Both in some respects follow the same course, or rather both make use, for the main part, of the same materials. It is universally acknowledged, that it is essential to the success of the drama, in all its branches, that the plot be interesting, the characters forcible, the ideas natural, the attention constantly kept up. In tragedy, by far its noblest department, it is indispensable, in addition, that the feelings should be vehemently excited in the spectators, and the human heart laid bare, by the most violent passions, in the characters on the stage. Aristotle expressly says, that it is the delineation of passions which is the object of tragedy. In order to achieve this object, all are agreed, that some permanent characters must be selected, generally from those known to history, to whom striking and tragic events have occurred; and it is in the delineation of the passions which those events excite, and the interest they awaken in the breast of the spectators, that the art of the writer consists. So far both parties are agreed; but they differ widely in the methods which they respectively take to attain this object. The Romantic dramatist, overstepping the bounds of time and place, professes in three hours to portray the principal events of years--it may be of a whole lifetime. He selects the prominent events of his hero's or heroine's career, the salient angles, as it were, of human existence, and brings them forward in different scenes of his brief representation. Years often intervene between the commencement of his piece and its termination; the spectator is transported hundreds, it may be thousands of miles by a mere mechanical sleight of hand in the scene-shifter, or between the acts. The drama constructed on these principles does not represent a short period, into which the crisis, as it were, of a whole lifetime is concentrated, but it gives sketches of the whole life itself, from the commencement of its eventful period to its termination. The poet chooses the most exciting scenes out of the three volumes of the historical novel, and brings these scenes on the stage in a few hours. As the drama, constructed on this principle, professes to portray the changes of real life, so it admits, it is thought, of that intermixture of the serious and the comic, which the actual world exhibits; and willingly transports the spectator from the most highly wrought scenes of passion, the deepest accents of woe, to the burlesque of extravagant characters, or the picture of vulgar life. This is deemed admissible, because it is natural; and certainly no one can have gone from the drawing-room, or the library, to the stage-coach or the steam-boat, without seeing that it exhibits at least a true picture of the varied phantasmagoria which existence presents.