Congreve makes twelve thousand pounds more than a
counterbalance to the affection of Belinda. No poet will now fly his
favourite character at less than fifty thousand. Clarissa Harlowe had
but a moderate fortune.
In Sir John Vanbrugh's Confederacy, a woman of fashion is presented with
a bill of millinery _as long as herself_.--Yet it only amounts to a poor
fifty pounds! at present this sounds oddly on the stage. I have heard of
a lady of quality and fashion who had a bill of her fancy dressmaker,
for the expenditure of one year, to the tune of, or rather, which closed
in the deep diapason of, six thousand pounds!
THE EARLY DRAMA.
"It is curious to trace the first rude attempts of the drama in various
nations; to observe at that moment how crude is the imagination, and to
trace the caprices it indulges; and that the resemblance in these
attempts holds in the earliest essays of Greece, of France, of Spain, of
England, and, what appears extraordinary, even of China and Mexico."
The rude beginnings of the drama of Greece are sufficiently known, and
the old _mysteries_ of Europe have been exhibited in a former article.
The progress of the French theatre has been this:--
Etienne Jodelle, in 1552, seems to have been the first who had a tragedy
represented of his own invention, entitled Cleopatra--it was a servile
imitation of the form of the Grecian tragedy; but if this did not
require the highest genius, it did the utmost intrepidity; for the
people were, through long habit, intoxicated with the wild amusement
they amply received from their farces and moralities.
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