This volume contains four new plays. I. The young COUNT OF BURGUNDY, saved in his infancy from the massacre of his family, has been educated, ignorant of his rank, by a hermit in Switzerland, and has rendered himself agreeable to Elizabeth, the daughter of a poor Swiss knight. News is brought that the usurper of the sceptre of Burgundy is dead; and the hermit now reveals to Henry the secret of his parentage; and sets off with him and the friendly messenger for Arles, in order to lay claim to the vacant inheritance. They carry with them the coronet, seal-ring, and cup, of the murdered Count, with other documents necessary to prove the pedigree and right of the young Henry. In the neighbourhood of Arles, they stay during the night at an inn: where some persons, observing the regalia in possession of the hermit, denounce him and his companions as conspirators in the massacre of the Count's family. The death of the usurper having withdrawn all supposed protection, every one is clamorous for their punishment; and they are dragged in bonds before an assembly of the burghers of Arles. Now follows one of the finest scenes, or rather acts, which we recollect in any drama. The stormy anger of the populace, clamouring for the execution of these suspected innocents, but mingled with a thousand bursts of affection for the murdered Count, the father of his country, whose benefits eighteen years of usurpation had not effaced the hermit gradually obtaining leisure for defence, relating his story, and, instead of the murderer, discovering himself as the preserver of the rightful heir; and the glow of enthusiastic triumph with which Henry is welcomed by the agitated and altered crowd; are truly admirable. They break open the convent in which his widowed mother, Matilda, has immured herself; and she is led to her son at the critical moment of his recognition and restoration. The rest of the play is comparatively flat. Henry goes in disguise to Switzerland in order to seek his Elizabeth, and surprises her with the offer of a throne. She returns with him to Arles; and the piece concludes with their coronation. - A translation of this play has appeared ;we shall give some account of it in a future number.

II. FALSE SHAME-is a very skilful comedy: full of delicate and new situations, scarcely improbable. The characters are various, natural, and consistent, and the moral is good. There is so much of local nature in this play, and the situations are poignant so much more from the characters than from the circumstances of the personages, that we shall not offer an analysis of the plot, which would probably excite little curiosity. It appears to us, however, nearly the best German comedy

Rr3

that

that we have seen: -the author of Minna von Barnheim may frown: but does all the patient art of LESSING attain the glow of KOTZEBUE'S rapidity?

III. A play on the subject of the misfortunes of LA PÉROUSE; who is here supposed to have been shipwrecked in the South-Seas. Malvina, a female savage, has saved him from the waves, and has conveyed him to an unoccupied island; where he lives with her, and has a son. In secret, he vents his sorrow for those whom he left behind in Europe: he observes a sail: he makes signals: the vessel approaches. A female and a boy are landed from a boat: they are the wife and son of La Pérouse, who had sailed on board the ship sent in search of him by the Convention. The two women gradually discover each other's relation to La Pérouse; their equal claims, their jealousy, their warm affection for him, and their children, supply interesting moments: but the parallelism of their situations is too complete, and gives an antithesis to their alternate speeches which often fatigues. The brother of Madame La Pérouse now intervenes. He descants on the revolution of France and the insecurity of happiness in Europe: he proposes to the party to establish themselves in the South-Seas, and to detach him with the vessel for other companions. The plan is determined, and the two women consent to live, in sisterly union, with La Pérouse.

IV. WILD OATS (for we know not how else to render the title der Wildfang) is an amusing farce, no doubt, on the stage, but is unfit for the closet. The endless disguises of the young lover, and the comic perversities of situation which occur, fill a busy but not very original plot.

A neatly engraved head of the author is prefixed to this volume.

ART. XXXIV. Herbarium Mauritianum, &c. i. e. An Account of the Plants of the Mauritius. By P. R. WILLEMET: With a Preface by A. L. MILLIN. 8vo. Leipzig. 1797.

T HE author of this Herbarium was born at Nancy, April 2, 1762, and studied botany under Mounier at Paris. He went to India with Tippoo Saib's ambassadors, as body-physician to that sovereign. On his voyage, he landed at the Isle of France, where he speedily collected a great number of plants, which he described as well as circumstances would permit. The collection and remarks he forwarded to his friend MILLIN at Paris, in order to be kept for revisal on his return: but he died shortly after his arrival at Seringapatam.

In this work, M. WILLEMET follows Linné: only naming

plants already known: -to the doubtful he adds a note of interrogation. The new he describes, adding the habitat and the time of flowering, in those cases in which he was acquainted with it.

ART. XXXV.

Homage d'un Suisse aux Braves d'Unterwalden.

The Homage of a Swiss to the brave Unterwalders. pp. 41. 6d. De Boffe, London. 1798.

ONCERNING

12mo.

Swiss history and politics, two works were

noticed our xxvith vol. p. 540 and 546. This also is one of the swan-songs of expiring independence, and records the brave but ineffectual resistance of the people of Unterwald to the violent intrusion of the French. The partition of Switzerland, like that of Poland, cannot be too much abhorred. It remains to be seen whether the magistrates of the Grisons, by favouring the introduction of the Austrians, or the clubbists of Berne, by favouring the introduction of the French, --have brought on their country the more humiliating and irreparable grievance.

ART. XXXVI. Lettre au Général Dumouriez, &c. i.e. A Letter to General Dumouriez, respecting his Speculative Picture of Europe. By the Abbé J. P. T. L. S. 8vo. pp.72. 1s. 6d. Boffe, London. 1798.

De

T His letter objects to the approbation bestowed by Dumouriez on Buonaparte's concessions to the Emperor, in the negotiation of Leoben. With Vienna in his grasp, why did Buonaparte retire, and resign the Venetian territory, for liberty to withdraw? The whole affair admits but of one interpretation. Buonaparte could not have maintained himself at Vienna without democratizing the country; and the Directory know it to be for the interest of their own progressive aggrandizement, not to democratize any one of the great continental powers. The German national character is more popular in Europe than that of the French: it is more orderly, humane, and just; less irascible, intolerant, and rapacious. If they had an equally advantageous structure of constitution to offer as the reward of subjection, they would appear to the petty European states the preferable sovereign they would become the GREAT NATION, to the prejudice of France, and would extend the influence of their laws, their literature, and their arms, from Tarento to Copenhagen:-whereas, by leaving the primary despotisms subsisting, the necessarily defective allegiance of the numerous classes

Rr4

classes facilitates the perpetual erosion of their territory, and the successive metamorphosis of their provinces into satellite republics, until they are ripe for absorption into the body of the Gallic planet.

ART. XXXVII. Nouveau Tableau Speculatif de l'Europe, &c. i. e. A New Speculative Picture of Europe. By General DUMOU RIEZ. 8vo. pp. 380. 6s. sewed. Imported by De Boffe. OF this Ex-General's Speculative Picture of Europe we spoke

at length in our xxvth vol. p. 546. This professes to be a new edition of that work, modernized down to the month of September 1798, by means of an additional preface. A new but insignificant sheet, intitled An Advertisement, has in fact been prefixed, but we have discovered no alteration in the body of the work itself.

ART. XXXVIII. Voyage à la Guiane et à Cayenne, &c. i. e. A Voyage to Guiana and Cayenne, performed in 1789, and the following Years, &c. &c. By L..... M... B... Merchant. 8vo. pp. 400. Paris. 1798.

actual voyage, we find

NSTEAD of being an account of an this work to be a superficial and inaccurate compilation from other writers, (some of them the least worthy of selection,) without even the appearance of that kind of order, and succession of incidents, which must necessarily attend the observations of any single traveller or observer. Though the writer pretends to give an account of the natural productions of the different parts of Guiana, he does not appear to know any thing more than their vulgar names; and even these are employed with so little attention, that loose descriptions or pretended descriptions of the same animal or vegetable, compiled from various writers, are given more than once in different parts of the volume. Sometimes a vulgar English name is literally translated into French, from some ignorant writer; and the object, which had before been described under its proper French name, is pretended to be again described under a name wholly unknown in the French language. Two instances of this occur at page 235-where, Ist, an account is given of "Le Plantin espèce de Platane," &c. The plant here meant is the Musa Pardisiaca, the common bread of the negroes, throughout the West Indies, called the Plantain by the English, and Banane by the French; under which name it had been already repeatedly mentioned and described by this compiler, without knowing it. 2dly, In the same page, "Le Pomme de Pin," &c. a name made out from the English pine-apple, which the French know only by the name " Ananas;" and under which this Mr. L. M. B. has frequently mentioned it.

INDEX

To the REMARKABLE PASSAGES in this Volume.

N. B. To find any particular Book, or Pamphlet, see the
Table of Contents, prefixed to the Volume.