this universal characteristic of tragedy-the | Leolf proceeding to the north, with a part of perceptible intervention in human affairs of the army, to rescue Elgiva, and Athulf assum. powers more than human-is to be discovered ing the conduct of the power destined for the in "Edwin the Fair," the following brief and deliverance of the king. imperfect outline of the plot may sufficiently determine. In the fresh and dewy dawn of life, Edwin and Elgiva had been wont to rove "O'er hill, through dale, with interlacing arms, And thrid the thickets where wild roses grow, Entangled with each other like themselves." But their sun had scarcely risen above the eastern horizon when the dreams of childhood faded away before the illusions of youth. He ascended the Anglo-Saxon throne, and she plighted her troth to Earl Leolf, the commander of the English armies. The earl was "a man in middle age, busy and hard to please," and not happy in the art of pleasing. Such, at least, was the more deliberate opinion or feeling of Elgiva. In a day of evil augury to herself, and to her house, the inconstant maiden crushed the hopes of her grave, though generous suitor, to share the crown of her early playmate. It sat neither firmly nor easily on his brows. Athulf, the brother, and Leolf, the discarded suitor of the queen, were the chief opponents of the powerful body which, under the guidance of Dunstan, were rapidly extending over the monarchy, and the Church of England, the authority of the monastic orders. In the approaching alliance of Athulf's family to Edwin, the abbot of Glastonbury foresaw the transfer, to a hostile party, of his own dominion over the mind of his young sovereign. Events had occurred to enhance and justify his solicitude. Athulf's energy had enabled Edwin to baffle the pretexts by which Dunstan had delayed his coronation. It was celebrated with becoming splendour, and was followed by a royal banquet. The moment appeared to the king propitious for avoiding the vigilant eye of his formidable minister. He escaped from the noisy revels, and flew on the wings of love to an adjacent oratory, where, before his absence had excited the notice and displeasure of his guests, he exchanged with Elgiva the vows which bound them to each other till death should break the bond. They little dreamed how soon it should thus be broken. Resenting the indignity of the king's abrupt desertion of the festive board, the assembled nobles deputed the abbot and the archbishop of Canterbury to solicit, and if necessary to compel his return. They found him in the society of his newly affianced bride, and assailed them with gross imputations, which she indignantly repelled by an open avowal of her marriage. Availing himself of the disorder of the moment, and of the canonical objections to their union, founded on their too near consanguinity, Dunstan caused them to be seized and imprisoned. Elgiva was despatched to Chester, the king and Athulf being secured in the Tower of London. Whatever may have been the indignation of the confederate lords, their policy dictated pacific measures; and to these the archbishop, offended and alarmed by the audacity of Dunstan, willingly lent himself. He convened a synod to deliberate on the validity of the royal marriage, and on the propriety of applying to Rome for a dispensation. Long and fervent debate ensued. The church as represented in that holy conclave, had given strong indications of a conciliatory spirit, when, casting himself, in vehement prayer before a crucifix, Dunstan invoked the decision of Him whose sacred image it bore. An audible voice, which seemed to proceed from the cross, (though really uttered by a minister of the abbot's crimes, who had been concealed for the purpose within its ample cavity,) forbade the ratification of the royal nuptials. Rising from the earth, the holy abbot pronounced a solemn excommunication of Edwin, Elgiva, and their adherents, and dismissed the assembly which had so vainly attempted to defeat the will of heaven, and of heaven's chosen minister. The triumphant Dunstan then proceeded to the Tower, to obtain from the captive and excommunicated king the abdication of his crown. He was answered by indignant reproaches, and at length withdrew, but not till he had summoned into the royal presence an assassin, prepared to bring the controversy to a decisive and bloody close. At that instant Athulf and his forces burst into the Tower. Edwin regained his freedom, and Dunstan fled in disguise into Hampshire. But the saint of Glastonbury possessed too powerful a hold on the attachment and reverence of the multitude, to be thus defeated by any blow however severe, or by any exposture however disgraceful. A popular insurrection in his favour arrested his flight to France. He resumed his self-confidence, appeared again in his proper character, and lifted up his mitred front, with its wonted superiority, in a Wittenagemot which he convened at Malpas. There, surrounded by his adherents and his military retainers, he openly denounced war on his sovereign. Under the guidance of Athulf, the king had moved from London towards Chester, to effect a junction with Leolf and his army. The attempt was not successful. Impatient of her prison, Elgiva had exercised over her jailer the spell of her rank and beauty, and had rendered him at once the willing instrument and the companion of her escape. Leolf was apprized of her design, and anxious for the safety of her who had so ill-requited his devotion, advanced to meet her, supported only by a small party of his personal attendants. They met, and, while urging their flight to Leolf's army, were overtaken by a party attached to the cause of Dunstan, and slain. Leolf, who had absented himself from the coronation, was in command of the royal forces For this catastrophe Dunstan was not, in inat Tunbridge, where he was quickly joined by tention at least, responsible. Alarmed by in Athulf, who had found the means of escaping telligence of a Danish invasion, he had become from prison. The two earls then separated-desirous of a reconciliation with Edwin, and was making overtures for that purpose. But | it was now too late. The king, maddened by the loss of Elgiva, rushed forward with blind and precipitate haste to Malpas, where the body of his murdered wife awaited a royal sepulture, and where was intrenched the haughty rebel who had brought her down to a premature grave. Deaf to every voice but that which from the inmost recesses of his soul cried for revenge, Edwin plunged wildly into his fate. Covered with wounds, he fell once more into the toils of his deadly enemy. An awful sound recalled him to momentary animation and strength. It was the low dirge from the choir of the neighbouring cathedral, chanting the funeral obsequies of Elgiva. He flew from his dying couch, cast himself with delirious ravings on her cold and inanimate form, and then, invoking the vengeance of heaven on their persecutor, descended with her to the grave. Incomplete, and therefore inaccurate, as it is, this slight abridgment of the tale will show, that the dramatic action of "Edwin the Fair" is rather disastrous than tragical. We witness, indeed, the deadly conflict of thrones, spiritual and temporal. The sceptre falls from a feeble grasp, and the crozier is elevated in sanguinary triumph. But it is the triumph of power over weakness, of craft over simplicity, of mature worldly wisdom over childish inexperience. An overwhelming calamity befalls Edwin and Elgiva, but it is provoked neither by any gigantic guilt, nor by any magnanimous self-devotion. They perish, the victims of imprudence rather than of crime-of a rash marriage and a venial inconstancy. This is quite probable-quite in accordance with truths to be gathered from the experience of each passing day; but for that very reason, it is a fable which does not fulfil the laws imposed on the stage by Eschylus and Shakspeareby their imitators and their critics-or rather by reason and nature herself. It does not break up our torpid habitual associations. It excites no intense sympathy. It gives birth to no deep emotion, except, indeed, regret that vengeance does not strike down the oppressor. There is a failure of poetical justice in the progress and in the catastrophe of the drama. If it were a passage of authentic history, the mind might repose in the conviction that the Judge of all must eventually do right. But as it is a fiction, it is impossible not to repine that right is not actually done. Such unmerited disasters and prosperous injustice are, we know, consistent with the presence of a superintending Deity. But they do not suggest it. The handwriting on the wall has no pregnant meaning, nor mythic significancy. It is not apparently traced by the Divine finger, nor has the seer given us any inspired interpretation. It is one of those legends from which a moralist might deduce important lessons of prudence, but from which a dramatist could hardly evoke a living picture of the destiny of man;-of man opposed and aided by powers mightier than his own, engaged in an unequal though most momentous conflict, impotent even when victorious, and majestic even when subdued. This objection to the plot of his drama has evidently been anticipated by Mr. Taylor himself. He summons some dark clouds to gather around Dunstan at the moment of his success, and dismisses him from our view, oppressed by the only domestic sorrow to which his heart was accessible, and by omens of approaching calamity from an inroad of the Northmen. Thus the triumph of the wicked is tempered, and some endeavour is made to gratify, as well as to excite, the thirst for his punishment. It is hardly a successful attempt. The loss in mature life of an aged mother, is a sorrow too familiar and transitory to be accepted as a retribution for crimes of the deepest dye; and war, however disastrous to others, has seldom any depressing terrors for the rulers of mankind. Besides, there are yet some fetters, however light, which chronology will throw over the volatile spirit of poetry; and it is hard to forget the historical fact, that no Danish invasion ever disturbed the tranquillity of Dunstan; but that he lived and died in that century of repose, for which England was indebted to the wisdom and the valour of the two great predecessors of Edwin. Mr. Taylor has therefore employed another and more effectual resource to relieve the inherent defects of the subject he has chosen. He avails himself of the opportunity it affords for the delineation and contrast of characters, which he throws off with a careless prodigality, attesting an almost inexhaustible affluence. In every passage where the interest of the story droops, it is sustained by the appearance of some new person of the drama, who is not a mere fiction, but a reality with a fictitious name. The stage is not possessed by its ancient tenants provided with a new set of speeches, but with recruits, who present some of the many aspects under which man has actually presented himself to a most sagacious and diligent observer. This, however, is not true of Dunstan, the most conspicuous of all those who contribute to the action or to the dialogue. He is drawn, not from actual life, but from books. In the great drama of society, which is acted in our age on the theatre of the civilized world, no part has been, or could be, assigned to a spiritual despot, in which to disclose freely the propensities and the mysteries of his nature. The poet has therefore taken the outline from the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers, and has supplied the details and the colouring from his own imagination. Hence the central figure is less congruous-less in harmony with itself-than those of the group by which it is surrounded; but then it is more ideal, is cast in bolder relief, and is thrown off with greater force and freedom. The real Dunstan, the recluse, the saint, and the statesman of the tenth century, had his full share of the inconsistencies which distinguish man as he is, from man as he is painted. He was endowed with all the faculties by which great actions are achieved, and with the tem perament without which they are never under. taken. Conversant in his early manhood with every science by which social life had then been improved, and by every art by which it had been embellished, his soul was agitated by ambition and by love. Unprosperous in be pronounced to be dramatic. He is at once both, his wounded spirit sought relief in soli- the victim of religious misanthropy and self. tude and penitential exercises; and an age adoration. He has worshipped the world, has familiar with such prodigies, regarded with been rejected by his idol, and has turned away astonishment and reverence the austerity of mortified, but not humbled, to meditate holier his self-discipline. When, at length, he emerged joys, and to seek an eternal recompense. But, from the grave, (for in that similitude he had in the pursuit of these sublime objects, he is dug his cell,) he was supposed by others, and haunted by the memory of the delights he has probably by himself, to have buried there all abandoned, and of the injustice which has exthe tastes and the passions which had once pelled him from the ways and the society of enslaved him to the world. But other spirits mankind. These thoughts distil their bitteras secular as the first, though assuming a holier ness even into his devotions. His social afgarb, had entered his bosom, and taken up fections droop and wither as their proper their abode there. All the energies once wasted aliment is withdrawn. His irascible feelings on letters, music, painting, and science, or in deepen, and pass into habits of fixed antipathy the vain worship of her to whom his young and moroseness. To feed these gloomy pasheart had been devoted, were henceforth con- sions he becomes the calumniator of his spesecrated to the church and to his order. He cies, incredulous of human virtue, and astute became the foremost champion of sacerdotal in every uncharitable construction of human celibacy and monastic retirement; assumed motives. His malignity establishes a disasthe conduct of the war of the regular against trous alliance with his disordered piety. He the secular clergy; and was the founder of the ascribes to the Being he adores the foul pasecclesiastical system which continued for five sions which fester in his own bosom. His centuries to control all the religious, and to personal wrongs are no longer the insignifiaffect all the political institutions of his native cant ills of an individual sufferer, nor have land. his personal resentments the meanness of a But the Severn leaping down the rocks of private revenge-for his foes are antagonists Plinlimmon, and the same stream when ex- of the purposes of heaven; and to crush them panded into a muddy and sluggish estuary, can be no unacceptable homage to the Sudoes not differ more from itself, than St. Dun-preme Arbiter of rewards and punishments. stan, the abbot of Glastonbury, from Dunstan With the cold unsocial propensities of a withthe metropolitan of the church, and the minis- ered heart, disguised from others and from ter of the crown of England. During five himself by the sophistries of a palsied consuccessive reigns, all the powers of the go- science, Dunstan finds his way back to the vernment were in his hands, but he ruled in- busy world. He lives among men to satiate gloriously. When his supreme power had an ambition such as might be indulged by an once been firmly secured, all the fire and ge- incarnation of the evil spirit-an ambition exnius of his earlier days became extinct. With ulting in conscious superiority, and craving the sublime example of Alfred, and the more for the increase and the display of it, but recent glories of Athelstan before his eyes, he spurning and trampling in the dust the vicaccomplished nothing and attempted nothing tims over whom it triumphs. Patriotism, loyfor the permanent welfare of his country. No alty, humility, reverence-every passion by one social improvement can be traced to his which man is kind to his brethren-all are wisdom or munificence. He had none of the dead in him; and an intense selfishness, covast conceptions, and splendid aims, which vered by holy pretexts, reigns in undisputed have ennobled the usurpations of so many sovereignty in his soul. Man is but the worthother churchmen. After an undisputed pos- less instrument of his will; and even to his session of power for forty years' continuance, Creator he addresses himself with the unawed he left the state enfeebled, and the crown in familiarity of a favourite. Proud, icy-cold, and hopeless degradation. To him, more than to remorseless, he wades through guilt sneeringly any man, must be ascribed the ruin of the dy- and exultingly-the subject of a strange spiritnasty under which he flourished, and the inva-ual disease, compounded of a paralysis of all sions which desolated the kingdom during half a century from his death. He had commanding talents and dauntless courage, but a low, narrow, selfish spirit. His place in the Roman calendar was justly assigned to him in acknowledgment of his incomparable services to the papacy; but he has no station in the calendar of the great and good men who, having consecrated the noblest gifts of nature and of fortune to their proper ends, live for the benefit of all generations, and are alike revered and celebrated by all. The Dunstan of this tragedy is not the lordly churchman reposing in the plenitude of success, but the fanatic grasping at supreme command. He is the real hero of "Edwin the Fair," towering over all his associates, and distinguished from them all by a character, which, in the full and proper sense of the term, may the natural sympathies, and a morbid vigour of all the mental energies. This portrait is terrible, impressive, and (unhappily) not improbable. It labours, however, under one inconsistency. The fanaticism of Dunstan, as delineated in this tragedy, is wanting in one essential ele. ment. He has no profound or deeply cherished convictions. He does not believe himself to be the selected depositary of divine truth. He does not regard dissent from his own opinions as criminal; nor does he revel in any vindictive anticipations of the everlasting wo of his theological antagonists. He is not clinging to any creed which, if rejected by others, may elude his own grasp. The enemies of the church are indeed his enemies, but they are so because they endanger his power, not be cause they disturb the repose or the self-com. placency of his mind. He has (to borrow the distinction of a great writer) the fanaticism of the scourge, the brand, and the sword, without having the fanaticism of the creed. He is a fanatic, without being an enthusiast. His guilt is not extenuated by any passionate attachment for truth or sanctity, or for what he believes to be true and sacred. He rushes into oppression, treachery, fraud, and plunder, not at the impulse of a disordered imagination, but at the bidding of a godless, brotherless heart. This absence of theological hatred, founded on the earnest attachment to some theological opinions, impairs both the congruity and the terror of Dunstan's dramatic character. He is actuated by no passion intense enough to provoke such enormous guilt; or familiar enough to bring him within the range of our sympathies; or natural enough to suggest, that some conceivable shifting of the currents of life might hurry us into some plunge as desperate as that which we see him making. His homicides are not bloody sacrifices, but villanous murders. His scourge is not the thong of Dominic, so much as the lash with which Sancho (the knave!) imposes on the credulity of his master. His impious frauds are not oracular deceptions, but the sleight-of-hand tricks of a juggler. He is waited on by an imp of darkness, who is neither man nor fiend; for he perpetrates the foulest crime, without malignity, or cupidity, or any other obvious motive. He slaughters Elgiva and Leolf; raises his hand to assassinate the king; and, at Dunstan's command, climbs a tree, to howl there like the devil; and then enters the cavity of the crucifix, to utter a solemn response in the person of the Redeemer. The objection to this is not the improbability, but the revolting hatefulness of the guilt which Dunstan and his minister divide between them. Unhappily it is not historically improbable, but the reverse. Sanguinary and devious have been the paths along which many a canonized saint has climbed that celestial eminence. Tricks, as base and profane as that of Dunstan's crucifix, have been exhibited or encouraged, not merely by the vulgar heroes, but by some of the most illustrious fathers of the church. But if they violated the eternal laws of God, it was to accomplish what they devoutly believed to be the divine will. Saints and sinners might agree in the means to be used, but they differed entirely as to the ends to be accomplished. Ambrose, preaching at Milan over the bleeding remains of the disinterred martyrs, lent himself to what he must have suspected or known to be a lie. But the lie was told and exhibited for the confutation of the Arians, to which holy object Ambrose would as readily have sacrificed his life. And though evil done that good may come, be evil still-nay, an evil peculiarly pestilent and hard to be forgiven-yet there is, after all, a wide difference between Bishop Bonner and Jonathan Wilde. Devout fanaticism, if it may not extenuate, does at least sublimate crime. By the intensity of his convictions, the greatness of his aims, and the energy of his motives, the genuine fanatic places himself beyond the reach of contemp. of disgust, or of unmixed abhorrence. We feel that, by the force of circumstances, the noblest of men might be betrayed into such illusions, and urged into such guilt. as his. We acknowledge that, under happy auspices, he might have been the benefactor, not the curse of his species. We perceive that, if his erring judgment could be corrected, he might even yet be reclaimed to philanthropy and to peace. If we desire that retributive justice should overtake him, the aspiration is, that he may fall "a victim to the gods," and not be hewed as "a carcass for the hounds." Not such is the vengeance we invoke on the dra matic Dunstan and his ministering demon We upbraid the tardiness of human invention which laboured a thousand years in the dis covery of the treadmill. Or rather our admiration of the genius which created so noble an image of intellectual power, ruthless decision, and fearful hardihood, is alloyed by some resentment that the poet should so have marred the work of his own hands. How noble a work. it is will be best understood by listening to the soliloquy in which Dunstan communes with his own heart, and with his Maker, on the commission intrusted to him, and on the spiritual temptations he has to encounter in the discharge of it: "Spirit of speculation, rest, oh rest! And push not from her place the spirit of prayer! A host of imps and Ethiops, dark doubts, In the same spirit, at once exulting, selfexploring, and irreverent, Dunstan bursts out in a sort of pæan on his anticipated success, as he enters the tower to persuade the abdication of his sovereign. "Kings shall bow down before thee, said my soul, I thank you, Gracious Powers! Supernal Host! The spirit thus agitated had not always been a prey to disquieting thoughts. Dunstan had once loved as other men love, and even on his seared heart were engraven recollec tions which revive in all their youthful warmth "When Satan first To music of the fountains and the birds, Or else in skirting groves by sunshine smitten, I should have owned it for an Angel's voice, Dunstan is a superb sophister. Observe with what address he reconciles himself to the fraud so coarse and degrading as that of making his instrument, Gurmo, shake the forest with dismal howlings, to intimate to the passers-by that the hour of fierce conflict between the saint and the prince of darkness had arrived. Contempt of mankind, and of his supposed adversary, are skilfully called up to still the voice of honour and the remonstrances of conscience. To the dramatic character of Dunstan, the antithesis is that of Wulfstan the Wise. An idealist arrested in the current of life by the eddy of his own thoughts, he muses away his existence in one long, though ever-shifting dream of labours to be undertaken, and duties to be performed. Studious of books, of nature, of the heart, and of the ways of man, his intellectual wealth feeds a perennial stream of discourse, which, meandering through every field of speculation, and in turns enriching all, still changes the course it ought to pursue, or overflows the banks by which it should be confined, as often as any obstacle is opposed to its continuous progress. Love, poetry, friendship, philosophy, war, politics, morals, and manners, each is profoundly contemplated, eloquently discussed, and helplessly abandoned, by this master of ineffectual wisdom: and yet he is an element in society which could be worse spared than the shrewdest practical understanding in the camp or the exchange. His wide circuit of meditation has made him catholic, charitable, and indulgent. In the large horizon which his mental eye traverses, he discerns such comprehensive analogies, such countless indications of the creative goodness, and such glorious aspects of beauty and of grace, as no narrower ken could embrace, and no busier mind combine and harmonize. To form such combinations, and to scatter prodigally around him the germs of thought, if happily they may bear fruit in intellects better disciplined, though less opulent than his own, is the delight and the real duty of Wulfstan, the colloquial. His talk, when listeners are to be had, thus becomes a ceaseless exercise of kindness; and even when there are none to heed him, an imaginary circle still enables him to soliloquize most benevolently. In this It is with admirable truth and insight into munificent diffusion of his mental treasures, human character that Dunstan is made to re- the good man is not merely happy, but invulsort to artifices, as various as the occasions nerable! Let fortune play her antics as she suggesting them, to evade the expostulations will, each shall furnish him with a text; and with which conscience still tracks him in the he will embellish all with quaint conceits or path of guilt. From scorn of man he passes diagnostic expositions. His daughter steals an to a kind of adoration of the mystical abstract unworthy match; but he rebounds from the Being, to which, in the absence of more palpa-shock to moralize on parental disappointment ble idols, it is so easy to render an extravagant and conjugal constancy. He is overborne and homage. What a labyrinth of gigantic, vague, half-conceited images is it into which he plunges, in the endeavour to sustain his own mind, by contemplating the majesty and the holiness of the impersonation in the cause of which he is willing to believe himself engaged. "And call'st thou this a fraud, thou secular lack-brain? Here in the heart of Man. And if from hence I tweak him by the snout. A fair belief trampled down by the energy of Dunstan, and immediately discovers in his misadventure a proof how well the events of his own age are adapted for history; and how admirably a retirement to Oxford will enable himself to be. come the historian. Could Samuel Taylor |