tastrophe of a tragedy is never made to de- | pend on it. In this play the noble efforts of the hermit for the restoration of France are frustrated, and the most interesting characters swept into ruin by instrumentalities too petty for such a catastrophe. All accidents of Nature to itself. Making the heavenly human. moves and I spared no pains. 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," and another pity which is "akin to contempt;" 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 humanity forbid poetry to enter. The hopes 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 generosity of art (equally great when it dares and when it forbears), in the exhibition of a contest 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 struggle, rests upon that which is itself ambiguous, if we throw ourselves back into the sympathies of the time described. Are we to regard the mira-preciate the full force of this scene, one must culous relic simply as an imposture? If so, previously be acquainted with the ferocious, a second spite of fortune has placed a noble though by no means callous, character of and innocent being in a position painfully Burgundy. He is thus described early in the equivocal. But by the only elevated charac- pieceters in the play, the healing agency is to the last moment supposed to be supernatural. In that case, its failure would be the condemnation of one who, with deficient purity, had dared to profane it. This picture has very serious consequences. Montargis, pretending zeal for a friend, Lies in the hollow of her Grace's hand "Whose soul Soft fluttering like a captured butterfly," 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 ve 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 ap "Other clay, Dug from some miry slough or sulphurous bog, 'Twas not rich ransom only spared the Duke. shed Than ere by Bajazet with all his hosts. Therefore it was to France he sent him back With gifts, and what were they? 'twas bowstrings made Of human entrails.”—Vol. iii. p. 111. Burgundy. That mole. This is the man who, after years of contest | A blot, a blur, I know not what Oh see, Montargis, look at her, she smiles, "Ha! were it not a frolic that should shake The husbands hither, each to look, round and spy The blazon of his dire disgrace." "Burgundy. And then the next! Montargis. I know not this; this was not Familiar seems it though in foreign garb, false, Still trusted her, and knowing that of the false Verily therein and rods, Powders and potions, would have breach'd the wall Of that fair c'tadel. Burgundy. I'll have his blood . . . A later hour were better; We want not daylight for a deed like this. Burgundy. I sleep not till he's dead. Come thou with me Should a breath be breathed That whispers of my shame, the end is this. A succession of stirring scenes follows. 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. Or Fancy feigning Memory . . . Death of my To save her Orleans hastens to the council, soul! It is my wife. Montargis. attended only by his page. As he makes his Oh no, my Lord, no, no, way in the dusk, through the snow-covered It cannot be her Highness. Her pure and spotless fame; no, no, it cannot; 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 in commotion, and the crowds soon swarm around the councilchamber where the Duke of Burgundy is sitting with the king's uncles, the Dukes of Bourbon and Berri, and the Titular King of Montargis. And I, my Lord, make answer it Sicily. The chamberlain, entering, announces is not. I would as soon believe that Castaly That mole convicts her. That mole is hers; Montargis. What? a mole? Well yes, Now that I think of it, some sort of smirch, 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 at tendants escapes from Paris. In the meantime 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 entreats lolande to fly by the wicket. She answers "It is I Must speak and vindicate the fame of him and advances to the window, when an arrow from below strikes her, and she falls. Once more the hermit speaks "Arise, if horror have not stark'd your limbs, Divine and human. In the grave with him Shall smite the neck whence grow the hundred heads, And one dread mace, weighted with force and fraud, Shall stun this nation to a dismal peace."Vol. ii. p. 198. 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. Secondclass 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 for given 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 elsewhere, 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 chawell as the bad, and each attained a heroic racter of the time. But the good existed as 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 punished; 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 most opposite extremes. The same men 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 boyplay. 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 remaining portion of his debt to a period of society so important on historic grounds, and which has furnished him with such rich poetical materials. In estimating Mr. Taylor's position among the English poets, both of recent and earlier *Montalembert, The Monks of the West. days, and in comparing the modern drama- | tists 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 these, while the whole of his contemporaries and immediate successors constitute the other. The rest, with all their differences of species, are still generically one, while Shakspeare is a genus in himself. Each of Shakspeare's greater plays is, in the highest sense of the word, a poem as well as a play. It possesses an interior unity (little as Shakspeare thought of what are technically called the unities), a unity proceeding from the one great idea that created the whole, the predominant sentiment that inspired it, and the exquisite subordination of the details to the general effect.* This unity, piercing at once and comprehensive, belongs alone to great creative genius, and Shakspeare's contemporaries were without it. Ben Jonson, with all his learning and classical predilections, lacked it as much as Marlow or Webster. Shakspeare worked "from within;" the process was one of growth, and the unity latent in the parent germ manifested itself in every leaf and spray of the developed plant. This is the secret of that marvellous judgment which equalled his imagination itself. Starting with a genuine idea, he shrank instinctively from whatever obscured it, whether by disproportion or by incongruity. The other dramatists worked "from without," and mechanically. They found their materials in life and books, and with great ability, but without a true inspiration, they combined them. In multitudes of cases the result is a painful discord; in few is it a complete harmony. The reader who turns to their Plays in a complete edition, after reading the splendid fragments detached from them in Lamb's Specimens, will often think the finished work more fragmentary than the fragments. Again and again, the finest scenes in our early drama lose half their value from the inappropriateness of their position. Take, for instance, Ford's best play, The Broken Heart: nothing can exceed in suppressed passion the concluding scene, in which the Princess, receiving secretly and successively the tidings of the death of her father, of her friend, and of her lover with a Spartan's fortitude, replies indifferently, keeping up the court pageant almost to the moment of her death. Shakspeare would have cast the whole play so as to have foreshadowed the dreadful ca *The reader who refers to Coleridge's Lectures on the English Drama, and to those by Schlegel, will find the most philosophic comparative estimate of Shakspeare and his contemporaries. tastrophe; and in approaching it we should have felt as men do when their boat is swept towards the rapids. In Ford's work we see little of the Princess, and care little for her; nor is there anything in her character to suggest the marvellous conclusion which thus stands up like a precipice with out a mountain-range to back it. This want of judgment in our early dramatists is often a moral even more than an intellectual deficiency. It proceeds from too great a love of the startling, and too slight a sense of the becoming, the fitting, and the orderly. Another difference between Shakspeare and his contemporaries is the amount of extravagance and rant in the latter. Strength was the great quality our early dramatists valued. When it came to them in the form of real passion, they knew how to exhibit it in perfection, intermixing the most delicate with the most vigorous touches. In the absence of real passion, they were often content with its coarse imitation. Giovanni, in a too celebrated play, makes his appearance at the revel with the heart of Annabella, whom he has just slain, on the point of his dagger! Yet this outrage against all genuine passion, as well as against decency, almost immediately follows a scene of the truest pathos. The same exaggerated love, either of strength itself, or of bombast mimicking strength, prevented Shakpeare's contemporaries from even aiming at his profound conception of character. Their own characters were formed on a different principle, and one for their coarser purposes more effective. To a great extent they are but abstractions, vividly described as are the circumstances among which they are placed. In The Broken Heart, Bassanes is not a jealous man so much as jealousy itself embodied, while Shirley's Traitor is not an example of fearless perfidy, but its impersonation. In the comedies the characters are often not even representations of qualities; they are but the embodiment of some personal whim or transient folly of society. Thus, in Ben Jonson's Epicane, the chief character, Morose, might be defined as a nervous gentleman's dislike to noise in the street." How different is this from Shakspeare! Before his mighty mind there ever stood the great idea of humanity; and each of his characters is worked out of that one manifold type. In shaping it, as much is withdrawn from the universal as is necessary to mould the particular, but the universal remains. This is the cause of the infinite light and shadow sions are influences working in conjunction of Shakspeare's characters; in them the paswith all else that belongs to the moral being, not tempests blowing on them from with out. Characters thus delineated are so soften- | which Milton borrowed in his Comus; yet ed and rounded off by imperceptible grada- it is disgraced by whole scenes of ribaldry; tions, that they can only be effective in the and in the Maid's Tragedy the grief of the hand of a genius who combines with the forsaken Aspatia is similarly dishonoured. force of nature her variety, grace, and sub- Massinger offends less than most of the other tlety. Those only can appreciate the strength dramatists, yet in his Futal Dowry vice alshown by Shakspeare, who appreciate also the most rejects the plea of temptation; and profundity, the completeness, the many-sided- even his Virgin Martyr is deformed by the ness, and the refinement, which he never con- excrescence of scenes which were reverently descended to sacrifice in order to gain the ap- omitted in a recent and separate edition of pearance of strength. that play. Such offences have commonly, when not condoned by the false charity of indifference, been regarded only from the moral point of view. The boundless injury inflicted by them on literature has hardly been adverted to. The Greeks were so well aware of the relations between virtue and the liberal arts, that even when the morals of Paganism were at the lowest, a high moral standard was maintained in serious literature. The indi The most important point of diversity remains to be noticed-the moral sense. The true greatness of Shakspeare is by nothing so proved as by his superiority to his contemporaries in this respect. Shakspeare does not bring out his moral in didactic vein; but the great moral that always belongs to nature herself belongs to him who best knew how to exhibit her. In him there are no moral confusions, no substitution of rhetorical sentiment for just feeling, no palliation of vice, no simu-rect losses sustained by our early dramatists, lations of virtue. The dramatic form of composition by necessity gives a great prominence to the passions, and must also keep in the background that region of the supernatural and the infinite in the immediate presence of which the passions are cowed. But from that remote and awful background no doubtful flashes are sent to bear witness that this life, with all its tumults, is circled by a vaster one. There are occasionally moral blemishes in Shakspeare's plots, and there is not seldom a license of language to be seriously regretted; but this last is far less than in the other writers of his time, nor do we know how much of it is owing to the interpolations of those players whom he commands to deliver "no more than is set down for them." It is far otherwise with almost all Shakspeare's contemporaries. When, some half century ago, our earlier dramatic writers emerged once more from obscurity, the public thought that all their offences ought to be condoned to make up for the neglect under which they had long lain. But the interests of literature itself require that in such cases justice should be done. The sins of our dramatists in the reign of Elizabeth and James the First were not exceptional, nor were they but superficial blemishes. The plays of Charles the Second's time were so far worse, that they possessed no compensating merits; but their positive offences could hardly prove more fatal both to the interests of poetry and of society. In multitudes of our early plays the whole plot turns upon vice in its grossest forms, or a second and foul plot is joined to a sound one, like a dead body bound to a living one. Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess is rich in poetry from was in consequence of their defects in this mat- |