in the slowest manner, till his eyes fixed on Claudius; he still remained silent, and after looking eagerly at the impostor, he uttered in a low tone of voice, that spoke the fullness of a broken heart, Thou traitor!" The whole audience was electrified; they felt the impression, and a thunder of applause testified their delight. Pliny the elder, speaking of certain minerals, says, nature is never more fully displayed than in the minutest objects. This remark may be applied to the nice touches of such an actor as Garrick. Rerum natura nusquam magis quam in minimis tota est. CHAP. CHAP. XXII. CREUSA, a Tragedy, by WILLIAM WHITEHEAD, Esq.-The Subject far removed in the dark Ages of Antiquity—It is fabulously treated by EURIPIDES in his Tragedy of IONDACIER'S Opinion of the Greek Play-PERE BRUMOY has translated it-His Judgement and Observations on the Fable -Mr. WHITEHEAD has given it an Air of Historical Truth -SCALIGER'S Dramatic Rules-WHITEHEAD an exact Observer of these Rules-The Catastrophe is brought about with great Skill-GARRICK in ALETES, MOSSOP in XUTHUSMrs. PRITCHARD in CREUSA. IN the month of April 1754, Mr. Whitehead, the author of the Roman Father, put his tragedy of Creusa into rehearsal. This was at a late part of the season, but the author was going to travel with a young nobleman, and probably wished to carry his fame along with him. In a short advertisement, he tells us, that his subject is so ancient, so slightly mentioned by historians, and so fabulously treated by Euripides in his tragedy of Ion that he thought himself at liberty to make the story his own. Some glaring circumstances he was obliged to adhere to, and he endeavoured to render them probable. Dacier, in the Notes to his translation of Aristotle's Art of Poetry*, makes mention of the Ion of Euripides, and, with his usual good sense, observes, that Merope, recognizing her son in the moment when she was going to kill him, is an incident highly commended by the great master critic; he adds, that Euripides wrote a tragedy, in which the mother is on the point of killing her son, whom she does not know, while, at the same time, the *Chap. xy. Note 6. son, son, in a like state of ignorance, is meditating the death of his mother. Both are undeceived. This, says Dacier, is the tragedy of Ion; and the double danger of two persons, closely allied by nature, but ignorant of each other, affords an interesting situation; but, upon the whole, when he considers the number of improbable circumstances involved in the fable, he is of opinion, that a tragedy, formed on the same plan, would have no chance of succeeding on the modern stage. That this obervation is founded in truth, appears in the clearest light from the analysis of the Ion of Euripides, by Pere Brumoy, who is allowed to be the best of the French critics. His account of the play is drawn out, scene after scene, in regular succession, and is highly entertaining. Our curiosity is kept alive by the conduct of the fable, notwithstanding the machinery, the inter 2 interposition of the deities, and the glaring want of probability, that runs through the whole. One passage, in particular, deserves our notice, though it does not seem to be worthy of a place in a dramatic composition. Young Ion receives the train, that follows Creusa from Athens, in the temple of Apollo, and there passes some time in shewing the pictures that adorn the sacred dome. This undoubtedly is a strange employment, but our pleasure arises from the use which Virgil has made of it, when we find the Roman poet making it a capital beauty, in that fine situation in the temple of Carthage, where Æneas surveys the pictures that represent the wars of Troy. Upon the whole, Brumoy agrees with Dacier, and concludes with saying, "We now clearly see that such a fable is by no means adapted to the modern taste, and that a |