One of the great objections against this tragedy was its monstrous plan of six acts; this innovation did not lean towards improvement in the minds of those who had endured the long sufferings of tragedies of the accepted size.  But the author offers some solemn reasons to induce us to believe that six acts were so far from being too many, that the piece had been more perfect with a seventh!  M. de Beaussol had, perhaps, been happy to have known, that other dramatists have considered that the usual restrictions are detrimental to a grand genius.  Nat.  Lee, when in Bedlam, wrote a play in twenty-five acts.

Our philosophical dramatist, from the constituent principles of the human mind, and the physical powers of man, and the French nation more particularly, deduces the origin of the sublime, and the faculty of attention.  The plan of his tragedy is agreeable to these principles:  Monarchs, Queens, and Rivals, and every class of men; it is therefore grand! and the acts can be listened to, and therefore it is not too long!  It was the high opinion that he had formed of human nature and the French people, which at once terrified and excited him to finish a tragedy, which, he modestly adds, “may not have the merit of any single one; but which one day will be discovered to include the labour bestowed on fifty!”

No great work was ever produced without a grand plan.  “Some critics,” says our author, “have ventured to assert that my six acts may easily be reduced to the usual five, without injury to the conduct of the fable.”  To reply to this required a complete analysis of the tragedy, which, having been found more voluminous than the tragedy itself, he considerately “published separately.”  It would be curious to ascertain whether a single copy of the analysis of a condemned tragedy was ever sold.  And yet this critical analysis was such an admirable and demonstrative criticism, that the author assures us that it proved the absolute impossibility, “and the most absolute too,” that his piece could not suffer the slightest curtailment.  It demonstrated more—­that the gradation and the development of interest required necessarily seven acts! but, from dread of carrying this innovation too far, the author omitted one act, which passed behind the scenes![170] but which ought to have come in between the fifth and sixth!  Another point is proved, that the attention of an audience, the physical powers of man, can be kept up with interest much longer than has been calculated; that his piece only takes up two hours and three quarters, or three hours at most, if some of the most impassioned parts were but declaimed rapidly.[171]