tempest at Bertram's shipwreck? It is a mere supernatural effect without even a hint of any supernatural agency; a prodigy without any circumstance mentioned that is prodigious; and a miracle introduced without a ground, and ending without a result. Every event and every scene of the play might have taken place as well if Bertram and his vessel had been driven in by a common hard gale, or from want of provisions. The first act would have indeed lost its greatest and most sonorous picture: a scene for the sake of a scene, without a word spoken; as such, therefore, (a rarity without a precedent) we must take it, and be thankful! In the opinion of not a few, it was, in every sense of the word, the best scene in the play. I am quite certain it was the most innocent: and the steady, quiet uprightness of the flame of the wax-candles which the monks held over the roaring billows amid the storm of wind and rain, was really miraculous. The Sicilian sea coast: a convent of monks: night: a most portentous, unearthly storm: a vessel is wrecked: contrary to all human expectation, one man saves himself by his prodigious powers as a swimmer, aided by the peculiarity of his destination— 3d Monk.-No, there was one did battle with the storm Well! This man is led in by the monks, supposed dripping wet, and to very natural inquiries, he either remains silent, or gives most brief and surly answers, and after three or four of these half-line courtesies, "dashing off the monks" who had saved him, he exclaims in the true sublimity of our modern misanthropic heroism— 'Off! ye are men-there's poison in your touch But I must yield, for this (what?) hath left me strengthless." So end the three first scenes. In the next, (the Castle of St. Aldobrand) we find the servants there equally frightened with this unearthly storm, though wherein it differed from other violent storms we are not told, except that Hugo informs us, page 9 Piet." Hugo, well met. Does e'en thy age bear Hugo.-They have been frequent lately. Hugo. So it is said. But storms when I was young A most perplexing theory of Sicilian storms is this of old Hugo' and what is very remarkable, not apparent ly founded on any great familiarity of his own with this troublesome article. For when Pietro asserts the 'ever more frequency" of tempests in Sicily, the old man professes to know nothing more of the fact, but by hearsay. "So it is said."-But why he assumed this storm to be unseasonable, and on what he grounded his prophecy, (for the storm is still in full fury; that it would be profitless, and without the physical powers common to all other violent sea-winds in parifying the atmosphere, we are left in the dark; as well concerning the particular points in which he knew it (during its continuance) to differ from those that he had been acquainted with in his youth. We are at length introduced to the Lady Imogine, who, we learn, had not rested "through" the night, not on account of the tempest, for "Long ere the storm arose, her restless gestures Forbade all hope to see her blest with sleep." Sitting at a table, and looking at a portrait, she informs us-First, that portrait-painters may make a portrait from memory "The limber's art may trace the absent feature." For surely these words could never mean, that s painter may have a person sit to him, who afterwards may leave the room or perhaps the country? Second, that a portrait-painter can enable a mourning lady to possess a good likeness of her absent lover, but that the portrait-painter cannot, and who shall— "Restore the scenes in which they met and parted?" The natural answer would have been-Why the scene-painter to be sure! But this unreasonable lady requires, in addition, sundry things to be painted that have neither lines nor colors "The thoughts, the recollections sweet and bitter Or the Elysian dreams of lovers when they loved." Which last sentence must be supposed to mean: when they were present and making love to each other.Then, if this portrait could speak, it would "acquit the faith of womankind." How? Had she remained constant? No, she has been married to another man, whose wife she now is. How then? Why, that in spite of her marriage vow, she had continued to yearn and crave for her former lover "This has her body, that her mind; The lover, however, was not contented with this precious arrangement, as we shall soon find. The lady proceeds to inform us, that during the many years of their separation, there have happened in the different parts of the world, a number of “ such things," even such as in a course of years always have, and, till the millennium, doubtless always will happen somewhere or other. Yet this passage, both in language and in metre, is, perhaps, among the best parts of the Play. The lady's loved companion and most esteemed attendant, Clotilda, now enters and explains this love and esteem by proving herself a most passive and dispassionate listener, as well as a brief and lucky querist, who asks by chance, questions that we should have thought made for the very sake of the answers. In short, she very much reminds us of those puppet-heroines, for whom the showman contrives to dialogue, without any skill in ventriloquism. This, notwithstanding, is the best scene in the Play and though crowded with solecisms, corrupt diction and offences against metre, would possess merits suf- The dramatic effect of which passage we not only tude; of his loss of his sovereign's favor; his disgrace, attainder and flight; that he (thus degraded) sunk into a vile ruffian, the chieftain of a murderous banditti; and that from the habitual indulgence of the most reprobate habits and ferocious passions, he had become so changed even in his appearance and features, This is no natural sleep! Ho! wake thee, stranger." This is rather a whimsical application of the verb reflex, we must confess, though we remember a similar transfer of the agent to the patient in a manuscript Tragedy, in which the Bertram of the piece, prostrating a man with a single blow of his fist, exclaims -"Knock me thee down, then ask thee if thou liv'st." Well, the stranger obeys; and whatever his sleep might have been, his waking was perfectly "That she who bore him had recoiled from him, natural, for lethargy itself could not withstand the Nor known the alien visage of her child; scolding stentorship of Mr. Holland, the Prior. We Yet still she [Imogine] loved him." She is compelled by the silent entreaties of a father, next learn from the best authority, his own confession, perishing with "bitter shameful want on the cold that the misanthropic hero, whose destiny was incomearth," to give her hand, with a heart thus irrevoca- patible with drowning, is Count Bertram, who not bly pre-engaged, to Lord Aldobrand, the enemy of only reveals his past fortunes, but avows with open her lover, even to the very man who had baffled his atrocity, his satanic hatred of Imogine's Lord, and his frantic thirst of revenge; and so the raving character ambitious schemes, and was, at the present time, entrusted with the execution of the sentence of death scolds-and what else? Does not the Prior act? which had been passed on Bertram. Now, the proof Does he send for a posse of constables or thief-takers, of "woman's love," so industriously held forth for to handcuff the villain, and take him either to Bedthe sympathy, if not the esteem of the audience, con- lam or Newgate? Nothing of the kind; the author sists in this: that though Bertram had become a rob- preserves the unity of character, and the scolding ber and a murderer by trade, a ruffian in manners, Prior from first to last does nothing but scold, with yea, with form and features at which his own mother the exception, indeed, of the last scene of the last could not but "recoil," yet she, (Lady Imogine,) “the act, in which, with a most surprising revolution, he wife of a most noble, honored Lord," estimable as a whines, weeps, and kneels to the condemned blasman, exemplary and affectionate as a husband, and pheming assassin out of pure affection to the highthe fond father of her only child-that she, notwith-hearted man, the sublimity of whose angel-sin rivals standing all this, striking her heart, dares to say it- the star-bright apostate, (i. e. who was as proud as "But thou art Bertram's still, and Bertram's ever." A monk now enters, and entreats in his Prior's name for the wonted hospitality, and "free noble usage," of the Castle of St. Aldobrand, for some wretched shipwrecked souls; and from this we learn, for the first time, to our infinite surprise, that notwithstanding the supernaturalness of the storm aforesaid, not only Bertram, but the whole of his gang, had been saved, by what means we are left to conjecture, and can only conclude that they had all the same desperate swimming powers, and the same saving destiny as the hero, Bertram himself. So ends the first act, and with it the tale of the events, both those with which the Tragedy begins, and those which had occurred previous to the date of its commencement. The second displays Bertram in disturbed sleep, which the Prior, who hangs over him, prefers calling a 'starting trance," and with a strained voice, that would have awakened one of the seven sleepers, observes to the audience "How the lip works! How the bare teeth do grind! And beaded drops course down his writhen brow!'"* Lucifer, and as wicked as the Devil,) and "had thrilled him" (Prior Holland aforesaid) with wild admiration. Accordingly, in the very next scene, we have this tragic Macheath, with his whole gang, in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, without any attempt on the Prior's part either to prevent him, or to put the mistress and servants of the Castle on their guard against their new inmates, though he (the Prior) knew, and confesses that he knew, that Bertram's "fearful mates" says Shakspeare of a wounded stag, hanging his head over a stream: naturally, from the position of the head, and most beautifully, from the association of the preceding image, of the chase, in which "the poor sequester'd stag from the hunter'e aim had ta'en a hurt." In the supposed position of Bertram, the metaphor, if not false, loses all the propriety of the original. † Among a number of other instances of words chosen without reason, Imogine, in the first act, declares that thunder-storms were not able to intercept her prayers for "the desperate man, in desperate ways who dealt"— "Yea, when the launched bolt did sear her sense, Her soul's deep orisons were breathed for him ;" i. e. when a red-hot bolt, launched at her from a thundercloud, had cauterized her sense-in plain English, burnt her eyes out of her head, she kept still praying on. "Was not this love? Yes, thus doth woman tove! 367 were assassins so habituated and naturalized to guilt, with her ruffian paramour, with whom she makes that "When their drenched hold forsook both gold and gear, They griped their daggers with a murderer's instinct ;" and though he also knew that Bertram was the leader of a band whose trade was blood. To the Castle, however, he goes, thus with the holy Prior's consent, if not with his assistance; and thither let us follow him. No sooner is our hero safely housed in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, than he attracts the notice of the lady and her confidante, by his "wild and terrible dark eyes," "muffled form," "fearful form,"*"darkly wild," "proudly stern," and the like common place indefinites, seasoned by merely verbal antithesis, and, at best, copied with very slight change, from the CONRADE of Southey's Joan of Arc. The lady Imogine, who has been (as is the case, she tells us, with all soft and solemn spirits) worshipping the moon on a terrace or rampart within view of the castle, insists on having an interview with our hero, and this, too, tete-a-tete. Would the reader learn why and wherefore the confidante is excluded, who very properly remonstrates against such "conference, alone, at night, with one who bears such fearful form "--the reason follows-"why, therefore send him!" I say follows, because the next line, "all things of fear have lost their power over me," is separated from the former by a break or pause, and beside that it is a very poor answer to the danger-is no answer at all to the gross indelicacy of this wilful exposure. We must, therefore, regard it as a mere afterthought, that a little softens the rudeness, but adds nothing to the weight of that exquisite woman's reason aforesaid. And so exit Clotilda, and enter Bertram, who "stands without looking at her," that is, with his lower limbs forked, his arms akimbo, his side to the lady's front, the whole figure resembling an inverted Y. He is soon, however, roused from the state surly to the state frantic, and then follow raving, yelling, cursing, she fainting, he relenting, in run's Imogine's child, squeaks "mother!" He snatches it up, and with a 'God bless thee, child! Bertram has kissed thy child," the curtain drops. The third act is short, and short be our account of it. It introduces Lord St. Aldobrand on his road homeward, and next Imogine in the convent, confessing the foulness of her heart to the Prior, who first indulges his old humor with a fit of senseless scolding, then leaves her alone *This sort of repetition is one of this writer's peculiarities, and there is scarce a page which does not furnish one or more instances-Ex. gr. in the first page or two. Act I. line 7th, "and deemed that I might sleep."-Line 10, "Did rock and quiver in the bickering glare."-Lines 14, 15, 16, "But by the momently gleams of sheeted blue, Did the pale marbles glare so sternly on me, I almost deemed they lived."-Line 37, "The glare of Hell."-Line 35, "O holy Prior, this is no earthly storm."-Line 38," This is no earthly storm."Line 42, "Dealing with us."-Line 43, "Deal thus sternly "-Line 44, "Speak! thou hast something seen!"-A fearful sight!"-Line 45, "What hast thou seen? A pite ous, fearful sight."- Line 48, "quivering gleams."-Line 50, "In the hollow pauses of the storm."-Line 61, "The pauses of the storm," &c. at once an infamous appointment, and the curtain drops, that it may be carried into act and consummation. I want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust with which I witnessed the opening of the fourth act, considering it as a melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind. The shocking spirit of jacobinism seemed no longer confined to politics. The familiarity with atrocious events and characters appeared to have poisoned the taste, even where it had not directly disorganized the moral principles, and left the feelings callous to all the mild appeals, and craving alone for the grossest and most outrageons stimulants. The very fact then present to our senses, that a British audience could remain passive under such an insult to common decency, nay, receive with a thunder of applause, a human being supposed to have come reeking from the consummation of this complex foulness and baseness, these and the like reflections so pressed as with the weight of lead upon my heart, that actor, author, and tragedy would have been forgotten, had it not been for a plain elderly man sitting beside me, who, with a very serious face, that at once expressed surprise and aversion, touched my elbow, and, pointing to the actor, said to me in a half-whisper-" Do you see that little fellow there? he has just been committing adultery!" Somewhat relieved by the laugh which this droll address occasioned, I forced back my attention to the stage sufficiently to learn that Bertram is recovered from a transient fit of remorse, by the information that St. Aldobrand was commissioned (to do what every honest man must have done without commission, if he did his duty) to seize him and deliver him to the just vengeance of the law; an information which (as he had long known himself to be an attainted traitor and proclaimed outlaw, and not only a trader in blood himself, but notoriously the Captain of a gang of thieves, pirates and assassins) assuredly could not have been new to him. It is this, however, which alone and instantly restores him to his accustomed state of raving, blasphemy, and nonsense. Next follows Imogine's constrained interview with her injured husband, and his sudden departure again, all in love and kindness, in order to attend the feast of St. Anselm at the convent. This was, it must be owned, a very strange engagement for so tender a husband to make within a few minutes after so long an absence. But first his lady has told him that she has "a vow on her," and wishes "that black perdition may gulph her perjured soul,"-(Note: she is lying at the very time)—if she ascends his bed till her penance is accomplished. How, therefore, is the poor husband to amuse himself in this interval of her penance? But do not be distressed, reader, on account of Lord St. Aldobrand's absence! As the author has contrived to send him out of the house, when a husband would be in his, and the lover's way, so he will doubtless not be at a loss to bring him back again so soon as he is wanted. Well! the husband gone in on the one side, out pops the lover from the other, and for the fiendish purpose of har rowing up the soul of his wretched accomplice in guilt, by announcing to her with most brutal and blasphemous execrations, his fixed and deliberate resolve to assassinate her husband; all this, too, is for no discoverable purpose, on the part of the author, but that of introducing a series of super-tragic starts, pauses, screams, struggling, dagger-throwing, falling on the ground, starting up again wildly, swearing, outcries for help, falling again on the ground, rising again, faintly tottering towards the door, and, to end the scene, a most convenient fainting fit of our lady's, just in time to give Bertram an opportunity of seeking the object of his hatred, before she alarms the house, which indeed she has had full time to have done before, but that the author rather chose she should amuse herself and the audience by the abovedescribed ravings and startings. She recovers slowly, and to her enter Clotilda, the confidante and mother confessor; then commences what in theatrical language is called the madness, but which the author more accurately entitles delirium, it appearing indeed a sort of intermittent fever, with fits of lightheadedness off and on, whenever occasion and stage effect happen to call for it. A convenient return of the storm (we told the reader beforehand how it would be) had changed "The rivulet that bathed the Convent walls, The Lord and his small train do stand appalled. Talk of the devil, and his horns appear, says the proverb: and sure enough, within ten lines of the exit of the messenger sent to stop him, the arrival of Lord St. Aldobrand is announced. Bertram's ruffian band now enter, and range themselves across the stage, giving fresh cause for Imogine's screams and madness. St. Aldobrand having received his mortal wound behind the scenes, totters in to welter in his blood, and to die at the feet of this double-damned adulteress. with all the vessels and other preparations for the "No more I know, I wish I did, Wordsworth's Thorn. Our whole information is derived from the following words "Prior.-Where is thy child? Clotil.-[Pointing to the cavern into which she had look- It was to make [quere wake] one living cord o' th' heart, Imog-[With a frantic laugh] The forest-fiend had snatched him He [who? the fiend or the child ?] rides the night-mare through the wizzard woods." Now, these two lines consist in a senseless plagiarism from the counterfeited madness of Edgar in Lear, who, in imitation of the gipsy 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, fabulosus Amnis. Observe, too, these images stand unique in the speeches of Imogene, without the slightest resemblance to any thing she says before or after. But we are weary. The characters in this act frisk abont, here, there, and everywhere, as teazingly as the Jacko'lanthorn lights which mischievous boys, from across a narrow street, throw with a looking-glass on the faces of their opposite neighbors. Bertram disarmed, Of her, as far as she is concerned in this 4th act, we have two additional points to notice: first, the low cunning and Jesuitical trick with which she deludes her husband into words of forgiveness, which he himself does not understand; and secondly, that every where she is made the object of interest and sympathy, and it is not the author's fault, if at any moment she excites feelings less gentle than those we are accustomed to associate with the self-accusations of a sincere, religious penitent. And did a Bri-outheroding Charles de Moor in the Robbers, befaces tish audience endure all this? They received it with plaudits, which, but for the rivalry of the carts and hackney-coaches, might have disturbed the evening prayers of the scanty week-day congregation at St. Paul's cathedral, Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. Of the 5th act, the only thing noticeable (for rant and nonsense, though abundant as ever, have, long before the last act, become things of course) is the profane representation of the high altar in a chapel, the collected knights of St. Anselm, (all in complete armor,) and so, by pure dint of black looks, he 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 The child is an important personage, for I see not by what possible means the author could have ended the second and third acts, but for its timely appearance. How ungrate ful, then, not further to notice its fate! youthful sinner metamorphosed 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 snatched a sword from a despicable coward, who retreats in 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 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 foily and impudence to exclaim, "I died no felon's death, A warrior's weapon freed a warrior's soul !" CHAPTER XXIV. CONCLUSION. ologians, whose 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) had not made or cannot make a picture 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 enduringan eternity without time, and, as it were, below itGod present, without manifestation of his 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 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 (literally) enormous. Casimir, in the fifth ode of his third book, has happily expressed this thought.* 44 Me longus silendi Nec fortis æque, si per omnes Id. Lib. III. Od. 5. It 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 are jagged, and there is a dull under-pain 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, and only when, we contemplate the succession in the relations of cause and effect, which like the two poles in the magnet, manifest the being and the 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 time. It is eternity, revealing itself in the pheno- I shall not make this an excuse, however, for mena of time; and the perception and acknowledg- troubling my readers with any complaints or explanament of the proportionality and appropriateness of the tions, with which, as readers, they have little or no present to the past, prove to the afflicted soul, that it concern. It may suffice, (for the present at least) to has not yet been deprived of the sight of God; that it declare that the causes that have delayed the pubcan still recognize the effective presence of a Father, lication of these volumes for so long a period after though through a darkened glass and a turbid atmo- they had been printed off, were not connected with sphere, though of a Father that is chastising it. And any neglect of my own; and that they would form 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 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 cheerfulness, from some new symptom or product, that had at once determined the name and nature of his complaint, and rendered 't an intelligible effect of an intelligible cause; even though the discovery did at the same moment preclude all hope of restoration. Hence the mystic the *Classically, too, as far as consists with the allegorizing fancy of the modern, that still striving to project the inward, contra-distinguishes itself from the seeming ease with which the poetry of the ancients reflects the world without. Casiracteristic difference; for his style and diction are really mir affords, perhaps, the most striking instance of this chaclassical, while Cowley, who resembles Casimir in many respects, completely barbarizes his Latinity, and even his metre, by the heterogeneons nature of his thoughts. That Dr. Johnson should have passed a contrary judgment, 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. |