Tales from the Dramatists. By Charles Morris. 3 vols. (Griffith,
Ferran, and Co.)—Mr. Morris has put into prose twenty-one plays, tragedies as well as comedies, beginning with Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour, and ending with Talfourd's Ion. Most of the dramatists are represented by one specimen, two only have two. These are Sheridan—both of whose master- pieces, The School for Scandal and The Rivals, have been introduced —and George Colman, from whom The Poor Gentleman and The Heir at Law have been taken. We should be inclined to say that the comedies, which, indeed, considerably outnumber the tragedies, are the more successful, They are easier to turn into narrative, being, for the most part, prose to begin with. We do not find, for instance, anything like the curiously unproselike sentences which occur in the Ion. "I wear a casque," says Ctesiphon, when the associates are about to cast lots who shall slay the tyrant, " beneath whose iron circlet my father's dark hair whitened." Passage after passage falls into verse with very slight change or with no change at all. This does not hinder the " tales " from having considerable interest.
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