which in life they were strangers, they would both, without doubt,
considering the subject rather from a national than a general point of
view, enter with difficulty into the above idea and have many
objections to urge against it. But here a reconciling criticism[12]
must step in; and this, perhaps, may be best exercised by a German,
who is free from the national peculiarities of either Englishmen or
Spaniards, yet by inclination friendly to both, and prevented by no
jealousy from acknowledging the greatness which has been earlier
exhibited in other countries than his own.

The similarity of the English and Spanish theatres does not consist
merely in the bold neglect of the Unities of Place and Time, or in the
commixture of comic and tragic elements; that they were unwilling or
unable to comply with the rules and with right reason (in the meaning
of certain critics these terms are equivalent), may be considered as
an evidence of merely negative properties. The ground of the
resemblance lies far deeper, in the inmost substance of the fictions
and in the essential relations through which every deviation of form
becomes a true requisite, which, together with its validity, has also
its significance. What they have in common with each other is the
spirit of the romantic poetry, giving utterance to itself in a
dramatic shape. However, to explain ourselves with due precision, the
Spanish theatre, in our opinion, down to its decline and fall in the
commencement of the eighteenth century, is almost entirely romantic;
the English is completely so in Shakespeare alone, its founder and
greatest master; but in later poets the romantic principle appears
more or less degenerated, or is no longer perceivable, although the
march of dramatic composition introduced by virtue of it has been,
outwardly at least, pretty generally retained. The manner in which the
different ways of thinking of the two nations, one a northern and the