And thus, as his domain is the passions, he must seek a plot which admits of situations for passion, and characters in harmony with such situations. Great historical events in themselves are rarely dramatic—they are made so on the stage by the appeal to emotions with which, in private life, the audience are accustomed to sympathise. The preservation of the Republic of Venice from a conspiracy would have an interest in history from causes appealing to political reasoning, that would be wholly without interest on the stage. The dramatist, therefore, places the preservation of Venice in the struggle of a woman’s heart between the conflicting passions, with which, in private life, the audience could most readily sympathise. According as Belvidera acts, as between her husband and her father, Venice will be saved or lost. This is dramatic treatment—it is not historical. All delineations of passion involve the typical; because whoever paints a passion common to mankind presents us with a human type of that passion, varied, indeed, through the character of an individual and the situations in which he is placed; but still, in the expression of the passion itself, sufficiently germane to all in whom that passion exists, whether actively or latently, to permit the spectator to transfer himself into the place and person of him who represents it. Hence the passions of individuals, though affecting only themselves, or a very confined range of persons connected with them, command, in reality, a far wider scope in artistic treatment than the political events affecting millions in historical fact. For political events, accurately and dispassionately described, are special to the time and agents—they are traced through the logic of the reason, which only a comparative few exercise, and even the few exercise it in the calm of their closets, they do not come into the crowd of a theatre for its exercise. But the passions of love, ambition, jealousy—the conflict between opposing emotions of affection and duty—expressed in the breast of an individual, are not special,—they are universal. And before a dramatic audience the safety of a state is merged or ignored in the superior interest felt in the personation of some emotion more ardent than any state interest, and only more ardent because universal amongst mankind in all states and all times. If the domestic interest be the strongest of which the drama is capable, it is because it is the interest in which the largest number of human breasts can concur, and in which the poet who creates it can most escape from particulars into generals. In the emancipation of Switzerland from the Austrian yoke, history can excite our interest in the question whether William Tell ever existed—and in showing the large array of presumptive evidence against the popular story of his shooting the apple placed on his son’s head. But in the drama William Tell is the personator of the Swiss