slowly, and to her enter Clotilda, the confidante and mother
confessor; then commences, what in theatrical language
is called the madness, but which the author more
accurately entitles delirium, it appearing indeed a sort of
intermittent fever with fits of light-headedness off and on, 5
whenever occasion and stage effect happen to call for it.
A convenient return of the storm (we told the reader before-
hand 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.".

10

Talk of the devil, and his horns appear, says the proverb: 15 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 20 mortal wound behind the scenes, totters in to welter in his blood, and to die at the feet of this double-damned adultress.

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 25 words of forgiveness, which he himself does not understand; and secondly, that everywhere 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 30 of a sincere religious penitent. And did a British 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.

35

5

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.

Of the fifth 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, with all the vessels and other preparations for the holy sacrament. A hymn is actually sung on the stage by the chorister boys! For the rest, Imogine, who now and then talks deliriously, but who is always light-headed as far as her gown and hair can make Io her so, wanders about in dark woods with cavern-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 15 Lane audience 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 attentive perusal of the play, a riddle ao it remains.

"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.

25 Our whole information is derived from the following words

Prior. Where is thy child?

Clotil.-(Pointing to the cavern into which she has looked) Oh, he lies cold within his cavern-tomb !

30 Why dost thou urge her with the horrid theme?

* The child is an important personage, for I see not by what possible means the author could have ended the second and third acts but for its timely appearance. How ungrateful then not further to notice its fate!

Prior.-(who will not, the reader may observe, be disappointed 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 hath snatched him

He (who? the fiend or the child ?) rides the night-mare thro' the wizzard woods.

5

Now these two lines consist in a senseless plagiarism from 10 the counterfeited madness of Edgar in Lear, who, in imitation of the gipsey 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, fabu- 15 losus Amnis. Observe too these images stand unique in the speeches of Imogine, without the slightest resemblance to anything she says before or after. But we are weary. The characters in this act frisk about, here, there, and every where, as teasingly as the Jack o' Lanthorn-lights which 20 mischievous boys, from across a narrow street, throw with a looking glass on the faces of their opposite neighbours. Bertram disarmed, out-heroding Charles de Moor in the Robbers, befaces the collected knights of St. Anselm (all in complete armour), and so, by pure dint of black looks, he 25 outdares them into passive poltroons. The sudden revolution in the Prior's manners we have before noticed, and it is indeed so outré, that a number of the audience imagined a great secret was to come out, viz.: that the Prior was one of the many instances of a youthful sinner metamorphosed 30 into an old scold, and that this Bertram would appear at last to be his son. Imogine re-appears at the convent, and dies of her own accord. Bertram stabs himself, and dies by her side, and that the play may conclude as it began, viz. in a superfetation of blasphemy upon nonsense, because he had 35 snatched a sword from a despicable coward, who retreats in

terror when it is pointed towards him in sport; this felo de se, and thief-captain, this loathsome and leprous confluence of robbery, adultery, murder, and cowardly assassination, this monster, whose best deed is, the having saved his betters 5 from the degradation of hanging him, by turning jack ketch to himself; first recommends the charitable Monks and holy Prior to pray for his soul, and then has the folly and impudence to exclaim

ΙΟ

"I die no felon's death,

A warrior's weapon freed a warrior's soul!"

CHAPTER XXIV

CONCLUSION

IT sometimes happens that we are punished for our faults by incidents, in the causation of which these faults had no share and this I have always felt the severest punishment. The wound indeed is of the same dimensions; but the edges 15 are jagged, and there is a dull underpain that survives the smart which it had aggravated. For there is always a consolatory feeling that accompanies the sense of a proportion between antecedents and consequents. The sense of Before and After becomes both intelligible and intellectual when, 20 and only when, we contemplate the succession in the relations

of Cause and Effect, which, like the two poles of the magnet manifest the being and unity of the one power by relative opposites, and give, as it were, a substratum of permanence, of identity, and therefore of reality, to the shadowy flux of 25 Time. It is Eternity revealing itself in the phenomena of Time and the perception and acknowledgment of the proportionality and appropriateness of the Present to the Past, prove to the afflicted Soul, that it has not yet been deprived of the sight of God, that it can still recognise the effective 30 presence of a Father, though through a darkened glass and

a turbid atmosphere, though of a Father that is chastising it. And for this cause, doubtless, are we so framed in mind, and even so organized in brain and nerve, that all confusion is painful. It is within the experience of many medical practitioners, that a patient, with strange and unusual 5 symptoms of disease, has been more distressed, in mind, more wretched, from the fact of being unintelligible to himself and others, than from the pain or danger of the disease: nay, that the patient has received the most solid comfort, and resumed a genial and enduring chearful- 10 ness, from some new symptom or product, that had at once determined the name and nature of his complaint, and rendered it an intelligible effect of an intelligible cause: even though the discovery did at the same moment preclude all hope of restoration. Hence the mystic theologians, whose 15 delusions we may more confidently hope to separate from their actual intuitions, when we condescend to read their works without the presumption that whatever our fancy (always the ape, and too often the adulterator and counterfeit of our memory) has not made or cannot make a picture 20 of, must be nonsense,-hence, I say, the Mystics have joined in representing the state of the reprobate spirits as a dreadful dream in which there is no sense of reality, not even of the pangs they are enduring-an eternity without time, and as it were below it-God present without manifestation of his 25 presence. But these are depths, which we dare not linger over. Let us turn to an instance more on a level with the ordinary sympathies of mankind. Here then, and in this same healing influence of Light and distinct Beholding, we may detect the final cause of that instinct which, in the great 30 majority of instances, leads, and almost compels the Afflicted to communicate their sorrows. Hence too flows the alleviation that results from "opening out our griefs:" which are thus presented in distinguishable forms instead of the mist, through which whatever is shapeless becomes magnified and 35