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.' I question'd, 'What?' That thou shalt see, declare, And what God puts it in thy heart to speak To hear thee, and not only with our ears What God commands, But dire offence How smacks it of offence? I heard and saw, and I am here to speak. Women and children to the plough were yoked; blood! Visit him, God, with thy divine revenge l' Slow and sepulchral that the word took up And lightning smote and splinter'd two tall trees That tower'd above the rest, the one a pine, Trembling though guiltless I; for them I quaked Of whom it spake: O Princes, tremble ye, through me, Perdition and the pit hereafter; here 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. You're ever dreaming dreams, and when they're They're always about me. I too can dream, 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 I found myself transported to the hall 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. 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 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 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. 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 With many a vein of mineral poison mix'd, “Painter. There is a power in beauty which More Christian blood should by his mean be shed subdues All accidents of Nature to itself. I spared no pains. Than ere by Bajazet with all his hosts. 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 Familiar seems it though in foreign garb, my soul! It is my wife. Montargis. Oh no, my Lord, no, no, 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 Montargis. And I, my Lord, make answer in commotion, and the crowds soon swarm it is not. Oh see, Montargis, look at her, she smiles, Oh, would to God that she had died the day 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 - Oh my besotted soul! 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 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 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. |