It is a most grievous but unavoidable consequence of this original departure, as we deem it, from right principle in dramatic composition, that it leads by a natural and almost unavoidable transition to all the extravagances and meritricious aids, the presence of which has so long been felt as the chief disgrace of the British stage. As long as the unities of time and place are adhered to, the poet has no resource but in the forces of character, the pathos of incident, the beauty of language. If he does not succeed in these he is lost. But the moment that he feels himself at liberty to change the scene or time at pleasure, there is no end to the assistance which he will seek to derive from such adventitious support, how foreign soever to the real interest and true principles of his art. Frequent changes of scene, gorgeous pictures of buildings or scenery, brilliant exhibitions of stage effect, processions, battles, storming of castles, the clang of trumpets, the clashing of swords, the discharge of fire-arms, are all resorted to in order to save the trouble of thought, or conceal mediocrity of conception. It may be that such exhibitions are very attractive, that they draw full houses of children, or of men and women with the minds of children--no small portion of the human race. But no one will assert that they are the drama, any more than that name belonged to the exhibitions of lions or cameleopards in the Roman amphitheatre. But the Romantic drama, by the unbounded latitude in point of time, place, and incident, which it permits, opens the door to all these substitutes for genius which the great drama, by excluding them, kept carefully closed. Therefore it is that the corruption of taste has been much more rapid and irremediable in the countries by which it has been adopted, than in those in which the old landmarks were adhered to; and that in the latter the taste for extravagance in the public, and the degradation in the character of dramatic composition, has always been contemporary with the introduction of the Romantic style on the theatre.