Thus ends this tragedy; which in energy and character is not inferior to the best of our author’s compositions. The chief personage bears some resemblance to the Saul of Alfieri, and has, like him, the ingredients of a character adapted to the romantic school. The last dramatic production from the pen of Silvio Pellico which has reached this country is _Thomas More_, of which we have left ourselves but brief space to speak. It is almost, if not altogether, a failure. The representation of the historical personages of the Court of Henry VIII. in a piece in which not the slightest local or national coloring is preserved, has a singularly feeble effect on minds familiar with the graphic power of the English dramatists. With this association the scenes are unusually bald and desolate; the characters, which might have been Italians or Greeks for ought appearing to the contrary, save in their names, (and those have a Tuscan twist,) walk through the chill desert of their parts with more than classic monotony. Not that we believe Pellico could have succeeded, even had he attempted the task, in exhibiting a faithful picture of the manners of that court and those times, or in painting English character; we simply regard it as unfortunate that he should ever have thought of writing a drama on a subject in our history. Alfieri’s _Maria Stuarda_ ought to have been a warning to deter him from such an effort. The chief business of the piece in question is to exhibit the integrity and virtue of More, the fallen Chancellor, and victim of tyranny, through trials and persecutions. These, of course, avail nothing to turn him from the path of duty; and the reader, foreseeing from the beginning the certain catastrophe, is conducted by slow steps through the play, as through a long avenue of cypresses terminating with a scaffold. An effort is indeed made, in the last Act, to divert attention by exciting hopes of a deliverance, but it is feebly effected. The historical answer of More to his enemies is preserved; “As St. Paul, who took part in the murder of Stephen, is with the martyr in heaven, so may you, my judges, and I, be saved alike in the mercy of the Lord.”