placency of his mind. He has (to borrow the distinction of a great writer) the fanaticism of the scourge, the brand, and the sword, without having the fanaticism of the creed. He is a fanatic, without being an enthusiast. His guilt is not extenuated by any passionate attachment for truth or sanctity, or for what he believes to be true and sacred. He rushes into oppression, treachery, fraud, and plunder, not at the impulse of a disordered imagination, but at the bidding of a godless, brotherless heart. This absence of theological hatred, founded on the earnest attachment to some theological opinions, impairs both the congruity and the terror of Dunstan's dramatic character. He is actuated by no passion intense enough to provoke such enormous guilt; or familiar enough to bring him within the range of our sympathies; or natural enough to suggest, that some conceivable shifting of the currents of life might hurry us into some plunge as desperate as that which we see him making. His homicides are not bloody sacrifices, but villanous murders. His scourge is not the thong of Dominic, so much as the lash with which Sancho (the knave!) imposes on the credulity of his master. His impious frauds are not oracular deceptions, but the sleight-of-hand tricks of a juggler. He is waited on by an imp of darkness, who is neither man nor fiend; for he perpetrates the foulest crime, without malignity, or cupidity, or any other obvious motive. He slaughters Elgiva and Leolf; raises his hand to assassinate the king; and, at Dunstan's command, climbs a tree, to howl there like the devil; and then enters the cavity of the crucifix, to utter a solemn response in the person of the Redeemer. The objection to this is not the improbability, but the revolting hatefulness of the guilt which Dunstan and his minister divide between them. Unhappily it is not historically improbable, but the reverse. Sanguinary and devious have been the paths along which many a canonized saint has climbed that celestial eminence. Tricks, as base and profane as that of Dunstan's crucifix, have been exhibited or encouraged, not merely by the vulgar heroes, but by some of the most illustrious fathers of the church. But if they violated the eternal laws of God, it was to accomplish what they devoutly believed to be the divine will. Saints and sinners might agree in the means to be used, but they differed entirely as to the ends to be accomplished. Ambrose, preaching at Milan over the bleeding remains of the disinterred martyrs, lent himself to what he must have suspected or known to be a lie. But the lie was told and exhibited for the confutation of the Arians, to which holy object Ambrose would as readily have sacrificed his life. And though evil done that good may come, be evil still-nay, an evil peculiarly pestilent and hard to be forgiven-yet there is, after all, a wide difference between Bishop Bonner and Jonathan Wilde. Devout fanaticism, if it may not extenuate, does at least sublimate crime. By the intensity of his convictions, the greatness of his aims, and the energy of his motives, the genuine fanatic places himself beyond the reach of contempt, of disgust, or of unmixed abhorrence. We feel that, by the force of circumstances, the noblest of men might be betrayed into such illusions, and urged into such guilt as his. We acknowledge that, under happy auspices, he might have been the benefactor, not the curse of his species. We perceive that, if his erring judgment could be corrected, he might even yet be reclaimed to philanthropy and to peace. If we desire that retributive justice should overtake him, the aspiration is, that he may fall "a victim to the gods," and not be hewed as "a carcass for the hounds." Not such is the vengeance we invoke on the dramatic Dunstan and his ministering demon. We upbraid the tardiness of human invention, which laboured a thousand years in the discovery of the treadmill. Or rather our admiration of the genius which created so noble an image of intellectual power, ruthless decision, and fearful hardihood, is alloyed by some resentment that the poet should so have marred the work of his own hands. How noble a work it is will be best understood by listening to the soliloquy in which Dunstan communes with his own heart, and with his Maker, on the commission intrusted to him, and on the spiritual temptations he has to encounter in the discharge of it: "Spirit of speculation, rest, oh rest! And push not from her place the spirit of prayer! A host of imps and Ethiops, dark doubts, In the same spirit, at once exulting, selfexploring, and irreverent, Dunstan bursts out in a sort of pean on his anticipated success, as he enters the tower to persuade the abdication of his sovereign. "Kings shall bow down before thee, said my soul, Thy chambers are most cheerful, though the light I thank you, Gracious Powers! Supernal Host! The spirit thus agitated had not always been a prey to disquieting thoughts. Dunstan had once loved as other men love, and even on his seared heart were engraven recollec tions which revive in all their youthful warmth "When Satan first To music of the fountains and the birds, Or else in skirting groves by sunshine smitten, An To the dramatic character of Dunstan, the antithesis is that of Wulfstan the Wise. idealist arrested in the current of life by the eddy of his own thoughts, he muses away his existence in one long, though ever-shifting dream of labours to be undertaken, and duties to be performed. Studions of books, of nature, of the heart, and of the ways of man, his intellectual wealth feeds a perennial stream of discourse, which, meandering through every field of speculation, and in turns enriching all, still changes the course it ought to pursue, or overflows the banks by which it should be to its continuous progress. confined, as often as any obstacle is opposed friendship, philosophy, war, politics, morals, Love, poetry, and manners, each is profoundly contemplated, eloquently discussed, and helplessly abandoned, by this master of ineffectual wisdom: and yet he is an element in society which could be worse spared than the shrewdest practical understanding in the camp or the exchange. His 1 should have owned it for an Angel's voice, Nor ever could an earthly crown, or toys And childishness of vain ambition, gauds And tinsels of the world, have lured my heart Into the tangle of those mortal cares That gather round a throne. What call is thine From God or man, what voice within bids thee Such pleasures to forego, such cares confront? Dunstan is a superb sophister. Observe with what address he reconciles himself to the fraud so coarse and degrading as that of making his instrument, Gurmo, shake the forest with dismal howlings, to intimate to the passers-by that the hour of fierce conflict between the saint and the prince of darkness had arrived. Contempt of mankind, and of his supposed adversary, are skilfully called up to still the voice of honour and the remon-wide circuit of meditation has made him castrances of conscience. "And call'st thou this a fraud, thou secular lack-brain? Here in the heart of Man. And if from hence I tweak him by the snout. A fair belief tholic, charitable, and indulgent. In the large horizon which his mental eye traverses, he discerns such comprehensive analogies, such countless indications of the creative goodness, and such glorious aspects of beauty and of grace, as no narrower ken could embrace, and no busier mind combine and harmonize. To form such combinations, and to scatter prodigally around him the germs of thought, if happily they may bear fruit in intellects better disciplined, though less opulent than his own, is the delight and the real duty of Wulfstan, the colloquial. His talk, when listeners are to be had, thus becomes a ceaseless exercise of kindness; and even when there are none to heed him, an imaginary circle still enables It is with admirable truth and insight into munificent diffusion of his mental treasures, him to soliloquize most benevolently. In this human character that Dunstan is made to re- the good man is not merely happy, but invulsort to artifices, as various as the occasions nerable! Let fortune play her antics as she suggesting them, to evade the expostulations will, each shall furnish him with a text; and with which conscience still tracks him in the he will embellish all with quaint conceits or path of guilt. From scorn of man he passes diagnostic expositions. His daughter steals an to a kind of adoration of the mystical abstract unworthy match; but he rebounds from the Being, to which, in the absence of more palpa-shock to moralize on parental disappointment ble idols, it is so easy to render an extravagant homage. What a labyrinth of gigantic, vague, half-conceited images is it into which he plunges, in the endeavour to sustain his own mind, by contemplating the majesty and the holiness of the impersonation in the cause of which he is willing to believe himself engaged. 20 and conjugal constancy. He is overborne and trampled down by the energy of Dunstan, and immediately discovers in his misadventure a proof how well the events of his own age are adapted for history; and how admirably a retirement to Oxford will enable himself to become the historian. Could Samuel Taylor Coleridge have really thus blossomed in the iron age of the Anglo-Saxons? It is a hard problem. But the efflorescence of his theatrical representative is rendered probable to all who ever performed the pilgrimage to the Hierophant at Highgate, in the golden era of George IV. Never was there a group of auditors better disposed or better able to appreciate the wisdom of a sage, than those who are collected round Wulfstan. See with what fine discrimination and keen relish his portrait is sketched by one of them. "Still This life and all that it contains, to him Descended with a wafture and a swoop, An The spirit of rumination possesses all the persons of this drama. No wonder, then, that Leolf feeds on his own thoughts, as best becomes a discarded lover. But of that deplor able class of mankind, he is a remarkable, if not altogether a new variety. He had climbed the central arch and in the bridge of life, painfully conscious of the solitude of his heart in the midst of the busy crowd, and cherishing a vague but earnest desire for deliverance. ideal form, lovely as the day-spring, and radiant with love to him, haunted his path, and he lived in the faith that the bright reality would at length be disclosed, when his spirit should know the blessedness of that union which mystically represents to man the design and the perfection of his being. She came, or seemed to come, in the form of Elgiva-the glorious impersonation of that dazzling fan Whose wisdom lay in dealings and transactions; Yet so much action as might tie his shoe Cannot his will command; himself alone By his own wisdom not a jot the gainer. Of silence, and the hundred thousand things 'Tis better not to mention, he will speak, And still most wisely-But, behold! he comes." Leolf, who thus delineates the character of Wulfstan, is about to announce to the old man the secret marriage of his daughter; and as the earl cautiously approaches the unwelcome topic, the philosopher finds in each turn of the discourse some theme which hurries him away to a boundless distance from the matter in hand. Obeying the law by which his own ideas are associated, but with the tendency ob-tasy-the actual fulfilment of many a dream, servable in all dreamers, sleeping or waking, to reconcile the vision with any suggestion from without, he involves himself in an inquiry how a man in middle life should wed, and on that critical topic thus makes deliver ance: "Love changes with the changing life of man: Nor drains their source; but proffers with free grace Mr. Shandy's expenditure of eloquence on the death of his son, was not more consolatory to the bereaved rhetorician, than are the disquisitions of Wulfstan on his daughter's undutiful marriage. She must no longer be mutable of purpose. She must study the excellent uses of constancy, and abide in quietude of mind. The fickle wind may be her teacher. Then, as if himself floating on the wings of some soft and balmly gale, the poetical sage drowns all his parental anxieties in this light and beautiful parable: "The wind, when first he rose and went abroad Thro' the vast region, felt himself at fault, Wanting a voice; and suddenly to earth too fondly courted by his solemn and overburdened mind. Nature had made her beautiful, and, even when the maiden's ruby lips were closed, her beaming eye and dimpled cheek gave utterance to thoughts, now more joyous or impassioned, now more profound or holy, than any which could be imparted through the coarser vehicle of articulate speech. So judged the enamoured interpreter of that fair tablet-mistaking for emanations of her mind the glowing hues reflected by the brilliant surface from his own. He threw over the object of his homage all the most rich and graceful draperies stored in the wardrobe of his own pensive imagination; unconsciously worshipped the creature of his own fancy; and adorned her with a diadem which, though visible to him alone, had for a true heart a greater value than the proudest crown which could be shared with kings. Such was not Elgiva's judgment. Her ear drank in the flatteries of Edwin; nor had he long to sue for the hand which had been plighted to the champion and defender of his throne. A ready vengeance was in the grasp of Leolf. One word from him would have sealed the doom of his successful rival. But no such words passed his lips. In his solitude he probes the incurable wound which had blighted all the hopes, and dispelled all the illusions of life. He broods with melancholy intentness over the bleak prospect, and drains to the dregs the bitter cup of irremediable desclation. But in his noble spirit there is no place for scorn, resentment, or reproach. His duty, though it be to protect with his life the authors of his wretchedness, is performed in the true spirit of duty;-quietly, earnestly, and without vaunt or ostentation. He has sympathy to spare for the sorrows of others, while demanding none for his own. He extenuates with judicial rectitude and calmness Elgiva's infidelity to himself, and loyally dies to restore her to the arms of her husband. Leolf is the portrait of a man in whose mind justice, in the largest conception of the word, exercises an undisputed sway;-silencing, though it cannot assuage, the deepest sorrow, representing all the importunities of self-love, restraining every severe and uncharitable censure, and exciting the faithful, though unrequited, discharge of all the obligations of loyalty, and love, and honour. The world in which we live abounds in models, which may have suggested, by the power of contrast, this image of a statesman and a soldier. Haughty self-assertion is not merely pardoned in our public men, but takes its place among their conventional virtues. We are accustomed to extol that exquisite sensitiveness which avenges every wrong, and repels every indignity, even though the welfare of our common country be the sacrifice. To appreciate the majesty of a mind which, in the most conspicuous stations of life, surrenders itself to the guidance of perfect equity-and of humility, the offspring of equity; which has mastered resentment and pride as completely as all the baser passionswe must turn from the real to the mimetic theatre, and study man not as he actually is, in camps and parliaments, but as he is here exhibited on the stage. Relieved from attendance on his feeble sovereign and faithless queen, Leolf (a great soliloquist) takes his stand on the sea-shore, and thus gives utterance to the thoughts which disappointment had awakened in his melancholy, though well-balanced mind: "Rocks that beheld my boyhood! Perilous shelf Rides high, and on the thoroughfares of life Busy and hard to please. The sun shall soon transient pause in her flight with him to Edwin, the inconstant queen expresses her gratitude, and suggests her contrition. It is a scene of pathos and dignity which we should rejoice to transfer into our pages, but which would be impaired by abridgment, and is too long for quotation as it stands. If Leolf is the example of the magnanimous endurance of the ills of life, Athulf, his friend and brother soldier, is the portrait of a man born to encounter and to baffle them. It is drawn with the elaborate care, and touched and retouched with the parental fondness with which authors cherish, and sometimes enervate, their favoured progeny. Unfortunately, Athulf is surrounded by a throng of dramatic persons, who afford him no sufficient space for action or for speech. We become acquainted with him chiefly by observing the impression he leaves on the minds of his associates, his enemies, and his friends. Wulfstan the Wise is one of these; and he will describe Athulf with a warmth and vigour which it is impossible to emulate, although it must be admitted to be not inconsiderably abstruse-an infirmity to which the good Wulfstan is greatly addicted. "Much mirth he hath, and yet less mirth than fancy. Which both ways doth redound, rejoicing now With Dunstan, Leolf, Wulfstan, and Athulf, are associated a rich variety of other characters-some elaborately, some slightly, sketched -and some exhibited in that rapid outline which is designed to suggest, rather than to portray the image which occupies the poet's fancy. There is Odo, the archbishop, the sport of the winds and currents, into which this victim of dignity and circumstances is passively borne-a sort of rouge dragon, or clarencieux king-at-arms, hurried by some misadventure in feats of real chivalry, with nothing but tabard and mantle to oppose to the sharp sword and heavy battle-axe;-and Clarenbald, by office a lord chancellor, a pompous patronizing appendage of royalty, who, in an age of war and treason, and amidst the clash of arms, is no better than a kind of master of the ceremonies in the Aula Regia;—and Ruold, a hairbrained gallant, whom the frown of a polished brow, or the smile of a dimpled cheek, will mould to the fair one's purposes, though faith, life, and honour should be the forfeit:-and Edwin himself, the slave in turn of every passion which assails him, love, anger, despondency, impatience, and revenge, ever wasting It is in his last interview with Elgiva that his energies to no purpose, and playing the the character of Leolf is best exhibited. He fool with the indefeasible dignity of him who has rescued her from captivity, and, during alat once wears and worships an hereditary Are life's two twilights! Would the last were first over, is more warm and genial, and the versification flows more easily, and in closer resemblance to the numerous prose of Massinger and of Fletcher. There is also less of the uniformity which may be observed in the style of "Edwin," where churchmen, laics, and ladies, are all members of one family, and have all the family failing, of talking philoso phy. The idle king himself moralizes not a little; and even the rough huntsman pauses to compare the fawning of his dogs with the flat crown; and Elgiva, the storm-compelling beauty, who sets a world in flames, and who has proceeded from the hands of her dramatic creator with a character entirely neutral and unformed; in order that all may ascribe to her such fascinations as may best explain to each the mystery of her influence over the weak and the wise, the feeble and the resolute; and Emma, a damsel whose virtue (for she is virtuous and good, and firm of heart) is but little indebted to her discretion; for the maiden is possessed by the spirit of intrigue and inter-teries of the court. But if the earlier work be meddling, and, at his bidding, assumes by turns the disguises of a wife, of a strolling minstrel, and of a priest, to disentangle the webs which she has spun; and there are military leaders and ecclesiastics, fortune-tellers, and scholars, jesters, swineherds, and foresters-to each of whom is assigned some share in the dialogue or in the plot-which glows like the firmament with stars of every magnitude, clustering into constellations of endless variety. This crowding of the scene at once conduces to the beauty, and impairs the interest of this drama. If our arithmetic fail us not, there appear on the stage not fewer than fifty interlocutors, who jostle and cross each other impede the development of the fable, and leave on the mind of the reader, or of the spectator, an impression at once indistinct and fatiguing. It is not till after a second or a third perusal, that the narrative or succession of events emerges distinctly from the throng of the doings and the sayings. But each successive return to this drama brings to light, with a still increasing brilliancy, the exquisite structure of the verse, the manly vigour of thought, and the deep wisdom to which it gives most musical utterance; the cordial sympathy of the poet with all that is to be loved and revered in our common nature, and his no less generous antipathy for all that debases and corrupts it; his sagacious and varied insight into the chambers of imagery in the human heart; and the all-controlling and faultless laste which makes him intuitively conscious of the limits which separate the beautiful from the false, the extravagant, and the affected. A great writer is his own most formidable rival. If "Edwin the Fair," shall fail of due acceptance, it will be more to "Philip Van Artevelde" than to any other hostile critic that such ill success will be really owing. Mr. Taylor has erected a standard by which he must be measured and judged. The sect of the Takersdown is a large and active fraternity, among whom there are never wanting some to speak of powers impaired, and of exhausted resources. Untrue, in fact, as such a censure would be, it would not be quite destitute of plausibility. Philip Van Artevelde" has a deeper and more concentrated interest than "Edwin the Fair." It approaches far more nearly to the true character of tragedy. Virtues, hazardous in their growth, majestic in their triumph, and venerable even in the fall, shed a glory round the hero, with which the guilt and the impunity of Dunstan form a painful contrast. The scene of the play, more the greater drama, the latter is assuredly the greater poem. More abundant mental resources of every kind are there-knowledge more comprehensive—an imagination at once more prompt and more discursive-the ear tuned to a keener sense of harmony-the points of contact and sympathy with the world multiplied-and the visible traces of that kind influ ence which passing years have obviously shed on a mind always replete with energy and courage, but which has not, till now, given proof that it was informed in an equal degree by charity, benevolence, and compassion. It is, indeed, rather as a poet than as a dramatist that Mr. Taylor claims the suffrage of those with whom it rests to confer the high reward of his labours. In a memorable essay, prefixed to his former tragedy, he explained and vindicated, not his dramatic but his poetical creed, and then, as now, proceeded to illus trate his own doctrines. To the credit of having discovered any latent truth, or of having unfoided any new theory of the sublime art he pursues, he, of course, made no pretension. It would have been utterly at variance with the robust sense which is impressed on every page he writes. His object was to refute a swarm of popular sectarians, by proclaiming anew the ancient and Catholic faith. As the first postulate of his argument, he laid it down, that if a man would write well, either with rhythm or without it, behooved him to have something to say. From this elementary truth, he proceeded to the more abstruse and questionable tenet, that "no man can be a very great poet who is not also a great philosopher." To what muse the highest honour is justly due, and what exercises of the poetic faculty ought to command, in the highest degree, the reverence of mankind, are problems not to be resolved without an inquiry into various recondite principles. But it is a far less obscure question what is the poetry which men do really love, ponder, commit to memory, incorporate into the mass of their habitual thoughts, digest as texts, or cherish as anodynes. This is a matter of fact, which Paternoster Row, if endowed with speech, could best determine. It would be brought to a decision, if some literary deluge (in the shape, for example, of a prohibitory book-tax) should sweep over the land—consigning to the abyss our whole poetical patrimony, and all the treasures of verse accumulated in our own generation. In that frightful catastrophe, who are the poets whom pious hands would be stretched out to save! The philosophical? They would sink unheeded, with Lucretius at ineir head. Or the |