Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/99

Rh It is an attempt to portray a state of things such as few pens, save those of Tacitus and Gibbon, are able to depict. The once great and free republic, whose internal history had been the vehement and protracted struggle of powerful classes, whose external history the record of valiantly won victories and extended territory, was now groaning under its own bulk, and had exchanged its ancient liberties for the despotism of the sword. Society was in a state so corrupt that barbarism, because purer, would have been preferable to it. It was an age of plots, intrigues, open assassinations and secret poisonings, adulteries and lewd abominations which insult all natural instinct. No vice was too abject to be indulged, no passion too morbid, no desire too impure to reap its unholy gratification. Those senators whose fathers had seen Catiline tremble at the thunders of Cicero, and Cæsar fall by the steel of Brutus, wore the fetters of servitude without a blush, and stooped to be panders and procurers, while slaves enjoyed a prouder criminality as the ministers of murder. There was no crime which the ingenuity of wickedness can invent which did not blacken the gown of the conscript and the purple of his imperial master.

Such an epoch would seem to possess some elements of dramatic interest and tragic grandeur. Contemporary writers, in such times, would stand in strong contrast, and may easily be classified. They must prostitute genius to be the slave of lust and folly, or take their rank among the stern satirists of vice. But when such an age becomes historical, one might think the dark landscape would present wonders and warnings which might fitly be exhibited on the stage. On a closer view, however, it would appear that there is a want of that rude healthy life and genuine feeling, without which the pomp and circumstance of the drama, however grand and gaudy,