Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/188

 182 Whitford Greece taught proud Rome the reign of arts to greet, But dull, tho' furious, tasteless, wild, and rude As Gothic rage that Rome and arts subdued. 67 Dramatists who ventured to translate or adapt German plays were often subjected to satirical attack. Holcroft, whose liberal political principles brought him into general disrepute, was attacked in The Pursuits of Literature. Lewis was rebuked in Dermody's More Wonders! for plagiarizing from the Ger- mans, and from Englishmen too, in his terror play, The Castle Spectre: In pity I forbear, as carrion prey, To taint my nostrils with your hideous play; Where incident and language, point and plot, And all but loathsome spectacle's forgot. . . Smit with the frenzy of a foreign race Who all their beauty in distortion place, Who couple contraries with equal ease As taylors munch their cucumbers with peas, Was't not enough to filch their flimsy style, But thou must rob the worthies of our isle,. . . Those heirs of honour who, divinely brave, Fought as they sung. . . When charming poesy was all their own, And Germans, but for dulness, quite unknown? 69 Mrs. Inchbald, who a decade earlier had been satirized for the weaknesses of her own plays, was cleverly attacked in 1800 for the frailties of her translations from the German. In The Wise Man of the East (1800), a satirical tale which took the title from one of her adaptations from Kotzebue, Thomas Button criticized her work forcefully and with evident sincerity of purpose. He believed that he saw a great evil in the growing influence of German romantic drama, particularly that of Kotzebue, and he determined to criticize it in the way which seemed likely to be most effective. He explains his decision thus: Aware, that elaborate criticism, unaccompanied with humour, and stript of the embellishments of verse, would, from being of too grave a nature to 67 A Satirical Epistle in verse addressed to the Poet Laureate on his Carmen Seculare. . (London 1801), 27. 68 Pursuits of Literature, 296. 69 The Harp of Erin, 116.