The oldest specimens of writing in this language are some dramatical performances in verse upon scriptural subjects, which are extant only in manuscript.

Here the "humours," to anticipate Ben Jonson, give names not only to the characters of the play, but to the plays themselves.[206] As adopted by the drama, the orator's view that people of a certain age and rank are likely to behave in certain fashions was perverted to the dramatical law of decorum, that people of certain age or rank must on the stage act up to this generalization of what was characteristic.

Since that time, his performances, of the Duenna, and the School for Scandal, have been distinguished with the public favour beyond any dramatical productions in the language.

To this information Mr. Weber has added nothing; and he hopes that the meagreness of his biographical account will be readily excused by the reader who has examined the lives of his (Ford's) dramatical contemporaries, in which we are continually "led to lament that our knowledge respecting them amounts to little better than nothing."

Judging from the past, I should suppose that till Poetry becomes less self- conscious, less self-concentrated, more dramatical in spirit, if not in form, it will not have the qualities which can powerfully affect Englishmen.

Not only were the Poets of our most national age dramatists, but there seems an evident dramatical tendency in those who wrote what we are wont to call narrative, or epic, poems.

If the ominous title applies to an abstraction, and if the event so vividly introduced is but a dramatical representation of some phase in the mystery of iniquity, the spiritual inferences are just what they would be were the words respectively descriptive of an angel of sin, and of his utter and terrible overthrow.

[Footnote 2: Dramatical, and in first reprint.

Now Mr. Pope shews us his profound judgment in dramatical passions; thinks a lady in her circumstances cannot without absurdity open a letter that seems to her as surprize, with any more preparation than the most unconcerned person alive should a common letter by the penny-post.

Our dramatical traveller ran immediately to a young friend, an artist then studying at Rome, and prevailed on him to take out a passport, in his own name for Naples.