controlling the spirit of the first; capable, at all events, of animating him with an eloquence and a poetry not inferior to his own. For there is certainly this disadvantage in bringing before us a well-known and celebrated poet--we expect that he should speak in poetry of the first order--in such as he might have written himself. It is long before we can admit him to be neither more nor less poetical than the other speakers; it is long before we can believe him to talk for any other purpose than to say beautiful and tender things. Knowing, as we do, the trick of poets, and what is indeed their office as spokesmen of humanity, we suspect even when he is relating his own sufferings, and complaining of his own wrongs, that he is still only making a poem; that he is still busied first of all with the sweet expression of a feeling which he is bent on infusing, like an electric fluid, through the hearts of others. Altogether, he is manifestly a very inconvenient personage for the dramatist to have to deal with.