We have not yet, it would seem, found the object of our search--a Great Poem. Let us extend our quest into the Elizabethan age. We are at once sucked into the theatre. With the whole drama of that age we are conversant and familiar; but whether we understand it or not, is another question. It aspires to give representations of Human Life in all its infinite varieties, and inconsistencies, and conflicts, and turmoils produced by the Passions. Time and space are not suffered to interpose their unities between the Poet and his vast design, who, provided he can satisfy the spectators by the pageant of their own passions moving across the stage, may exhibit there whatever he wills from life, death, or the grave. 'Tis a sublime conception--and sometimes has given rise to sublime performance; but has been crowned with full success in no hands but those of Shakespeare. Great as was the genius of many of the dramatists of that age, not one of them has produced a Great Tragedy. A Great Tragedy indeed! What! without harmony or proportion in the plan--with all puzzling perplexities and inextricable entanglements in the plot--and with disgust and horror in the catastrophe? As for the characters, male and female--saw ye ever such a set of swaggerers and rantipoles as they often are in one act--Methodist preachers and demure young women at a love-feast in another--absolute heroes and heroines of high calibre in a third--and so on, changing and shifting name and nature, according to the laws of the Romantic Drama forsooth--but in hideous violation of the laws of nature--till the curtain falls over a heap of bodies huddled together, without regard to age or sex, as if they had been overtaken in liquor. We admit that there is gross exaggeration in the picture; but there is always truth in a tolerable caricature--and this is one of a tragedy of Webster, Ford, or Massinger.