Energy and conciseness are the distinguishing marks of Alfieri's dramas. Wishing to bring the whole action of the piece into one focus, he rejected altogether the confidantes of the French theatre, so that his dramatis personæ are limited to the principals themselves. The preservation of the unities of time and place also contributed to curtail all excrescences; so that his tragedies are short, and all hear upon one point only, which he considered the essence of unity of action. Thus, in the "Merope," there are but four interlocutors, the queen and her son, his foster-father, and the tyrant. Instead, therefore, as is the case in the French dramas, of the action being carried on by a perpetual talk about it, at once tedious and unnatural, the interest is always at its height between the parties themselves; and it is singular, in the "Merope" in particular, with what talent and success he keeps the action in perpetual progress, and the passions developed by such slender means. It was the turn of Alfieri's character to consider it a duty in an author rather to conquer difficulties than to acquire facilities. He would read no other tragedians, for fear of imitating them, and abstained from a perusal of the great master of the art, Shakspeare, from the same mistaken notion. Genius need not fear to be imitative; but genius, unaided by cultivation, and by a study of what has gone before, can never surpass what is already written: it were as if a scientific man were to refuse to be initiated in the discoveries of science, that he might pursue his labours in a new and original path. Thus he might, we will say, re-invent gunpowder and printing, but never a new law and a new power. To use a more homely illustration, it were as if an agriculturist refused to manure the ground, and was bent on forcing the native soil, to produce by labour what would arise with greater fertility and ease if aided by extraneous nutriment. It is a law of mechanics, never to waste power, but to proportionate on all occasions the means to the end. If, instead of refusing to read the finest dramatic works, Alfieri had studied in them the genius and essence of the art; he might; instead of simply restricting his invention to the bald and inconclusive expedient of contracting the personages of his drama, have invented some original method of combining the simplicity of design consequent on an observance of the unities, with a more natural and inforced arrangement of plot, and with a greater variety and truth of character.