To see to what the Romantic style leads, we have only to look at the dramatic pieces founded on the favourite works of fiction which have recently appeared in England and France. Dramas in both countries have been formed on the stories of the most popular novels of Scott, Bulwer, Victor Hugo, Janin, and Eugene Sue. What success have they had? What sort of things are they? We pass over the horrors, the indecency, adulterous incest, and murders of the modern French drama, founded on the romances of three popular and imaginative novelists, and come to the dramas founded on our own great romance writers, against whom no such charges can be brought, and the original plots of which have been constructed with the utmost talent by the greatest master of prose fiction the world ever saw. What has been the fate of the dramas of _Ivanhoe_, _The Antiquary_, _Guy Mannering_, _Rob Roy_, or Sir Walter's other popular novels? With the exception of the lowest class of Scotch audiences, who roar on the representations of Dandie Dinmont, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, or the like, it may safely be affirmed that they have every where proved entire failures. The talent of a popular actress may for a time keep some of them up, as Miss Cushman has recently done with Meg Merrilies both in the London and provincial theatres; but left to themselves, they have every where sunk to the ground. The reason is evident. The story is so complicated, and leaps so from one thing to another, from a desire to skim over the whole novel, that except to those who have the original by heart, it is absolutely unintelligible.