Shakspeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, and Webster, he will be a gentleman. A man with friends like these will not go to the tap of the Black Dog. Better spend his sixpence at Sadler’s Wells, and learn what was going on in Rome in the time of Coriolanus, or learn the thanklessness of sycophantic friends in the Athenian Timon. With the bluff and brutal Henry VIII. they are quite familiar, and form a very tolerable idea of a certain pinchbeck cardinal’s pride, from the insolence of the overweening Wolsey. That energy and honour overcome all impediments, they have long discovered from the story of the Lady of Lyons, and the grandeur of self-devotion in the noble aspirations of Ion. A world like this opening to their eyes, reflects a pleasant light on the common earth they inhabit. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” The same sentiment brings a big sob into their rough throats, and swells the gentle bosom of the delicate young lady in the front row of the dress circle. If the Queen were there, there would be a quivering of the royal lip. Jack Wiggins, the tinman, cries as if he were flogged. Let us off to see Sadler’s Wells, where a new play is to be acted, with our old friend James VI. for its hero. A pretty hero for a play!—The pedantic, selfish, ambitious, and cowardly son of Mary Stuart, who kissed the hand reeking with his mother’s blood, and held out the Scottish crown to be an awmous-dish, into which Elizabeth disdainfully threw her niggard charity, like an old maid depositing a farthing in the plate at the Magdalen Hospital door. This play is improperly called a tragedy, because a few people happen to be killed in the course of it. The foundation is decidedly comic—horribly, grotesquely comic. There the laughter tries in vain to banish the shudder, and between them a compound is created which we believe to be new to the stage. The conventional tyrant of tragedy is entirely done away with. There are no knittings of brows and crossings of elbows, starts and struttings, such as we generally see made the accompaniments of revenge and hatred. There is a low, selfish, cruel nature, disguised in ludicrous repartee and jocular conversation—a buffoon animated by the soul of Richard III., a harlequin’s lath tipt with deadly poison—our ordinary ideas turned topsy-turvy, and Polonius running his sword through Hamlet behind the arras. Whether this historical view of James be correct or not, does not matter to the play. It is the view chosen by the author on a preponderating weight of evidence; and the point of his career chosen for the development of these blacker portions of his disposition is the Gowrie plot, where even the king’s adulators were unable to hide the murmurs of the people, who certainly believed his conduct to have been cruel and unjust.