The Press.
London, England, 1856-09-06 00:00:00

only a square and a cube, but could be divided
by two down to unity without throwing off a
fraction. Others devoted their lives to the
construction of " magic squares," or to
attempts at trisecting angles or squaring
circles—the votaries of the last-mentioned
mystery being the most numerous, and
actually persuading themselves that the same
discovery which should enable them to square
the circle would also contain the seeretofmaking
gold, and securing immortality by the Elixir of
Life. To thisclass of investigators Science owes
something, as she must owe to those who de-
vote time and talent in faithful researches upon
almost any subject. The author before us has
well deserved a place among them. If we are
unable to acknowledge any great scientific
debt as due to his labours, the result must be
attributed to his misfortune rather than to
his fault. Clearly it was a mistake, over
which he had no control, that he should have
belonged to the nineteenth instead of the
fifteenth century.

Life's a Dream : the Great Theatre of the
World. From the Spanish of Calderon.
With an Essay on his Life and Genius by
Richard Chenevix Trench. London : J. W.
Parker and Son.

TT is the design of Mr. Trench in this essay to
hold the scales of justice evenly between those
who extravagantly eulogise and those who
extravagantly detract from the genius of the
great Spanish dramatist. He places himself
almost equidistant from the enthusiasm of the
&Allegels and the sceptical coldness of Sis-
mondi. He weighs the claims of Calderon in
every department of his art with great careful-
ness, and endeavours to ascertain his correct
rank, not only in his native literature, but in
that of the only other two countries in which
the drama has flourished,—Greece and Eng-
land.

By persons intimately acquainted with the
Spanish language, and with the writings of
Calderon, this little volume will doubtless be
read with avidity; while the general public
will find in it a well compressed stock of
information upon one of those topics about
which every educated man likes to know some-
thing, though unable to penetrate for himself
to the original sources.
When Calderon commenced writing, the
Spanish drama was in the meridian of its
brief but brilliant life,—the summer just
waning into autumn. Of Calderon's position
towards his contemporaries Mr. Trench
writes :

They convey altogether a wrong impression of Calderon,
who, willing to exalt and glorify him the more, isolate hint
wholly from his age, who pass over all its other worthies
to magnify him only, presenting him to us not as one, the
brightest indeed in a galaxy of lights, but as the sole par.
titular star in the firmament of Spanish dramatic art.
Those who derive their impression from the Schlegels,
especially from Augustus, would conclude him to stand
thus alone ;—to stand, if one might venture to employ the
allusion, a poetical Melchisedec, without spiritual father,
without spiritual mother, with nothing round him to ex•
plain or account for the circumstances of his greatness.
But there are no such appearances in literature; great
artists, poets, or painters, or others, always cluster ; the
conditions which produce one, produce many. They are
nit strewn at nearly equable distances through the life of
a nation, but there are brief periods of great productive-
I'm with long intervals of comparative barrenness
b•tween; or it may be, as indeed was the case with Spain,
the aloe tree of a nation's literature blossoms but once.
And if this is true in other regions of art, above all will
it be true in respect of the drama. In this, when it de•
serves the name, a nation is uttering itself, what is nearest
to its heart, what it has conceived there of life and life's
mystery, and of a possible reconciliation between the
world which now is and that ideal world after which it
yearns; and the conditions of a people, which make a
great outburst of the drama possible, make it also inevitable
that this will utter itself not by a single voice but by many.
Even Shakespeare hi:nself, towering as he does im•
measurably above all his compeers, is not a single isolated
peak, rising abruptly from the level plain ; hut one of a
chain and cluster of mountain summits; and his altitude,
so far from being dwarfed and diminished, can only be
rightly estimated when it is regarded in relation with
theirs. And if this is true even of him, it is much more
of Calderon ; who by no means towers so pre•eminently,
and gut of the reach of all rivalry anti competition, above
his fellows. The greatest of all the Spanish dramatists,
he is yet equalled and excelled in this point and in that
by one and another ; as by Lope in invention, by Tirso de
Molina in exuberant and festive wit. Let us regard him
then not as that monster which some would present him
to us; but, with all his manifold gifts, still as the orderly
birth of his age and nation; and regarding him as such