Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/149

Rh purposes this play is no laughing matter. In it was recognised by Lessing's critics a tragic element unobserved in any of his previous writings—"ein, bedeutendes Talent furs Pathetische." The pathos, however, is of an ever lugubrious kind, and savours too much of the Lillo school, by whose rules it was modelled. Marwood is but another Millwood; Mellefont has a strong dash of George Barnwell about him; Miss Sara is as good, and more unhappy than Maria Thorowgood; Sir William Sampson is as perfect a piece of paternity as the London Merchant; and old Waitwell embodies the immaculate type of personal fidelity to he found in Trueman. Lessing does not make his puppets whine quite so sentimentally as Lillo; the goodness he endows them with is not quite so impossible and disagreeable as that which the Thorowgood tribe revel in; their dialect is not quite so stilted and mouthingly metrical: but the same tone pervades Miss Sara's sad, eventful history as that which used to draw tears from obdurate 'prentices on Boxing Night, when George looked upwards to the shilling gallery, as the constables walked off with him, and obligingly put into rhyme the moral of his life, exclaiming,and so on—rhyming away like an Oxford prize-poet, rather than a gent in difficulties with the police. Miss Sara Sampson is, on the whole, justly characterised by Schlegel as a familiar tragedy of the lachrymose and drawling style. Probably few plays have commanded a larger outlay of sighs and sobs from theatre-going Deutschland, or have exercised a more unlimited power torolling in maudlin, copious streams from the eyes of young and old. Nor would we depreciate the emotion—or deny that "some natural tears they shed;" but we do trust they "wiped them soon," and were too wise to value the play as they would a whale, by the quantity of "blubber" it produced.

"Philotas" is a classical tragedy, in one act, of a widely different style. The young hero is justly defined by his royal foe, Aridäus, as a wondrous compound of the child-like and the heroic (O der wonderbaren Vermisehung von Kind und Held!). His character is traced with simplicity and power; his earnest patriotism and impassioned courage come out in sometimes masterly strokes. He mourns over his captivity and his "only one wound" in strains that recal, however faintly by comparison, the wailing echoes of Philoctetes.

Very many agree that Lessing's dramatic "Meisterstück" is the genteel comedy, "Minna von Barnhelm." It is a genial picture of German life during the Seven Tears' War, drawn with point and vivacity, and relieved with touches that are rather French than Teutonic—at once refined and broad. The crosses of true love are amusingly depicted, if also a little overdone. Major Tellheim makes us laugh at his crotchets, as well as admire his lofty sense of honour, which, however, belong rather to universals than to particulars; for the gallant gentleman will sometimes condescend to a little fibbing, for the purpose of injuring his own pocket and filling another's—a phenomenon quite peculiar its pecuniary