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The poet Alfieri, that Tyrtæus of Italian liberty, produced there his revolutionary dramas, and there sowed his maxims against the two-fold tyranny of popes and kings in every theatre in Italy. Milan, beneath the Austrian flag, had within its walls a republic of poets and philosophers. Beccaria wrote there more daringly than Montesquieu.
The work consists of comedies and dramas which cannot be acted; but which contain some most interesting scenes representing manners and customs. You will read in it how, in the reign of Charles X, a vicar of one of the Paris churches, the Abbé Mouchaud, would refuse burial to a pious lady, and would, at all costs, grant it to an atheist.
The story of Tell has been the subject of several dramas. Lemierre, a popular French dramatist of his day, (though J. J. Rousseau affects to call him a scribe whom the French Academy once crowned,) produced a play founded upon it, in Paris, in 1766; but the language of Swiss freemen on a French stage was little to the taste of those days, and it was a failure. Voltaire, when asked what he thought of it, replied, "Il n'y a rien
His reputation as a dramatic poet rests on the seventy-three sacramental autos, and one hundred and eight dramas, which are known to be his.
'From twelve o'clock until three each day a constant stream of carriages and pedestrians filled the evergreen bordered avenue leading from the Wrington village road. Among them came Lady Gladstone and W.E.G., aged six, the latter carrying away with him the Sacred Dramas, to be preserved during a long life.
But in this choice company hers was not the only voice, though it was heard above all the others. Thought and wit flashed and sparkled. Dramas were played the "Zaire" and "Tancred" of Voltaire, and tragedies written by herself. Mme. Recamier acted the Aricie to Mme. de Stael's Phedre. This life that seems to us so fascinating, has been described too often to need repetition.
While the Indian was being restricted to a small part of the great region west of the Mississippi, there was being enacted on the plains one of the most picturesque of all American dramas.
The vacillating conduct of the imbecile old man throughout his whole reign, the apathy with which he was contented to remain a passive spectator of those bloody dramas of which his court was for so long a period the theatre, deprive him of all claim to commiseration in his present degraded position, which, in fact, is the natural result of his indifference to the game so eagerly played by the contending parties, and of which the stake was his own throne.
Their tombs are to this day among the most frequented shrines in the capital of the land, and one of the most popular dramas presented in the theaters is based on this same heroic tragedy. The prominence of the emotional element may be seen in the popular description of national heroes. The picture of an ideal Japanese hero is to our eyes a caricature.
A Christian boy must be the Icarus, and a Christian man the Scævola or the Hercules or the Orpheus of the amphitheatre; and Christian women, modest maidens, holy matrons, must be the Danaids or the Proserpine or worse, and play their parts as priestesses of Saturn and Ceres, and in blood-stained dramas of the dead.
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