with the complicated intrigue that it describes. The truth is, that both in Spain and England, the drama, at the period of its greatest splendour, was drawn from the inmost sources of the national character and genius. It spoke the language of the different races amid which it appeared, and the peculiarities of each were wrought into the stamina of its existence. Before that time, and while it was seeking the track which it was to illuminate with such a flood of glory, before the days of Shakspeare and Lope de Vega, its effects had been feeble and unsuccessful. _Ferrex and Porrex_, _Ralph Royster_, _ Doyster_, _Damon and Pythias_, bear, like the contemporary works of Spanish and Italian authors, traces of the attempt to substitute, as in the _Sophonisba_ of Trissino, a cold, stiff, and affected imitation of ancient models for the appeal to those passions, and the image of those manners, with which man has an unchangeable and an everlasting sympathy. In the rude comedies of that day, as in the Spanish farces in the middle of the sixteenth century, coarse buffoonery and the realities of vulgar detail predominate. After this phasis, there may be still observed, in the dramatists of the day, a want of power to manage the materials which they had just begun to discover and appreciate. In the plays of Green, as well as of Juan de la Cueva, the sudden and inartificial incidents, the actions without a motive, and the want of a regularly constructed plot, betray the authors' want of experience and self-command. Marlow and Christoval de Vines resemble each other in their love of what is horrible and extravagant, and their use of a turgid and inflated diction. Neither in Peele, Kyd, or Lily, in our country, nor in Arguesda, Artieda, or Cervantes, (considered exclusively as a dramatist,) in the other, is any fixed, systematic, matured, independent, national drama distinctly to be traced. They were, however, the harbingers, in their respective lands, of the meridian light which was fast travelling to its maturity of splendour, and rejoicing as a giant to run its course. A lustre then was shed over the Western skies, which more than rivalled the earlier glories of the East. How did this come to pass? to what are we to ascribe the surprising resemblance of dramatic literature, in so many essential points, of Spain and England? this simultaneous outbreak of genius, this selection of the same path, and this arrival at the same goal--a goal which the utmost exertions of other modern nations have never enabled them to come within sight of, much less to reach? What is the seed of the noble and stately plant that shot up at once in such prodigality of magnificence? Shall we content ourselves with the cant of a romantic school, which, after it had wearied the Continent, has, of course, been put forward as a great discovery by our wretched sciolists, in explanation of this curious epoch in the history of the