of Mary's person, apart altogether from her qualities of mind and heart; and the revelation of her real character does not therefore in the least degree affect his feeling towards herdoes not touch, in fact, the object of his passion. The discovery that she is utterly treacherous and corrupt fails to abate his devotion, her throat being still as white, her lips as red, and her hair as rich and soft as before. Here is the description he gives, in the first act, of the points in Mary's person that had attracted him :

'She hath fair eyes: may be

I love her for sweet eyes or brows or hair,
For the smooth temples, where God touching her
Made blue with sweeter veins the flower-sweet white;
Or for the tender turning of her wrist,

Or marriage of the eyelid with the cheek;

I cannot tell; or flush of lifting throat;

I know not if the colour get a name

This side of heaven-no man knows; or her mouth,
A flower's lip with a snake's lip, stinging sweet,
And sweet to sting with: face that one would see
And then fall blind and die with sight of it
Held fast between the eyelids-oh, all these
And all her body and the soul to that,

The speech and shape and hand and foot and heart
That I would die of-yea, her name that turns
My face to fire being written.'

Here the soul and heart are barely mentioned, thrown in, as it were, amidst the enumeration of physical characteristics, as things that help to give colour to the lips and brightness to the eyes. He does not afterwards refer to mind or character, to any mental feature or moral quality, in summing up what is supreme in his regard. He gives, at least, two such summaries in later scenes of the play, and on each occasion in the immediate prospect of death, within an hour or so, as he imagines, of his doom. On the night on which he breaks into the queen's bridal-chamber and surprises her at her toilet-table, he says:

"Always in my sight I had your lips

Curled over, red and sweet; and the soft space
Of carven brows, and splendour of great throat
Swayed lily-wise; what pleasure should one have
To wind his arms about a lesser love?

Ah, you see now,

You know now well enough; yea, there, sweet love,
Let me kiss there."

QUEEN.

"I love you best of them. Clasp me quite round till your lips cleave on mine.

Oh, I do love you more than all men ! yea,
Take my lips to you, close mine eyes up fast,
So you leave hold a little; there, for pity,
Abide now, and to-morrow come to me.
Nay, lest one see red kisses in my throat-
Dear God! what shall I give you to be gone?"
CHASTELARD.

"Let me twice more. This beautiful bowed head,
That has such hair with kissing ripples in,

And shivering soft eyelashes and brows

With fluttered blood!'

What intensifies the revolting character of this scene, is, that he knows perfectly well all through that Mary is playing false, is, in fact, utterly indifferent to him except for the momentary gratification of a wanton appetite; and that with this knowledge he seeks, and risks his life to secure, those mere personal favours which, under such circumstances, a great and noble nature would instinctively loathe and shun as the last extreme of degradation and dishonour. Again, in prison, within an hour or two of his execution, Chastelard soliloquises on his fate as follows:

'Her face will float with heavy scents of hair
And fire of subtle amorous eyes, and lips
More hot than wine, full of sweet wicked words,
Babbled against mine own lips, and long hands

Spread out, and pale bright throat and pale bright breasts,
Fit to make all men mad. I do believe

This fire shall never quite burn out to the ash,
And leave no heat and flame upon my dust
For witness where a man's heart was burnt up.
For all Christ's work this Venus is not quelled,
But reddens at the mouth with blood of men,
Sucking between small teeth the sap o' the veins,
Dabbling with death her little tender lips
A bitter beauty, poisonous-pearlèd mouth.
I am not fit to live but for love's sake,
So I were best die shortly. Ah, fair love,
Fair, fearful Venus, made of deadly foam,
I shall escape you somehow with my death-
Your splendid supple body, and mouth on fire,
And Paphian breath that bites the lips with heat.'

'Chastelard' is Mr. Swinburne's greatest performance in the way of tragedy, and so far as the higher and more essential

elements of tragic interest are concerned, it is a complete failure. The action, in everything save the catastrophe, is trivial, almost contemptible; the characters weak and uninteresting from the mere monotony of mindless indulgence and excess. There may possibly be natures effeminate enough to be passively extinguished by a morbid craving for the sensuous enjoyment of a worthless object, but they are certainly not the stuff out of which tragedies are made.

An earlier tragedy of Mr. Swinburne's entitled 'Rosamond' is essentially of the same type, and marked by the same features, as Chastelard.' The four chief characters-the Queen with a lover, and her husband with a mistress, exist in both plays, only in Rosamond' the centre of dramatic interest is shifted from the Queen's lover to the King's mistress. In the one drama Darnley plays, in a weaker and more subordinate manner, the part of Eleanor in the other. The point in favour of Rosamond' as a play is that of Henry's truth-his not being, like Mary, false and cruel. The victims in the respective tragedies are of course Chastelard and Rosamond, and their characters, so far as they may be said to possess any, are substantially alike. Each is overcome of love, or rather overmastered in mind and body by the unresisted assaults of lust, and they are both described in very much the same way. As Chastelard dwells with tedious iteration on Mary's bodily features and motions, so Rosamond does on those of Henry, and being a woman, on her own personal attractions as well. In the first scene of the play, talking to Constance her attendant, Rosamond says:

'I whose curled hair was as a strong staked net

To take the hunters and the hunt, and bind
Faces and feet and hands; a golden gin
Wherein the tawny-lidded lions fell,
Broken at ankle; I that am yet, ah yet,
And shall be till the worm hath share in me,
Fairer than love or the clean truth of God,
More sweet than sober customs of kind use
That shackle pain and 'stablish temperance;
I that have roses in my name, and make
All flowers glad to set their colour by ;
I that have held a land between twin lips
And turned large England to a little kiss.'
Again, in special reference to the King:-
'Would you be wiser than I was with him?
A king to kiss the maiden from your lips,
Fill you with fire as water fills the sea,
Hands in your hair and eyes against your face ;-

Ay, more than this, this need not strike at heart,
But say that love had bound you like a dog,
Leashed your loose thoughts to his uncertain feet;
Then would you be much better than such are
As leave their soul upon two alien lips,

Like a chance word of talk they use for breath?
This I know,
When first I had his arms across my head,
And had his mouth upon my heated hair,
And his sharp kisses mixed into my blood,
I hung athirst between his hands and said,
Sweet, and so sweet! for both mine eyes were weak,
Possessed with rigorous prophecy of tears

To drench the lids past sleeping, and both lips
Stark as twain rims of a sweet cup drunk out.'

Again, in a passage intended as a kind of justification of her way of life, all honour, dignity, and respect, all the grace, modesty, and reserve of true passion, are openly thrown aside. 'I think that whoso shall unclothe his soul Of all soft raiment coloured custom weaves, And choose before the cushion-work of looms Stones rough at edge to stab the tender side, Put honour off, and patience and respect, And veils and relics of remote esteem,

To turn quite bare into large arms of love,
God loves him better than those bitter fools

Whom ignorance makes clean, and bloodless use
Keeps colder than their dreams.'

And further on, as a kind of historical defence of her position and fate, we have from her lips the following:

'Yea, I am found the woman in all tales,

The face caught always in the story's face;

I Helen, holding Paris by the lips,

Smote Hector through the head. I Cressida

So kissed men's mouths that they went sick or mad,

Stung right at brain with me. I Guenevere

Made my queen's eyes so precious, and my hair
Delicate with such gold in its soft ways,
And my mouth honied so for Launcelot,
Out of good things he chose his golden soul
To be the pearlwork of my treasuring hands,
And so our love foiled God; I that was these,
And am no sweeter now than Rosamond
With most full heart and mirth give my lord up
Body's due breath and soul's forefashioned peace
To pay love with.'

These extracts are all taken from a single scene of the play,

VOL. CXXXIV. NO. CCLXXIII.

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and were not our readers wearied and cloyed with the subject, other passages of a similar kind might be quoted, one in particular, which runs to about ten lines, wholly occupied with a description of Rosamond's hair. Further on in the play, the King goes repeatedly over the same ground, but only in somewhat more fiery language. Throughout the whole delineation the dramatic element is of the slightest kind, and, as in Chas'telard,' the only tragic feature is the well-known catastrophe. The drama has no distinctive characters, no continuous action, while much of the dialogue and soliloquy both in 'Chastelard' and Rosamond' might be transferred from the one play to the other, being occupied with the same details treated in the same way. These are the physical provocatives of ungoverned appetite, the sensual signs and bodily stimulants of loose desire. Out of such bastard elements it is, as we have said, impossible to construct a true tragedy. The elements of tragedy are moral and spiritual, not material. As the highest form of poetry it has, moreover, to do with what is great and noble, with what is most powerful and permanent in human nature, with elemental feelings, with catholic principles and passions; not with morbid cravings and monstrous appetites. And whatever passion is made the subject of tragic delineation must be dealt with primarily on its ideal side, in its moral aspects and working, not in its mere physical operations and results. The genuine passion of love, for example, working in noble natures and meeting with insurmountable obstacles, hopelessly crossed by circumstance or fate, may well afford the materials of a tragedy. But the tragedy lies in the mental anguish, in the terribly divided life, and the deepening internal conflict which death alone can terminate. Romeo and Juliet' is a love tragedy marked throughout not only with the perfect bloom and deathless beauty, but with the exquisite innate purity and rich idealism, of the passion. Antony and Cleopatra,' again, shows the working of the same passion under far more complex conditions, in natures stronger and more mature, but the greatness of the characters, and, above all, the brilliant fancy, infinitely varied charm, exhaustless intellectual resource, and indomitable spirit of the Queen, give undying interest and reality to the whole delineation. It is possible that in a great nature the mental results-the intense internal desolation arising from the excesses even of criminal passion might furnish materials for a tragedy, at least if the subject were not too painful. But adequately to portray the sombre greatness of such a moral ruin would almost require a pencil dipped in the gloom and terror of earthquake and eclipse.