It sounds well, no doubt, to say, as Macaulay does, that the Romantic drama exhibits all the plans of a man's life, from the ardour of generous youth to the coolness of experienced age. This may be done in history or romance; but it is impossible within the limits of a single representation. It is quite enough if, in so short a space, the stage can represent one momentous crisis with adequate power, and really paint the heart as laid bare by its occurrence. He who knows how difficult it is to do that in a single instance, will feel that the effect can only be weakened by repeated draughts upon the sympathy of the audience, from the effect of different events in the same piece. The attempt to do so scarcely ever fails to weaken the effect of the whole piece, by distracting the interest and confusing the idea of the spectators. If it succeeds, the result, like the repeated demands which Matthews made on our risible faculties, in general is to produce an effect directly the reverse of what was intended. The comedian, by trying too often to make us laugh, made us in the end more ready to cry; the tragedian, by trying too often to make us cry, succeeds generally only in making us laugh. But what, then, it is said, is to be made of Shakspeare, and how is his transcendent and universally acknowledged greatness, while setting the unities at defiance, to be reconciled with those principles? We accept the challenge; we take the case of the Earl of Avon, with his deathless fame, and maintain that his dramatic excellence not only affords no impeachment of what has now been advanced, but furnishes its most decisive confirmation. When it is commonly said that Shakspeare sets the unities at defiance, and assumed that his success has been owing to his disregarding them, the _fact_ is not correctly stated, and the _inference_ is not logically drawn. It is a mistake to say that the unities are always disregarded by the great English tragedian. In many of his most popular pieces, they are maintained nearly as strictly as they were by Sophocles; and we are aware of not one of his dramas which is still represented with undiminished effect on the stage, in which the principle of the unities may not distinctly be recognised, and the long-continued success is not to be traced to their observation.