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ing persons of Gabii, and having thus weakened and destroyed the power of the city, he delivered it into the hands of the Romans.

[To be continued.]

taua e Tahete nee, eaha utou e fano
mae ea pohe au. Fenua baa pao ata
Tahete nee eaha utou e fano mae ea
pohe au ete mae. Teee hoe te tahe
henaaro ou, e fapono mae utou e te ta
oa ree eáha e toe te peu ree no Bre-

LETTER from POMARE, KING of tane. E fapono mae utou. Homae
OTAHEITE, to the MISSIONARY
SOCIETY.

OMARE, the King of Otaheite,

hoe te peu ree no te ta parau, e te
Paper, e te Ink, e te Pen, earahe noa
mae te peu, te peu te peu ree eaha roa

POWARE, long been in the habit etoe te peu ree no te la parau.

Ehoama. Terara, tera roa tu tau parau ea utou na. Eto utou henaaro

of visiting, and familiarly conversing with, the British Missionaries at Matavai, in that island, has assiduously ete haapee ea Tahete nee. Uatea applied himself, for a considerable roatu ea. eau, te huru aea e muraa eho time, under their direction, to attain aeta eete maetae, e mea maetae hoe the art of writing, which at length he te na te re, uatea roa ea u, ua faa rue te has acquired. peu eno roatu. Tau parau mau te na e ene te parau haa vare e parau may roatu te ùa. Terara roara ua hope tau paru.

Ehoama. Eta mae utou ete parau
ea ete hoe au e ta utou parau.
Eaorana uton ehoama, ea ora hoe au.
Eaora toa hoe ta tou ea,

A letter having been sent to Pomare by the Directors of the Missionary Society, the Missionaries carefully translated it, and laid it before him. The following answer, in the Taheitan language, was composed entire ly by himself; it was then translated by the Missionaries into English, which translation was copied by the King. The annexed is an exact copy of his Na English letter, and may be considered as a literary curiosity.

The Letter in the Tahcitan Language.
(COPY.)

Matavae, Tahete, Jan. 1st, 1907.
Енолма,

Eaorana utou ehoama ete nohoraa ete fenua, e ete faapee ra mae ete fenua eeno nee ete fenua maamaa nee ete fenna parau eno nee ete fenua ete ore ete peu maetatae, ete fenua ete ore ete Atua mau nee, ete fenua haapao ata nee. Eaorana utou ehoama, eaora hoe au, Eaora hoe ta tou ea Jehovah.

Ehoama. Teee tau parau ea utou, eta utou parau eta mae na, eto ntou tere, eto utou henaaro. Uatea roatu eau; uatea varu váu ea na ea Oro hopoe maore Oea e Raeatea.

Ehoama. Ua faaroo maore ou, eta utou parau.

Ehoama. Teee hoe tou henaara. E faatea mae hoe utou e tou henaaro, e faatono mae hoe utou ete Taota ea rahe, e te vahene, e te tamaetete. Ehoama, Homae hoe te ta oa ree, e te Ahu no matou, e haapee hoe matou ete peu no Peretane. Ehoama. Homae hoe te pupuhe ea rahe e te Powder ea rahe hoe, e fenua ta máe rahe to matou. Ea pohe au aeta Ooutou

Jehovah.
POMARE EAREE NO TAHLITE

te mau hoa nou,

na Missionary Society,
Tee London.

(TRANSLATION)

Matavae, Olahete, Jan. 1st, 1807.
FRIENDS,

I wish you every blessing friends in your residence in your country, with success in teaching this bad land, this foolish land, this wicked land, this land which is ignorant of good, this land that knoweth not the true God, this regardless land.

Friends, I wish you health and prosperity, may I also live, and may Jehovah save us all.

Friends, with respect to your letter you wrote to me, I have this to say to you, that your business with me, and your wishes I fully consent to, and shall consequently" banish Oro, and send him to Raeatea.

Friends, I do therefore believe and shall obey your word.

Friends, I hope you also will consent to my request, which is this: I wish you to send a great number of men, women, and children here.

Friends, send also property, and cloth for us, and we also will adopt English customs.

Friends send also plenty of muskets

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and powder, for wars are frequent in per distance, and with all the advanour country. Should I be killed, you tages of an extensive contrast. It is will have nothing in Tahete: do not with him as with the traveller; by an come here when I am dead, Tahete attentive observation of the manners is a regardless country, and should I and customs of foreign countries, his die with sickness, do not come here. eyes are opened to the prevailing errors This also I wish, that you would send and prejudices in his own; but he me all the curious things that you also returns with a lively sense of its have in England. Also send me every advantages, of many of which he can thing necessary for writing. Paper, hardly be conscious, who never left Ink, and Pens in abundance, let no behind him the bounds of his native writing utensil be wanting. land.

Friends, I have done, and have no- Of the modern nations of Europe, thing at all more to ask you for. As there are five of which the drama has for your desire to instruct Tahete, tis attracted any attention; the English, what I fully acquiesce in. Tis a com- French, and German: and in a more mon thing for people not to under- limited degree, the Italian and Spastand at first, but your object is good, nish. The English enjoy many inand I fully consent to it, and shall portant advantages for a national drama cast off all evil customs.

over the others: their country has

What I say is truth, and no lie, it been long an illustrious theatre of is the real truth. glory; and they have been always This is all I have to write, I have more deeply pervaded by a common done.

Friends write to me, that I may know what you have to say.

I wish you life and every blessing. May I also live, and may Jehovah

save us all.

For

POMARE, KING OF TAHETE.

my friends

The Missionary Society
London.

An ESSAY on the ITALIAN DRAMA.
SIR,

patriotic feeling than any of their neighbours. The French history is not deficient in instances of heroic magnanimity, though far inferior in this respect to our own; but they have never yet been known to avail themselves of their real advantages; and their tragedy remains yet a stran-. ger to every light of inspiration, to every bold and spirited delineation of character. The Germans have no common country, no cominon interest, and are united together merely by the tie of language. To them, O detain the reader with a dis- however, science and the best inTe of the ocnefit to be de- terests of humanity are strongly inrived from an acquaintance with fo- debted; for we owe to them the first reign literature, whether ancient or successful efforts against religious modern, would be unnecessary in this usurpation, from which necessarily enlightened age. The disadvantages followed the civil and religious liberty under which he labours whose know- and toleration, now so universally enledge of literature extends not beyond joyed. But these effects, however the productions of his own country, much they merit the grateful adoare very obvious. The sphere of ration of the philosopher, are too enjoyment of the purest pleasure of modest for the drama. The Germans our nature, is to him bounded and have struggled, however, successfully circumscribed and even of his own for Dramatic fame; and if they native literature, he can in general yield in strength and variety of chapossess neither the same keen per- racter to the English, they have left ception of the faults, nor the same the other nations, in these and other sensibility to the beauties, as the man, respects, far behind them; while, for who, throwing aside the distinctions overpowering pathos, they stand unof country and age, has formed his rivalled. The Spaniards were once taste on the broad principles of hu- an enterprising people, renowned in man nature. To the latter a wider arts and arms; and their early theatrifield of observation is opened; and cal efforts are said, with all their irhe beholds his object from the pro- regularity, to bear strong marks of UNIVERSAL MAG. VOL. IX. 3 N

genius; but civil and religious tyran- was strongly penetrated with an opiny have long exercised their baneful nion of the degeneracy of his countryinfluence over this once gallant na- men; he saw in past ages every thing tion, and have swept before them that could ennoble humanity, and no fancy and inspiration, and destroyed trace of dignity in his own: and he even the germ of genius; and the wished to rouse his contemporaries Spanish name is now only adduced as from the lethargy in which he conHis a melancholy illustration of the in- ceived them to be plunged. stability of human grandeur. efforts in favour of liberty were conThe Italians were long in posses- fined to the pen, but he was passive sion of a theatre before any of the merely through want of opportunity; other nations of Europe. While the and from the very singular dedication rest of Europe was plunged in dark- of one of his plays to General Washness, they were successfuly cultivating ington, may be easily seen with what most of the departments of literature; alacrity he was ready to carry his but whether from the universal im- principles into execution. His admorality, and the almost total want miration of antiquity was excessive, of patriot feeling for which Italy was and without discrimination. Withlong remarkable, from the want of out reflecting that ancient liberty was interest and elevation in the disputes often but another name for outrage of the petty republics and principali- and abuse, with him it supplies the ties of which it was composed, or place of every virtue, and sanctions from whatever cause, the efforts of every enormity. Liberty forms the the dramatic muse in that country sole subject of nearly the half of his have, however unwearied, been till plays. Nothing can be conceived very lately at least, highly unsuccess- more irksome and more devoid of ful. They had, indeed, in direct op. interest, than to hear this subject position to what has happened in bandied about in the most commonother countries where the tragic muse place declamations, from the beginhas almost always preceded the comic, ning to the close of the piece, without very early some good comedies; for gradual preparation, and without rethe comedies of Macchiavelli, how- lief from a proper admixture of the ever immoral, abound in wit and hu- avowed principles of our nature. It mour, and faithfully paint the man- is hardly possible to fire the mind of ners of his age: but even the genius the spectator with the sound of abof a Tasso was unable to rescue their stract terms. He may feel strongly tragedy from neglect, which can only for particular instances of oppression, date its proper existence with the when strongly depicted and bodied exertions of a Maffei, an Alfieri, and out before him in the semblance of a Monti. Even yet, however, their reality; but if general liberty or genetragedy can scarcely be called na- ral oppression are the subjects, he will tional; for with the exception of the always be disposed to lend an unwil conspiracy of the Pazzi, the subject is ling ear. uniformly foreign, and the sentiments slightly, if at all, characteristic of the genius and modes of thinking of the people of Italy.

"Non satis est pulchra esse poemata; dulcia

sunto,

Et quocunque volent animum auditoris

agunto

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Ut ridentibus arrident, ita flentibus adfient
Humani vultus: si vis me fiere, dolendum

est

Primum ipsi tibi.”

Altieri was descended from a noble family of Piedmont, and bred at the court of Turin. With every advantage of birth, fortune, and figure, the usual fashionable amusements and oc- In the unities of time and place cupations appeared to him, at an Alfieri is completely regular; and be early age, empty and unsatisfactory; has banished all confidents and inand with an ardour for liberty rarely ferior personages from the stage. to be exampled, he exiled himself From beginning to end he never for from his family, friends, and native a moment loses sight of the main accountry, where wealth and honours tion. What he has gained in this way awaited him, to enjoy independence in steadiness of effect, he has more in one of the free states of Italy. He than lost in another, by neglecting to

avail himself of numberless circum curately known by any other than a stances incompatible with the strict- native. ness of his rules, not only interesting in themselves, but which would have been productive of the best effect in giving variety and relief to his fable, and dispelling the monotony so strongly felt long before his catastrophe.

Upon the whole, Alfieri will hardly ever be a favourite poet; and it is astonishing to me how he has acquired the very high reputation he at present maintains. With a few ex ceptions, he is almost totally destitute of pathos; and though some In the delineation of character, he times sublime, the sublimity is buried has, in my opinion, completely failed. in a profusion of inflation and tur He abounds in tyrants, monsters, and gidity. His characters have few or unrelenting politicians, openly and none of the illusions of reality. He avowedly wicked without a motive; has studied the rules of the theatre, with generous and exalted visionaries; indeed, with much and unwearied but with the true springs of human attention; but he has neglected to conduct he seems to have been almost study them in the noblest of all wholly unacquainted. The extremes schools, the school of human nature. of good and evil are rarely to be met I shall enter into an examination of with in this world; and he who places some of his most celebrated pieces. before us unmasked villainy, without The first play I shall notice is Polinice, at the same time exposing the cir- the subject of which is the same with cumstances and situations which im- the Eta e Onßais of Æschylus and perceptibly and almost unavoidably the door of Euripides. lead to its perpetration, can never Edinburgh, May 29, 1808. captivate our minds by the illusion of reality. We must see virtue and vice blended together as they really exist in life. We must see our fellow creatures actuated by all the variety of contending inclinations and passions which reign in our own breast. He whose penetration into human nature has enabled him successfully to unravel the mazes of character, has attained the highest dramatic excellence: and without this qualification, every other talent will be unavailing. In the possession of this excellence. Shakspeare and Schiller with all their faults will command the esteem and admiration of every age.

[To be concluded in our next.]

J. B.

Mr. BREWER'S REPLY to "STRIC-
TURES on his VINDICATION of the
MODERN DRAMA."

Sir,

You

YOUR correspondent X, in the Magazine for April last, presents us with some remarks on that vindication of the Modern Drama, which I attempted in the Universal Magazine for the mouth of March. He writes with so much liberality, as far as regards my personal feelings, that I should not have troubled you with a rejoinder on the subject, did it not appear to me that the remarks The language of the drama should of X do by no means warrant that debe exactly suited to the personage and cisive air with which he appears, in to the occasion. From a coutinual the latter part of his observations, to attempt at dignity, however, and a put the argument down as a matter so contempt for the effeminate strains entirely settled, that "a fact is not of Metastasio, Alfieri has written in needed" to add weight to his side of a language often unnatural and tur- the question. The probable good gid in a very high degree. He is said sense of X needs scarcely be remindto have contenined the existing lan- ed, that declamation and argument guage of his country, and to have are widely dissimilar. I stated what, travelled back to the age of Dante. in my humble opinion, were the de On this subject it is impossible for a fects of the old schools of the English foreigner to speak with any thing like

precision. What part of a language * By an error of the press, Mr. is spoken by the inhabitants of any Brewer's signature to his "Vindicacountry, and what is confined to their tion" in our number for March, was earlier authors, can never be ac- printed J. A. instead of J. N.

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drama. Considering the improve- from modern dramatists, by saying ment of manners as the legitimate that the age would not tolerate an and original aim of comedy, I noticed immodest expression, and therefore to (what, it may be said, was sufficiently the progress of general refinement, obvious without such a notation) the not to the taste of the dramatist, immorality of fable generally preferred must be ascribed the decorousness of by Congreve, Wycherley, &c. and the modern stage. Sir, the audience applauded by their auditors. I like- of our times would tolerate expreswise ventured to remark a deficiency sions more than equivocal. Some of in humour as observable in many our poets, with a most illaudable cu"good old writers," whose very riosity, have (though rarely) tried the names are now sufficient to inspire experiment, and the result is to be the ideas of wit and dramatic excel- seen in the printed copies of their lence, among whole crowds of those productions. It was, however, the who echo the voice of fashion, and improved morality of fable for which who "follow in the chace, not like a I commended modern bards; and on hound that hunts, but one that fills up that head X does not say a word. the cry." To observations like these, That sophism of X which would however trifling they may be deemed, describe the palm of delicacy (in reit became X to make a regular an- gard to purity of expression) as due swer before, in summing up his co- to the audience, not to the author, is rollary, he stated the disputo as en- entirely nugatory. Wherever may tirely ended, and himself the con- be the merit, that it does exist, is queror. I really cannot perceive one enough for our purpose. I did not argument fairly met, and brought to attempt to write an analytical disserissue, in the "Strictures" which X tation on the origin of excellence. has made on my attempt at vindicating X" hopes that I will not venture the drama of our own period. X says to assert that our writers equal the that I endeavour to elevate the flippant ancients in wit, humour, or genius; inanity of "Reynolds, Dibdin, &c." or that the single merit of being less over the humour, wit, and so forth, indecorous is sufficient to counterof Congreve, Farquhar, and their balance vulgarity of language, ab schools. I would beg permission to surdity of plot, and inanity of idea." remind X that my communication in Considering the stage as a great pubMarch asserted (and the assertion lic shcool of moral correction, I do must certainly be allowed correct) think that the merit of being decorous that it is from a selection of the best is sufficient to counter-balance the writers, that the pretensions of every brightest ascendancy of wit, when existing period of the stage must be that wit is employed in the ridicule censidered. In the days of each of of all that is dear to the domestic inthose celebrated writers enumerated terest of society;-especially when by X, a vast preponderancy of" flip- my opponent declines an attempt at pant inanity" sauk and was forgotten, proving that we are not equal to our while the phoenix-like production of predecessors in humour, the great es the master-genius, was chronicled as sential of dramatic composition. For the boast of the age. vulgarity of language the dramatist is X, therefore, should not have de- not responsible. His business is to scribed me as elevating (or endea- hold the mirror up to the times; and vouring to elevate) "flippant inanity," if the fashionable language of the day till he had perused my selection. be vulgar (as it indubitably is) he And I venture to assure X that a se- would fail to sustain a just reflector, if lection likely to survive the present his language were that of the polished era by much more than the poet's gentleman of the old school. Inanity hope-his golden century-might rea- of idea seems (in the present case) dily be made. His own candour will included in deficiency of wit. convince him that it might, if he give The concluding blow of X is not the subject due consideration. particularly happy. He affirms that Mistaking perpetually the nature the inability of recent writers is esta of my observations, X strives to take blished by the circumstance of their all the merit of moral propriety away plays passing to oblivion after the

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