ION J A TRAGEDY. 



, MR. SERGEANT TALFOURD'S TRAGEDY.* 



THE national literature of our own day, however high its reputation 

 on some accounts may be, is not of an imaginative or poetical cha- 

 racter. The calculating matter-of-fact element of the English charac- 

 ter, the selfish money-getting principle which binds us down to a 

 vulgar common-place existence, seems to have given a stamp to the 

 literature, and to have bound down its votaries with the same chains 

 that confine the rest of society. So few are the real children of song 

 in our land that we feel almost justified in saying that English poetry 

 has ceased to exist. The harps of Keats and Coleridge are for ever 

 silenced by death ; Wordsworth and Southey have long retired from 

 their minstrelsy, contented with their well-earned fame ; and the high 

 behests of poetry poetry in its highest and purest sense we mean 

 are but ill answered by the inferior qualifications of younger aspirants 

 to the honours of the Muse. One exception, and only one, would 

 we make to this seemingly sweeping assertion : we mean Miss Mit- 

 ford, who, to an intimate acquaintance with the charming ties and more 

 humble pleasures of social life in a modern age, unites a perfect 

 knowledge of those high and turbulent passions whose true por- 

 traiture constitutes one of the criteria of consummate poetic skill. 

 The exalted talents of this lady, whose social virtues in private life 

 adorn her no less really than her mental accomplishments before the 

 world, have not, as we think, been so highly valued and respected as 

 they deserve ; and it is a source of grateful pleasure to the writer of 

 these few remarks that he is here enabled to pay a slight tribute of 

 praise and respect to the authoress of Rienzi, a Drama equalled by 

 only one or two, and second to none, that has been produced in Eng- 

 land during the last quarter of a century. 



Such was the train of thought that a short month ago we should 

 fearlessly have expressed, and which the state of our literature would 

 have fully justified. The appearance of the Tragedy of /ow, when 

 announced as coming from the pen of the accomplished Sergeant 

 Talfourd, was hailed by us with exclamations indicating our high and 

 zealous expectations, expectations which on the day of publication 

 and representation were so far from being disappointed that we ex- 

 perienced from the perusal a very high and unlooked-for pleasure, 

 in which we are desirous that our readers should participate. 



The Tragedy of Ion belongs decidedly to the classique order, and 

 carries us back to a state of society widely different from our own, 

 as different as mingled associations belonging to the manners of the 

 Teutonic nations were from those of the dwellers in Southern Europe, 

 or as the florid architecture of the Normans differs from the chaste 

 columns and entablature of a Grecian temple. It is not for us here 

 to descant on the comparative merits of these two descriptions of dra- 

 matic literature. To produce a successful model of either requires a 

 degree of talent that would gain for its possessor a high rank among 



* Ion ; a Tragedy, in Five Acts, by Thomas Noon Talfourd. 



