that it would be profitless, and without the physical powers common to all other violent sea-winds in pu rifying the atmosphere, we are left in the dark; as well concerning the particular points in which he knew it (during its continuance) to differ from those that he had been acquainted with in his youth. We are at length introduced to the Lady Imogine, who, we learn, had not rested "through" the night, not on account of the tempest, for

tempest at Bertram's shipwreck? It is a mere super- this storm to be unseasonable, and on what he groundnatural effect without even a hint of any supernatu-ed his prophecy, (for the storm is still in full fury) ral agency; a prodigy without any circumstance mentioned that is prodigious; and a miracle introduced without a ground, and ending without a result. Every event and every scene of the play might have taken place as well if Bertram and his vessel had been driven in by a common hard gale, or from want of provisions. The first act would have indeed lost its greatest and most sonorous picture: a scene for the sake of a scene, without a word spoken; as such, therefore, (a rarity without a precedent) we must take it, and be thankful! In the opinion of not a few, it was, in every sense of the word, the best scene in the play. I am quite certain it was the most innocent: and the steady, quiet uprightness of the flame of the wax-candles which the monks held over the roaring billows amid the storm of wind and rain, was really miraculous.

The Sicilian sea coast: a convent of monks: night: a most portentous, unearthly storm: a vessel is wrecked: contrary to all human expectation, one man saves himself by his prodigious powers as a swimmer, aided by the peculiarity of his destination

3d Monk.-No, there was one did battle with the storm
With careless desperate force; full many times
His life was won and lost, as tho' he recked not-
No hand did aid him, and he aided none-
Alone he breasted the broad wave, alone
That man was saved."

Well! This man is led in by the monks, supposed
dripping wet, and to very natural inquiries, he either
remains silent, or gives most brief and surly answers,
and after three or four of these half-line courtesies,
"dashing off the monks" who had saved him, he ex-
claims in the true sublimity of our modern misan-
thropic heroism-

'Off! ye are men-there's poison in your touch

But I must yield, for this (what?) hath left me strengthless." So end the three first scenes. In the next, (the Castle of St. Aldobrand) we find the servants there equally frightened with this unearthly storm, though wherein it differed from other violent storms we are not told, except that Hugo informs us, page 9—

Piet." Hugo, well met. Does e'en thy age bear
Memory of so terrible a storm?

Hugo.--They have been frequent lately.
Piet. They are ever so in Sicily.

Hugo. So it is said. But storms when I was young
Would still pass o'er like Nature's fitful fevers,
And rendered all more wholesome. Now their rage
Sent thus unseasonable and profitless
Speaks like threats of heaven."

A most perplexing theory of Sicilian storms is this of
old Hugo! and what is very remarkable, not apparent
ly founded on any great familiarity of his own with
this troublesome article. For when Pietro asserts the
"ever more frequency" of tempests in Sicily, the old
man professes to know nothing more of the fact, but
by hearsay. "So it is said."--But why he assumed

"Long ere the storm arose, her restless gestures
Forbade all hope to see her blest with sleep."

Sitting at a table, and looking at a portrait, she in-
forms us-First, that portrait-painters may make a
portrait from memory—

"The limner's art may trace the absent feature." For surely these words could never mean, that a painter may have a person sit to him, who afterwards may leave the room or perhaps the country? Second, that a portrait-painter can enable a mourning lady to possess a good likeness of her absent lover, but that the portrait-painter cannot, and who shall

"Restore the scenes in which they met and parted?" The natural answer would have been-Why the scene-painter to be sure! But this unreasonable lady requires, in addition, sundry things to be painted that have neither lines nor colors

"The thoughts, the recollections sweet and bitter

Or the Elysian dreams of lovers when they loved." Which last sentence must be supposed to mean: when they were present and making love to each other.Then, if this portrait could speak, it would "acquit the faith of womankind." How? Had she remained constant? No, she has been married to another man, whose wife she now is. How then? Why, that in spite of her marriage vow, she had continued to yearn and crave for her former lover

"This has her body, that her mind; Which has the better bargain?" The lover, however, was not contented with this precious arrangement, as we shall soon find. The lady proceeds to inform us, that during the many years of their separation, there have happened in the different parts of the world, a number of "such things;" even such as in a course of years always have, and, till the millennium, doubtless always will happen somewhere or other. Yet this passage, both in language and in metre, is, perhaps, among the best parts of the Play. The lady's loved companion and most esteemed attendant, Clotilda, now enters and explains this love and esteem by proving herself a most passive and dispassionate listener, as well as a brief and lucky querist, who asks by chance, questions that we should have thought made for the very sake, of the answers. In short, she very much reminds us of those puppet-heroines, for whom the showman contrives to dialogue, without any skill in ventriloquism. This, notwithstanding, is the best scene in the Play and though crowded with solecisms, corrupt diction,

and offences against metre, would possess merits suf-
ficient to outweigh them, if we could suspend the
moral sense during the perusal. It tells well and
passionately the preliminary circumstances, and thus
overcomes the main difficulty of most first acts, viz.
that of retrospective narration. It tells us of her
having been honorably addressed by a noble youth, Prior.-"I will awake him from this horrid trance:
of rank and fortune vastly superior to her own: of
their mutual love, heightened on her part by grati-
tude; of his loss of his sovereign's favor; his dis-
grace, attainder and flight; that he (thus degraded)
sunk into a vile ruffian, the chieftain of a murderous
banditti; and that from the habitual indulgence of
the most reprobate habits and ferocious passions, he
had become so changed even in his appearance and
features,

The dramatic effect of which passage we not only
concede to the admirers of this Tragedy, but acknow-
ledge the further advantage of preparing the audi-
ence for the most surprising series of wry faces, pro-
flated mouths, and lunatic gestures, that were ever
launched" on an audience to "sear the sense."+

This is no natural sleep! Ho! wake thee, stranger." This is rather a whimsical application of the verb reflex, we must confess, though we remember a similar transfer of the agent to the patient in a manuscript Tragedy, in which the Bertram of the piece, prostrating a man with a single blow of his fist, exclaims

4

Knock me thee down, then ask thee if thou liv'st." Well, the stranger obeys; and whatever his sleep might have been, his waking was perfectly "That she who bore him had recoiled from him. natural, for lethargy itself could not withstand the Nor known the alien visage of her child; Yet still she [Imogine] loved him." scolding stentorship of Mr. Holland, the Prior. We She is compelled by the silent entreaties of a father, next learn from the best authority, his own confession, perishing with bitter shameful want on the cold that the misanthropic hero, whose destiny was incomearth," to give her hand, with a heart thus irrevoca- patible with drowning, is Count Bertram, who not bly pre-engaged, to Lord Aldobrand, the enemy of only reveals his past fortunes, but avows with open her lover, even to the very man who had baffled his atrocity, his satanic hatred of Imogine's Lord, and his ambitious schemes, and was, at the present time, en- frantic thirst of revenge; and so the raving character trusted with the execution of the sentence of death scolds-and what else? Does not the Prior act? which had been passed on Bertram. Now, the proof Does he send for a posse of constables or thief-takers, of "woman's love," so industriously held forth for to handcuff the villain, and take him either to Bedthe sympathy, if not the esteem of the audience, con- lam or Newgate? Nothing of the kind; the author sists in this: that though Bertram had become a rob- preserves the unity of character, and the scolding ber and a murderer by trade, a ruffian in manners, Prior from first to last does nothing but scold, with yea, with form and features at which his own mother the exception, indeed, of the last scene of the last could not but "recoil," yet she, (Lady Imogine,)" the act, in which, with a most surprising revolution, he wife of a most noble, honored Lord," estimable as a whines, weeps, and kneels to the condemned blasman, exemplary and affectionate as a husband, and pheming assassin out of pure affection to the highthe fond father of her only child-that she, notwith-hearted man, the sublimity of whose angel-sin rivals standing all this, striking her heart, dares to say it- the star-bright apostate, (i. e. who was as proud as

"But thou art Bertram's still, and Bertram's ever."

A monk now enters, and entreats in his Prior's name for the wonted hospitality, and "free noble usage,” of the Castle of St. Aldobrand, for some wretched shipwrecked souls; and from this we learn, for the first time, to our infinite surprise, that notwithstanding the supernaturalness of the storm aforesaid, not only Bertram, but the whole of his gang, had been saved, by what means we are left to conjecture, and can only conclude that they had all the same desperate swimming powers, and the same saving destiny as the hero, Bertram himself. So ends the first act, and with it the tale of the events, both those with which the Tragedy begins, and those which had occurred previous to the date of its commencement. The second displays Bertram in disturbed sleep, which the Prior, who hangs over him, prefers calling a "starting trance," and with a strained voice, that would have awakened one of the seven sleepers, observes to the audience

"How the lip works! How the bare teeth do grind ! And beaded drops course down his writhen brow !"'*

"The big round tears

Coursed one another down his innocent nose
In piteous chase."

Lucifer, and as wicked as the Devil,) and "had thrilled him" (Prior Holland aforesaid) with wild admiration.

Accordingly, in the very next scene, we have this tragic Macheath, with his whole gang, in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, without any attempt on the Prior's part either to prevent him, or to put the mistress and servants of the Castle on their guard against their new inmates, though he (the Prior) knew, and confesses that he knew, that Bertram's "fearful mates"

says Shakspeare of a wounded stag, hanging his head over a stream: naturally, from the position of the head, and most beautifully, from the association of the preceding image, of the chase, in which "the poor sequester'd stag from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt." In the supposed position of Bertram, the metaphor, if not false, loses all the propriety of the original.

without reason, Imogine, in the first act, declares that thun† Among a number of other instances of words chosen der-storms were not able to intercept her prayers for "the desperate man, in desperate ways who dealt"

"Yea, when the launched bolt did sear her sense, Her soul's deep orisons were breathed for him;"

i. e. when a red-hot bolt, launched at her from a thundercloud, had cauterized her sense--in plain English, burnt her eyes out of her head, she kept still praying on.

"Was not this love? Yes, thus doth woman love!

were assassins so habituated and naturalized to guilt, with her ruffian paramour, with whom she makes thar

"When their drenched hold forsook both gold and gear, They griped their daggers with a murderer's instinct ;"

and though he also knew that Bertram was the leader of a band whose trade was blood. To the Castle, however, he goes, thus with the holy Prior's consent, if not with his assistance; and thither let us follow him.

at once an infamous appointment, and the curtain drops, that it may be carried into act and consumma

tion.

I want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust with which I witnessed the opening of the fourth act, considering it as a melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind. The shocking spirit of jacobinism seemed no longer confined to politics. The familiarity with atrocious events and characters No sooner is our hero safely housed in the Castle appeared to have poisoned the taste, even where it of St. Aldobrand, than he attracts the notice of the had not directly disorganized the moral principles, lady and her confidante, by his "wild and terrible and left the feelings callous to all the mild appeals, dark eyes," "muffled form," "fearful form,"*"darkly and craving alone for the grossest and most outragewild," "proudly stern," and the like common place ous stimulants. The very fact then present to our indefinites, seasoned by merely verbal antithesis, and, senses, that a British audience could remain passive at best, copied with very slight change, from the Cox- under such an insult to common decency, nay, reRADE of Southey's Joan of Arc. The lady Imogine, ceive with a thunder of applause, a human being who has been (as is the case, she tells us, with all supposed to have come reeking from the consummasoft and solemn spirits) worshipping the moon on a tion of this complex foulness and baseness, these and terrace or rampart within view of the castle, insists the like reflections so pressed as with the weight of on having an interview with our hero, and this, too, lead upon my heart, that actor, author, and tragedy tete-a-tete. Would the reader learn why and where- would have been forgotten, had it not been for a plain fore the confidante is excluded, who very properly elderly man sitting beside me, who, with a very seriremonstrates against such "conference, alone, at ous face, that at once expressed surprise and avernight, with one who bears such fearful form "- the sion, touched my elbow, and, pointing to the actor, reason follows-" why, therefore send him!" I say said to me in a half-whisper-" Do you see that little follows, because the next line, "all things of fear fellow there? he has just been committing adultery!" have lost their power over me," is separated from the Somewhat relieved by the laugh which this droll adformer by a break or pause, and beside that it is a dress occasioned, I forced back my attention to the very poor answer to the danger-is no answer at all stage sufficiently to learn that Bertram is recovered to the gross indelicacy of this wilful exposure. We from a transient fit of remorse, by the information must, therefore, regard it as a mere afterthought, that that St. Aldobrand was commissioned (to do what a little softens the rudeness, but adds nothing to the every honest man must have done without commisweight of that exquisite woman's reason aforesaid. sion, if he did his duty) to seize him and deliver him And so exit Clotilda, and enter Bertram, who "stands to the just vengeance of the law; an information without looking at her," that is, with his lower limbs which (as he had long known himself to be an atforked, his arms akimbo, his side to the lady's front, tainted traitor and proclaimed outlaw, and not only a the whole figure resembling an inverted Y. He is trader in blood himself, but notoriously the Captain soon, however, roused from the state surly to the state of a gang of thieves, pirates and assassins) assuredly frantic, and then follow raving, yelling, cursing, she could not have been new to him. It is this, howfainting, he relenting, in run's Imogine's child, ever, which alone and instantly restores him to his squeaks “mother!" He snatches it up, and with a accustomed state of raving, blasphemy, and nonsense. "God bless thee, child! Bertram has kissed thy Next follows Imogine's constrained interview with child,”—the curtain drops. The third act is short, her injured husband, and his sudden departure again, and short be our account of it. It introduces Lord all in love and kindness, in order to attend the feast St. Aldobrand on his road homeward, and next Imo- of St. Anselm at the convent. This was, it must be gine in the convent, confessing the foulness of her owned, a very strange engagement for so tender a heart to the Prior, who first indulges his old humor husband to make within a few minutes after so long with a fit of senseless scolding, then leaves her alone an absence. But first his lady has told him that she has "a vow on her," and wishes that black perdition may gulph her perjured soul,"-(Note: she is lying at the very time)—if she ascends his bed till her penance is accomplished. How, therefore, is the poor husband to amuse himself in this interval of her penance? But do not be distressed, reader, on account of Lord St. Aldobrand's absence! As the author has contrived to send him out of the house, when a husband would be in his, and the lover's way, so he will doubtless not be at a loss to bring him back again so soon as he is wanted. Well! the husband gone in on the one side, out pops the lover from the other, and for the fiendish purpose of har

*This sort of repetition is one of this writer's peculiarities, and there is scarce a page which does not furnish one or more instances Ex. gr. in the first page or two. Act I. line 7th,

' and deemed that I might sleep."--Line 10, "Did rock and quiver in the bickering glare."-Lines 14, 15, 16, "But by the momently gleams of sheeted blue, Did the pale marbles glare so sternly on me, I almost deemed they lived."-Line 37, "The glare of Hell."-Line 35, "O holy Prior, this is no earthly storm."-Line 38, "This is no earthly storm."Line 42, "Dealing with us."-Line 43, "Deal thus sternly."--Line 44, "Speak! thou hast something seen!''--A fearful sight!"-Line 45, "What hast thou seen? A pite ous, fearful sight."--Line 48, "quivering gleams."-Line 50,"In the hollow pauses of the storm."-Line 61, "The pauses of the storm," &c.

with all the vessels and other preparations for the
holy sacrament. A hymn is actually sung on the

who now and then talks deliriously, but who is al
ways light-headed, so far as her gown and hair can
make her so, wanders about in dark woods, with ca-
vern-rocks and precipices in the back scene; and a
number of mute dramatis personæ move in and out
continually, for whose presence there is always at
least this reason, that they afford something to be
seen, by that very large part of a Drury-lane audi-
ence, who have small chance of hearing a word.
She had, it appears, taken her child with her; but
what becomes of the child, whether she murdered it
or not, nobody can tell, nobody can learn; it was a
riddle at the representation, and, after a most atten-
tive perusal of the play, a riddle it remains.

rowing up the soul of his wretched accomplice in
guilt, by announcing to her with most brutal and
blasphemous execrations, his fixed and deliberate re-stage by the choirister boys! For the rest, Imogine,
solve to assassinate her husband; all this, too, is for
no discoverable purpose, on the part of the author,
but that of introducing a series of super-tragic starts,
pauses, screams, struggling, dagger-throwing, falling
on the ground, starting up again wildly, swearing,
outcries for help, failing again on the ground, rising
again, faintly tottering towards the door, and, to end
the scene, a most convenient fainting fit of our lady's,
just in time to give Bertram an opportunity of seek-
ing the object of his hatred, before she alarms the
house, which indeed she has had full time to have
done before, but that the author rather chose she
should amuse herself and the audience by the above-
described ravings and startings. She recovers slowly,
and to her enter Clotilda, the confidante and mother
confessor; then commences what in theatrical lan-
guage is called the madness, but which the author
more accurately entitles delirium, it appearing in-
deed a sort of intermittent fever, with fits of light-
headedness off and on, whenever occasion and stage
effect happen to call for it. A convenient return of
the storm (we told the reader beforehand how it
would be) had changed

"The rivulet that bathed the Convent walls,
Into a foaming flood; upon its brink

The Lord and his small train do stand appalled.
With torch and bell from their high battlements
The monks do summon to the pass in vain ;
He must return to-night."-

Talk of the devil, and his horns appear, says the proverb: and sure enough, within ten lines of the exit of the messenger sent to stop him, the arrival of Lord St. Aldobrand is announced. Bertram's ruffian band now enter, and range themselves across the stage, giving fresh cause for Imogine's screams and madness. St. Aldobrand having received his mortal wound behind the scenes, totters in to welter in his blood, and to die at the feet of this double-damned adulteress.

"No more I know, I wish I did,
And I would tell it all to you;
For what became of this poor child
There's none that ever knew."

Wordsworth's Thorn.

Our whole information* is derived from the follow-
ing words-

"Prior.-Where is thy child?

Clotil.-[Pointing to the cavern into which she had look-
ed] Oh, he lies cold within his cavern tomb!
Why dost thou urge her with the horrid theme?
Prior.-Who will not, the reader may observe, be dis-
appointed of his dose of scolding,]

It was to make [quere wake] one living cord o' th' heart,
And I will try, tho' my own breaks at it.
Where is thy child?

Imog. With a frantic laugh]

The forest-fiend had snatched him

He [who the fiend or the child ?] rides the night-mare
through the wizzard woods."

Now, these two lines consist in a senseless plagiarism
from the counterfeited madness of Edgar in Lear,
who, in imitation of the gipsy incantations, puns on
the old word Mair, a Hag; and the no less senseless
adoption of Dryden's forest-fiend, and the wizzard
stream by which Milton, in his Lycidas, so finely
characterizes the spreading Deva, fabulosus Amnis.
Observe, too, these images stand unique in the
speeches of Imogene, without the slightest resem-
blance to any thing she says before or after. But we
are weary. The characters in this act frisk about,
here, there, and everywhere, as teazingly as the Jack-
o'lanthorn lights which mischievous boys, from across
a narrow street, throw with a looking-glass on the
faces of their opposite neighbors. Bertram disarmed,

Of her, as far as she is concerned in this 4th act, we have two additional points to notice: first, the low cunning and Jesuitical trick with which she deludes her husband into words of forgiveness, which he himself does not understand; and secondly, that every where she is made the object of interest and sympathy, and it is not the author's fault, if at any moment she excites feelings less gentle than those we are accustomed to associate with the self-accusations of a sincere, religious penitent. And did a Bri-outheroding Charles de Moor in the Robbers, befaces tish audience endure all this? They received it with plaudits, which, but for the rivalry of the carts and hackney-coaches, might have disturbed the evening prayers of the scanty week-day congregation at St. Paul's cathedral,

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.

Of the 5th act, the only thing noticeable (for rant and nonsense, though abundant as ever, have, long before the last act, become things of course) is the profane representation of the high altar in a chapel,

the collected knights of St. Anselm, (all in complete
armor,) and so, by pure dint of black looks, he out-
dares them into passive poltroons. The sudden revo-
lution in the Prior's manners we have before noticed,
and it is indeed so outré, that a number of the audi-
ence imagined a great secret was to come out, viz.
that the Prior was one of the many instances of a

what possible means the author could have ended the second

*The child is an important personage, for I see not by

and third acts, but for its timely appearance. How ungrate
ful, then, not further to notice its fate!