PREPARATIONS FOR THE DRAMA.
RUMOURS have been several times afloat piquing public curiosity, with reference to a supposed desire on the part of Lord Joins Russcia to resign office : and though since the opening of Parlia- ment we have heard nothing from the noble Lord himself—have held our breath in vain to catch some word of comfort or assurance—on a subject of such anxious interest, yet it may not be unfair to specu- late on the motives to such a desire—to consider whether it be a reasonable or unreasonable one, and such as, if entertained, the public can, or cannot, be expected to further. In estimating the probabilities of his Lordship's contemplating a proceeding which must inflict a loss so irreparable on the Govern- ment of this country, we are met at the outset by the staggering fact, that his Lordship is now reaping in a more eminent degree than at any previous time those peculiar honours and that peculiar popularity, which his consistency, integrity, and liberal and exalted policy, have so long secured bim ; and these are intellectual plea- sures which no man can be expected willingly to relinquish. On the other hand, however, we have to take into account the love of retirement, indifference to the emoluments of office, literary tastes, and that very fulness of honour and reputation which offers a crisis for resignation so favourable to the dramatic part of history. Lord Joins Rvssnaa probably compares himself with justice to the " young warrior," of whom BURNS sings, and uo doubt desires, when he falls, " To fall in the blaze of his fame."
But then the question arises, whether has this blaze yet blazed 'forth ; or whether is there perhaps some flare beyond, hitherto un- dreamt of in the pyrotechnics of statesmanship, for which he waits ?—some prodigious final coruscation wherein he proposes to vanish like a genius—as he undoubtedly is. It is difficult, however, to imagine what further brilliance can be added to Lord JOHN Rus- sma2s career as a Minister, or how his "peculiar popularity" can be materially augmented by its protraction ; and, with the best view to effect, we feel bound to counsel that the official demise, which he has been said to contemplate, should take place now, and no later, and that he should not, like Whiskerandos, " stay dying here all night," but die at once. Of the finality of Reform Lord JOHN RUSSELL' has taken pains to persuade us—we have now, in our turn, to impress upon him the finality of office. By dint of meditating on this subject, we have been led into various discreet reflections touching the official death of great statesmen. It appears to us, that it is a ceremony often needlessly delayed ater all parties have become convinced of its necessity. In a recent paper we illustrated the self-referential principle in public men as it related to their hankerings after History. We showed the inconvenience (we have a right to this word) arising from the ambition of statesmen, not merely to cut a figure here- after, but to prescribe the very figure they mean to cut—to carve it out and plaster it with their own hands. There is, however, another future arena to which it is probable some of our great men occasionally look forward, not without a view to shape their course conformably with its requisitions. We need hardly say we allude to the Drama. Have not W0LSEY, STRAFFORD, BURLEIGH, and we know not how many other ministers of state, come to life again on the stage ? Have we not had " Richelieu, a play in five acts ?" Why not " Russell, a play in five acts?" Now, therefore, if we are right in conjecturing that some Ministers, who feel themselves to be Rienntanus and WonsEvs—if not in power, yet in genius and immortality—regulate their political attitudes and situations, their entrances and exits, by the principles of the drama, it follows that they must be in the highest degree solicitous about their dying- scene—must desire above all things to indue it with dramatic propriety and tragic interest ; because it is well known that a sub- ject is eligible for the stage almost in proportion to the merit of its catastrophe. This, then, is one reason, we conceive, why great statesmen stay dying here all night;" this it is that "makes calamity of so long life." They want to make the close of their political existence harmonize with the general plot of their lives; they desiderate, at all price, the preservation of the unities—not for their own sakes, but simply to save trouble to future dramatists ; they limey themselves correcting their proof-sheets, and, with the knowledg:s that it is the last opportunity they can have for altera- tions, linger over them in imagination with a fastidiousness that is never satisfied. All this may be of so much closer applica- tion to Lord Jolts; Russm.n, inasmuch as his Lordship is himself a dramatic author. The author of Don Carlos, it must be supposed, possesses an acute feeling of the exigencies of the drama. Now, much i, t.. he allowed under these circumstances. Only imagine the noble author to be revising fia• time last time " a play in fire vets," and you may conceive the nervous irresolution in regard to the whole piece, but especially to the last Scene ; you may conceive the temptation to keep the printer's boy waiting while he alters a little the stage-directions, adds a touching trait of character, and puts in new and heightening circumstances at the close ; you may conceive the difficulty of refraining from adding line after line to the dying-speech—the impossibility, almost, of saying, once for all,—" dies." All this is very natural, but—in his Lordship's phraseology- " inconvenient ;" and it is against this inconvenience that, as the practical end of our present lucubration, sue desire to provide. It appears to us that Ministers are entitled to some service and assist- ance in these their latter moments, if they never deserved so much before ; and we feel that, having ourselves been in some measure accessory to the destruction of their healths, we are now bound at least to help them out of their pain as soon as possible, and "Teach them how easy 'tis to die."
We have already suggested, as one explanation of the Houle See. retary's alleged readiness for official death, that he may be sensible of having reached the point of honour and greatness beyond which it is impossible as a Minister to go, and may thus feel a sort of spiritual longing for a life of retirement analogous to the aspira. tions of the virtuous after the world to come. People, however, desire death sometimes on other accounts,—to be delivered front torture, for example ; and we have heard those who did not scruple to say that this was Lord JOHN'S case. However this may be—if the desire exist, it is monstrous that an obstacle should remain to its accomplishment which the people of England by any efforts of theirs can possibly remove. What we wish is, therefore, that the country should enter into the spirit of the noble Lord's dramatic views, and—since, probably, the only consideration which delays the fall of the curtain now is the supposed want of materials for a sufficiently imposing exit,—that they should strive all they can to supply incidents likely to improve it, whereby they may render the climax one of undoubted adequacy, and the whole story may be ripe to be put on the stage so soon as ever the future BCLWER shall be ready to mould it into "Russell, a play," &e.
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