however, where this exclusiveness of style and partition of labor are
productive of the most felicitous results: namely, the minor drama. In
England and America the same theatre exhibits opera, melodrama, tragedy,
comedy, rope-dancing, and legerdemain; but in Paris, each branch and
element of histrionic art has its separate temple, its special corps of
actors and authors, nay, its particular class of subjects; hence their
unrivalled perfection. Ingenuity, science, and Art are concentrated by
thus assigning free and individual scope to the dramatic niceties and
phases of life, of history, of genius, and of society. At the Opera
Comique you find one kind of musical creation; at the Italiens the
lyrical drama of Southern Europe alone; at the Varietes a unique order
of comic dialogue; and at the Porte St. Martin yet another species of
play. One theatre gives back the identical tone of existing society and
current events; another deals with the classical ideas of the past.
Satire and song, the horrible and the brilliant, the graceful and the
highly artistic, pictorial, elocutionary, pantomimic, tragic, vocal,
statuesque, the past and present, all the elements of Art and of life,
find representation in the plot, the language, the sentiment, the
costume, the music, and the scenery of the many Parisian theatres.

Yet how much of this superiority is fugitive! how little in the whole
dramatic development takes permanent hold upon popular sympathy! Much
of its significance is purely local, and of its interest altogether
temporary. Scholars and the higher classes can talk eloquently of
Corneille and Racine; the beaux and _spirituelle_ women of the day can
repeat and enjoy the last hit of Scribe, or the new _bon-mot_ of
the theatre: but contrast these results with the national love and
appreciation of Shakspeare,--with the permanent reflection of Spanish
life in Lope de Vega,--the patriotic aspirations which the young Italian
broods over in the tragedies of Alfieri. The grace of movement, the