_Cæteris paribus_, there can be no doubt of the advantage of verse over prose in all works of the imagination. But an artist does not select his own department of art with deliberate calculation of the best chances of posthumous renown. His choice is determined partly by his own organisation, and partly also by the circumstances of his time. For these last may control and tyrannise over his own more special bias. For instance, in our country, at present, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that there is no tragic drama—scarcely any living drama at all; whether from the want of competent actors, or from some disposition on the part of our public and our critics not to accord to a successful drama the rank which it holds in other nations, and once held in this, I do not care to examine; but the fact itself is so clear, that the Drama, though in reality it is, in itself, the highest order of poem, next to the Epic, seems to have wholly dropped out of our consideration as belonging to any form of poetry whatsoever. If any Englishman were asked by a foreigner to name even the minor poets of his country who have achieved reputation since the death of Lord Byron, it would not occur to him to name Sheridan Knowles—though perhaps no poet since Shakespeare has written so many successful dramas; nay, if he were asked to quote the principal poets whom England has produced, I doubt very much whether Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, or Otway, would occur to his mind as readily as Collins or Cowper. We have forgotten, in short, somehow or other, except in the single instance of Shakespeare, that dramas in verse are poems, and that where we have a great dramatist, who can hold the hearts of an audience spell-bound, we have a poet immeasurably superior, in all the great qualities of poetry, to three-fourths of the lyrical, and still more of the didactic versifiers who, lettered and bound as British poets, occupy so showy a range on our shelves. It is not thus anywhere except in our country. Ask a Frenchman who are the greatest poets of France, he names her dramatists immediately—Corneille, Racine, Molière. Ask a German, he names Goethe and Schiller; and if you inquire which of the works of those great masters in all variety of song he considers their greatest poems, he at once names their dramas. But to return; with us, therefore, the circumstances of the time would divert an author, whose natural bias might otherwise lead him towards dramatic composition, from a career so discouraged; and as the largest emoluments and the loudest reputation are at this time bestowed upon prose fiction, so he who would otherwise have been a dramatist becomes a novelist. I speak here, indeed, from some personal experience, for I can remember well, that when Mr Macready undertook the management of one of those two great national theatres, which are now lost to the national drama, many literary men turned their thoughts towards writing for the stage, sure