Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 172 Art. X. A Series of Plays, in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger Passions of the Mind. Volume the Third. By Joanna Baillie. London, 1812. Longman. 1 Hough it is not to be denied, that the end and purpose of dramatic writing is to affect the mind through the eye and ear by living representations of manners, characters, and events, yet ever)' reader of sensibility feels, that much of the interest which a well written play excites, is wholly independent of the stage and its apparatus. The impression produced by giving utterance to passion and sentiment in their natural language, instead of relating or describing their operations, is so well understood, that the epic poets have perpetually assumed the province of the tragedian to animate their story; and history itself has sometimes borrowed the graces of dramntic composition to give to its facts and characters a fresher colouring and bolder delineation. These effects are, in a great measure, produced by the mere dialogue of the drama, without any aid from personification or scenic exhibition. When the language in which passion is expressed, or rather expresses itself, is faithfully copied, the scene is present to the imagination and the heart of the reader, and a better arrangement for stage effect is often supplied out of the furniture of a creative fancy, than any contrivances of art could produce. To give a sort of ideal presence to a character or a transaction, to embody it, as it were, to the conception of the reader, and to place him in the midst of what he reads, is the privilege of the dramatic poet; but smce much is within his power, much is expected of him, and if he moves us only with the force of narration or description, or inspires only a tranquil train of common feelings, we deny to him the honou...