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For God hath work to give thee; be of good | See to that soldier's quittance-blood for

cheer; Nail thou two planks in figure of a cross, And lash thee to that cross and leap, and lo Thou shalt be cast upon the coast of France; Then take thy way to Paris; on the road, See, hear, and when thou com'st to Paris, speak.'

To whom?' quoth I. Was answer made, The King.'

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I question'd, 'What?' That thou shalt see, declare,

And what God puts it in thy heart to speak
That at the peril of thy soul deliver.'
Then leap'd Iin the sea lash'd to a cross,
And drifting half a day I came to shore
At Sigean, on the coast of Languedoc,
And parting thence barefooted journey'd hither
For forty days save one, and on the road
I saw and heard, and I am here to speak.
The King. Good hermit, by God's mercy
we are spared

To hear thee, and not only with our ears
But with our mind.

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What God commands,

But dire offence

How smacks it of offence?
There were if fear of man should choke God's
word.

I heard and saw, and I am here to speak.
Nigh forty days I sped from town to town,
Hamlet to hamlet, and from grange to grange,
And wheresoe'er I set my foot, behold!
The foot of war had been before, and there
Did nothing grow, and in the fruitless fields
Whence ruffian hands had snatch'd the beasts
of draught

Women and children to the plough were yoked;
The very sheep had learnt the ways of war,
And soon as from the citadel rang out
The larum peal, flock'd to the city gates:
And tilth was none by day, for none durst forth,
But wronging the night season which God gave
To minister sweet forgetfulness and rest,
Was labour and a spur. I journey'd on,
And near a burning village in a wood
Were huddled 'neath a drift of blood-stain'd

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blood!

Visit him, God, with thy divine revenge l'
The woman ceased; but voices in the air,
Yea and in me a thousand voices cried,
'Visit him, God, with thy divine revenge!'
Then they too ceased, and sterner still the
Voice

Slow and sepulchral that the word took up
'Him, God, but not him only, nor him most;
Look Thou to them that breed the men of blood,
That breed and feed the murderers of the realm.
Look Thou to them that, hither and thither tost
Betwixt their quarrels and their pleasures, laugh
At torments that they taste not; bid them learn
That there be torments terribler than these
Whereof it is Thy will that they shall taste,
So they repent not, in the belly of liell.'
So spake the Voice, then thunder shook the
wood,

And lightning smote and splinter'd two tall

trees

That tower'd above the rest, the one a pine,
An ash the other. Then I knew the doom
Of those accursed men who sport with war
And tear the body of their mother, France.
Trembling though guiltless did I hear that
doom,

Trembling though guiltless I; for them I quaked

Of whom it spake: O Princes, tremble ye,
For ye are they! Oh, hearken to that Voice!
Oh cruel, cruel, cruel Princes hear!
For ye are they that tear your mother's flesh;
Oh, flee the wrath to come! Repent and live!
Else know your doom, which God declares

through me,

Perdition and the pit hereafter; here
Short life and shameful death."- Vol. iii. p.

125-8.

We cannot better illustrate the two chief

female characters of the play than by the following passage. Iolande has been giving friendly counsel to Flos, whose wayward temper and love of wordly pleasures excite her alarm:

"Iolande. Last night I had a dreadful dream. I thought

That borne at sunrise on a fleece of cloud.
I floated high in air, and looking down,
Beheld an ocean-bay girt by green hills,
And in a million wavelets tipp'd with gold
Leapt the soft pulses of the sunlit sea.
And lightly from the shore a bounding bark,
Festive with streamers fluttering in the wind,
Sail'd seaward, and the palpitating waves
Fondly like spaniels flung themselves upon her,
Recoiling and returning in their joy.
And on her deck sea-spirits I descried
Gliding and lapsing in an undulant dance,
From whom a choral gratulating strain
Exhaled its witcheries on the wanton air.
Still sail'd she seaward, and ere long the bay
Was left behind; but then a shadow fell

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You're ever dreaming dreams, and when they're
bad

They're always about me. I too can dream,
But otherwise than you. The god of dreams
Who sleeps with me is blithe and débonnaire,
Else should he not be partner of my bed.
I dreamt I was a cat, and much caress'd,
And fed with dainty viands; there was cream,
And fish, and flesh, and porridge, but no mice;
And I was fat and sleek, but in my heart
There rose a long and melancholy mew

ries, might reply, with the author of Guesses at Truth, "Yes, a visionary, because he sees." But fate and fortune conspire to take from her the respect of others and her own. She has been saved by Orleans from Montargis, who attempted to carry her off, and she loves her preserver before she knows he has a wife. On the discovery she breaks the tie; but her heart is neither restored to liberty (as in so noble a nature it must soon have been), nor left in peace with its sorrow and its humiliation. Orleans implores her

she renounces him, at least to befriend his "O pious fraud of amorous charity"— if sick brother.

At his entreaty she undertakes to exorcise the king's malady by means of certain miraculous waters enclosed in a reliquary, the healing virtue of which depends upon the spotless purity in heart and life of her by whose hand they are sprinkled upon the sufferer's brow. makes the attempt, and fails. The ordina

She

Which meant, I must have mice;' and there-y reader will account for her failure, not

withal

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I found myself transported to the hall
Of an old castle, with the rapturous sound
Of gnawing of old wainscot in my ears;
With that I couch'd and sprang and sprang and
couch'd,

My soul rejoicing.

Iolande. May God grant, dear Flos, Your mice shall not prove bloodhounds."-Vol. iii. p. 135.

Too soon it turns out that there was room for the warning. Flos is betrayed and deserted by her lover Montargis. Wooed by another, she tells him that, before he wins her favour, he must avenge her wrong:

"Give me thy hand again. It is too white.
I dedicate this hand to truth and love,
And hatred and revenge. White as mine own!
Dye it and bring it back to me to-morrow,
And I will clasp it to my heart. Farewell!"

by her unworthiness, but by the circumstance that she was but a dupe, practised on by impostors. This is not her view of the subject, nor the hermit's; and if accepted as just, though it exculpates the victim, it leaves her death wholly unredeemed by poetic justice. In Shakspeare, imposture is treated with the contempt so sorry a thing deserves; it is exhibited, detected, and flung aside. The catastrophe of a tragedy is nev noble efforts of the hermit for the restoration er made to depend on it. In this play the of France are frustrated, and the most interesting characters swept into ruin by instrumentalities too petty for such a catastrophe.

We have another fault to find with this part of the plot. It forces our sympathies into a painful region of poetic casuistry. The struggle between human love and heavenly love, where each so easily puts on the semblance of the other, is perplexing to the imagination. We know not how far we are to condemn, and how far we may pity. There is a pity which is akin to love," Is changed to carnal hatred ! I have heard it and another pity which is "akin to con

Father Renault moralizes well:

:

"How swift

The transformation whereby carnal love

said,

There is no haunt the viper more affects
Than the forsaken bird's nest."

We know not how far we can recognize in Iolan le, the heroine of the play, an exception to the general darkness that characterizes it. At first she has a delightful freshness, and a purity capable of "disinfecting" the bad air in which she lives. She is tender in heart and soaring in aspirations, one of those who, if reproached as visiona

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tempt;" and in the misty region of insincere and equivocal action and passion, the two run into each other. The poetry that describes or adumbrates such conflicts of spirit and flesh, belongs to what, in writers very different from Mr. Taylor, sometimes claims the name of "psychological poetry." There are struggles in human nature which even the author of Hamlet would have shrunk from exhibiting in tragedy. There are regions in the human heart, open to the Divine Eye alone, into which reverence and

The hopes persuades the painter to lend it to him. It is the portrait of the Duke of Burgundy's wife, from whom he has long been estranged. Resolved to procure the assassination of Orleans, who had rescued Iolande from him, Montargis secretly conveys this portrait into a chamber of the Duke of Orleans's palace, reported to be hung round by the portraits of all those ladies who had successively surrendered their virtue to a prince as dissolute as he was captivating; and having carefully prepared the train, he introduces the Duke of Burgundy into the apartment, among the boasts of which is this witness to his dishonour. This is the critical scene, upon which the plot of St. Clement's Eve turns; and there are few passages in the English drama in which a vehement outburst of passion is more intensified by every art of skilful delay and artificial stimulus. To appreciate the full force of this scene, one must previously be acquainted with the ferocious, though by no means callous, character of Burgundy. He is thus described early in the piece

humanity forbid poetry to enter.
and aims of Iolande are noble; her heart
was liegefully given to heavenly things, and
was worthy of a human love also that should
have elevated, not degraded her. There is
something, we think, beneath the generos-
ity of art (equally great when it dares and
when it forbears), in the exhibition of a con-
test like that to which she is subjected one
entered upon so unwittingly, waged so
bravely, and yet ending so ignominiously,
as well as disastrously. Our estimate of her,
and therefore of the real nature of her strug-
gle, rests upon that which is itself ambigu-
ous, if we throw ourselves back into the
sympathies of the time described. Are we to
regard the miraculous relic simply as an im-
posture? If so, a second spite of fortune
has placed a noble and innocent being in a
position painfully equivocal. But by the
only elevated characters in the play, the
healing agency is to the last moment sup-
posed to be supernatural. In that case, its
failure would be the condemnation of one
who, with deficient purity, had dared to pro-

fane it.

In many parts of Mr. Taylor's poetry we find a singularly keen appreciation of the kindred art of painting. The following description will at once enable the reader to determine the school to which the picture described belongs. We are much mistaken if it be not the Venetian.

"Other clay,

Dug from some miry slough or sulphurous
bog,

With many a vein of mineral poison mix'd,
This knew the crafty Amorabaquin.
Went to the making of Duke Jean-Sans-Peur.
When captives by the hundred were hewn down,
'Twas not rich ransom only spared the Duke.
'Twas that a dying Dervise prophesied

“Painter. There is a power in beauty which More Christian blood should by his mean be shed

subdues

All accidents of Nature to itself.
Aurora comes in clouds, and yet the cloud
Dims not, but decks her beauty. Furthermore
Whate'er shall single out a personal self
Takes with a subtler magic. So of shape;
Perfect proportion, like unclouded light,
Is but a fauitless model; small defect
Conjoint with excellence, more moves and wins,
Making the heavenly human.

I spared no pains.
Look closer; mark the hyacinthine blue
Of mazy veins irriguous, swelling here,
There branching and so softening out of sight.
Nor is it ill conceited. You may mark
The timbrel drooping from her hand denotes
The dance foregone; a fire is in her eye
Which tells of triumph, and voluptuous grace
Of motion is exchanged for rapturous rest."
Vol. iii. p. 170.

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Than ere by Bajazet with all his hosts.
Therefore it was to France he sent him back
With gifts, and what were they? 'twas bow-
strings made

Of human entrails."- Vol. iii. p. 111.

This is the man who, after years of contest with his cousin of Orleans, has been forced into a temporary reconciliation with him. As daring in his wild fits of half-savage frolic as in ambition, he has entered the palace, nay. the inmost and secret chamber, of one whom he knew to have been his successful rival in power, but whom he has never suspected of rivalry in love. The first sight of the "galaxy of glowing dames" delights him :

"Ha! were it not a frolic that should shake Grim Saturn's self with laughter, could we bring

The husbands hither, each to look round and

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Familiar seems it though in foreign garb,
And whether it be Memory recalls
Or Fancy feigning Memory

my soul!

It is my wife.

Montargis.

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Oh no, my Lord, no, no,
It cannot be her highness.
Burgundy.

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A succession of stirring scenes follows. Death of The populace of Paris, infuriated by the. return of the king's madness, demands the death of the maiden who had undertaken his cure. The Duke of Burgundy, sitting in council, pledges his word that she shall die. To save her, Orleans hastens to the council, attended only by his page. As he makes his way in the dusk, through the snow-covered streets, Montargis, who, after receiving Burgundy's warrant, has lain in wait within the gate of a house, springs upon his prey, and slays him. All Paris is

Cannot cannot
Why, no, it cannot. For my wife is chaste,
And never did a breath of slander dim
Her pure and spotless fame; no, no, it cannot;
By all the Angels that keep watch above
It cannot be my wife and yet it is.
I tell thee, Bastard of Montargis, this,
This picture is the picture of my wife.

Montargis. And I, my Lord, make answer in commotion, and the crowds soon swarm

it is not.

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Oh see, Montargis, look at her, she smiles,
But not on me, but never more on me!

Oh, would to God that she had died the day
That first I saw that smile and trusted her;

around the council-chamber where the Duke of Burgundy is sitting with the king's uncles, the Dukes of Bouborn and Berri, and the Titular King of Sicily. The chamberlain, entering, announces the murder. The Provost of Paris, who follows him, demands permission to search for the assassin in all places alike, the royal residences, in spite of their ordinary privilege, not being excepted. The other royal dukes consent. Burgundy alone refuses, and on being challenged by the rest, suddenly avows his guilt, leaves the council, and with his atten

Though knowing the whole world of womendants escapes from Paris. In the mean

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- Oh my besotted soul!
Trusted her only Oh my wife, my wife!
Believing that of all the Devil's brood
That twist and spin and spawn upon this earth,
She was the single Saint-the one unfallen
Of this accursed Creation - oh my wife!
Oh the Iscariot kiss of those false lips!

time the body of Orleans has been carried to the convent of the Celestines, where Iolande watches beside it. Montargis, who enters with a warrant for her apprehension and death, is himself stabbed by De Vezelay. Immediately afterwards a tumult is heard without. The infuriated crowd, rolling on like a raging sea, have reached and beleaguered the convent. The hermit en

With him too-to be false with him- my treats Iolande to fly by the wicket. She

bane,

answers

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In St. Clement's Eve, as well as Philip van Artevelde, Mr. Taylor has dealt with a corrupt period of the middle ages, but in none of his works has he given us a favourable picture of them. He is drawn to them by their manliness and their quaintness, and these qualities he sketches with a graphic touch, but their deeper and more noble characteristics he seldom delineates. How is

this to be accounted for? In part, perhaps, on the principle of reaction. The contempt with which the middle ages were so long treated, had, before he began to write, been succeeded by an enthusiasm equally unreasonable. In neither instance had a calm philosophy pronounced its verdict. The middle ages had been revived in the form of melodrama, and become the fashion. Second-class poets and romancers had made them their spoil; every scene-painter had tried his brush on them; but it was only their more exaggerated and outward traits that had been painted, and admiration had been lavished alike on the worthless and on

worth. The justness of Mr. Taylor's genius seems to have been offended by this paltering with truth for the sake of effect, and his sense of humanity to have resented the wrongs of serfs whose oppressors have too often been forgiven because they wore a picturesque costume. The defects of those ages, far from being concealed or palliated, will ever be most lamented by those who most appreciate their great compensating merits. One of their most celebrated vindicators has made this frank confession:

"By the side of the opened heavens, hell always appeared; and beside those prodigies of sanctity which are so rare else

where, were to be found ruffians scarcely
inferior to those Roman emperors whom
Bossuet calls' monsters of the human race
In the feudal system, the barbaric, it is true,
was "scotched, not killed," by the chivalry
which expressed the Christian character of
the time. But the good existed as well as
the bad, and each attained a heroic growth.
The general hardihood of the time gave
a dreadful hardihood to crime also, and
probably in no small degree occasioned the
terrible severity with which crimes were pun-
ished; for mild punishments would have
exercised but a small deterring effect upon
men whose sport was war, and who seldom
counted upon dying in their beds. It was
not an age of respectability, and little
pains were taken to conceal offences,
often, it may be, more trouble was taken to
conceal virtues. Men did not then value
themselves on consistency. Immense crimes
were often followed by intense repentance;
high aspirations were strangely blended
with fierce animal instincts; refined and
coarse feelings were tenants of the same
breast; the whole human character was
large as well as strong, and its passions
swung through a wide arc, and touched the
The same men
most opposite extremes.
were self-sacrificing and cruel, and nature
was often trampled under foot by those
who yet bore no doubtful allegiance to a
supernatural ideal, to whom, in their serious
moods, earthly life was a shadow of life
eternal, and who regarded all that was not
sacred as the licensed field of a rough boy-
play. The strange contrasts between the
different elements that made up what are
called the "middle ages," and the very dif
ferent character of the periods included
under that comprehensive term, render an
impartial estimate of them a difficult thing.
Mr. Taylor has not, we think, yet presented
us with such an estimate, vividly as he has
touched many of their special traits; and
we trust he will yet discharge the remain-
ing portion of his debt to a period of society
so important on historic grounds, and which
has furnished him with such rich poetic
materials.

In estimating Mr. Taylor's position among the English poets, both of recent and earlier days, and in comparing the modern dramatists with those of the time of Elizabeth, we must bear in mind that the dramatists of the earlier period are themselves to be divided into two classes. Shakspeare by himself constitutes one of

* Montalembert, The Monks of the West.

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