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, 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 10 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 "I die no felon's death, A warrior's weapon freed a warrior's soul!" CHAPTER XXIV CONCLUSION Ir 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 5 ΤΟ 15 (literally) enormous. Casimir, in the fifth Ode of his third Book, has happily* expressed this thought. "Me longus silendi Edit amor, facilesque luctus Aures amicorum, et loquacem Cura volat residetque ramos. Pectora.' Id. Lib. iii. Od. 5. I shall not make this an excuse, however, for troubling my Readers with any complaints or explanations, with which, as Readers, they have little or no concern. It may suffice 20 (for the present at least) to declare, that the causes that have delayed the publication of these volumes for so long a period after they had been printed off, were not connected with any neglect of my own; and that they would form an instructive comment on the Chapter concerning Authorship * Classically too, as far as consists with the allegorizing fancy of the modern, that still striving to project the inward, contradistinguishes itself from the seeming ease with which the poetry of the ancients reflects the world without. Casimir affords, perhaps, the most striking instance of this characteristic difference. For his style and diction are really classical: while Cowley, who resembles Casimir in many respects, compleatly barbarizes his Latinity, and even his metre, by the heterogeneous nature of his thoughts. That Dr. Johnson should have passed a contrary judgement, and have even preferred Cowley's Latin Poems to Milton's, is a caprice that has, if I mistake not, excited the surprise of all scholars. I was much amused last summer with the laughable affright, with which an Italian poet perused a page of Cowley's Davideis, contrasted with the enthusiasm with which he first ran through, and then read aloud, Milton's Mansus and Ad Patrem. as a Trade, addressed to young men of genius in the first volume of this work. I remember the ludicrous effect of the first sentence of an autobiography, which, happily for the writer, was as meagre in incidents as it is well possible for the Life of an Individual to be-"The eventful Life which 5 I am about to record, from the hour in which I rose into existence on this Planet, &c." Yet when, notwithstanding this warning example of Self-importance before me, I review my own life, I cannot refrain from applying the same epithet to it, and with more than ordinary emphasis-and 10 no private feeling, that affected myself only, should prevent me from publishing the same (for write it I assuredly shall, should life and leisure be granted me), if continued reflection should strengthen my present belief, that my history would add its contingent to the enforcement of one important 15 truth, viz. that we must not only love our neighbours as ourselves, but ourselves likewise as our neighbours; and that we can do neither unless we love God above both. "Who lives, that's not 20 Depraved or depraves? Who dies, that bears Not one spurn to the grave-of their friends' gift?” Strange as the delusion may appear, yet it is most true that three years ago I did not know or believe that I had an enemy in the world and now even my strongest sensations of gratitude are mingled with fear, and I reproach myself for 25 being too often disposed to ask,-Have I one friend ?— During the many years which intervened between the composition and the publication of the CHRISTABEL, it became almost as well known among literary men as if it had been on common sale, the same references were made to it, and the 30 same liberties taken with it, even to the very names of the imaginary persons in the poem. From almost all of our most celebrated Poets, and from some with whom I had no personal acquaintance, I either received or heard of expressions of admiration that (I can truly say) appeared to 35 |