would be quite possible, in that period to excite the deepest sympathy with some of their most striking events or episodes _taken singly_; as the parting of Hector and Andromache, or the death of the Trojan hero, in the _Iliad_; the love of Dido for AEneas, or the catastrophe of Nisus and Euryalus, in the _AEneid_; the death of Clorinda, or the flight of Erminia, in the _Jerusalem Delivered_. The reason is, that it is possible in a short space to point a single catastrophe with such force and minuteness as to excite the warmest sympathy, but wholly impossible to effect that object within such limits, with a long series of consecutive events. Again, look at the historical romance or the common novel. No one needs to be told how deep and universal is the interest which the masterpieces in that department awaken. Whatever may be said to the decline of the public taste for the drama, most certainly there is no symptom of any abatement in the general interest awakened by works of fiction; but that interest is of comparatively slow growth. It would be impossible to produce it in a few hours. It is excited by the reading of three evenings by the fireside. No one would deem it possible to awaken the interest, or make the characters intelligible, in three hours. It is true that to the aid of six or eight chapters culled out of three volumes, the Romantic dramatist brings the auxiliaries of acting, scenery, and stage effect; but that adds little to the power of exciting deep sympathy or powerful emotion. Such feelings cannot be awakened without minute painting, and continuity of action, and they are excluded by the very nature of the Romantic drama. That species of composition proposes to give a picture of the principal events of a long period, as the peristrephic panorama does of the chief scenes of a great space, as the whole course of the Rhine or the Danube. Every one knows how inferior the interest it excites is to those in which the whole skill of the artist and outlay of the proprietor have been exerted on a single picture, as the original round one of Barker and Burford. The art of panoramic painting has signally receded, since the moving panorama has been substituted for the fixed one. A series of galloping lithographic sketches of Italy, however highly coloured or skilfully drawn, will never paint that lovely peninsula like a single sunset of Claude in the bay of Naples. Claude himself could not do so in his varied sketches, graphic and masterly as they are. The Romantic drama is the _Liber Veritatis_; the Greek drama is the finished Claude in the Doria Palace, or the National Gallery. Few persons will hesitate to say which excites the strongest admiration, which they would rather possess.