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passions may silence the voice of humanity; but it is, I think, equally against probability and decorum, to make both the passions and the voice of humanity give way (as in the example of Calantha) to a mere form of outward behaviour. Such a suppression of the strongest and most uncontrollable feelings, can only be justified from necessity, for some great purpose,-which is not the case in Ford's play; or it must be done for the effect and eclat of the thing, which is not fortitude but affectation. The fallacy of this criticism appears to us to lie in the assumption, that the violent suppression of her feelings by the heroine was a mere piece of court etiquette-a compliment to the ceremonies of a festival. Surely the object was noble, and the effort sublime. While the deadly force of sorrow oppressed her heart, she felt that she had solemn duties to discharge, and that, if she did not arm herself against affliction till they were finished, she could never perform them. She could seek temporary strength only by refusing to pause-by hurrying on to the final scene; and dared not to give the least vent to the tide of grief, which would at once have relieved her overcharged heart, and left her, exhausted, to die. Nothing less than the appearance of gaiety could hide or suppress the deep anguish of her soul. We agree with Mr Lamb, whose opinion is referred to by our author, that there is scarcely in any other play a catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so surprising as this!'

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The Fifth Lecture, on Single Plays and Poems, brings into view many curious specimens of old humour, hitherto little known, and which sparkle brightly in their new setting. The Sixth, on Miscellaneous Poems and Works, is chiefly remarkable for the admirable criticism on the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney, with which it closes. Here the critic separates with great skill the wheat from the chaff, showing at once the power of his author, and its perversion, and how images of touching beauty and everlasting truth are marred by the spirit of Gothic quaintness, criticism, and conceit.' The passage, which is far too long for quotation, makes us desire more earnestly than ever that an author, capable of so lucid and convincing a development of his critical doctrines, would less frequently content himself with giving the mere results of his thought, and even conveying these in the most abrupt and startling language. A remark uttered in the parenthesis of a sarcasm, or an image thrown in to heighten a piece of irony, might often furnish extended matter for the delight of those whom it now only disgusts or bewilders.

The Seventh Lecture, on the works of Lord Bacon, compared as to style with those of Sir Thomas Browne and of Jeremy Taylor, is very unequal, The character of Lord Bacon is elo

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quent, and the praise sufficiently lavish; but it does not show any proper knowledge of his works. That of Jeremy Taylor is somewhat more appropriate, but too full of gaudy images and mere pomp of words. The style of that delicious writer is ingeniously described as 'prismatic; though there is too much of shadowy chillness in the phrase, adequately to represent the warm and tender bloom which he casts on all that he touches. And when we are afterwards told that it unfolds the colours of the rainbow; floats like a bubble through the air; or is like innumerable dew drops, that glitter on the face of morning, and twinkle as they glitter;'-we can only understand that the Critic means to represent it as variegated, light and sparkling: But it appears to us that the style of Jeremy Taylor is like nothing unsubstantial or airy. The blossoms put forth in his works spring from a deep and eternal stock, and have no similitude to any thing wavering or unstable. His account of Sir Thomas Browne, however, seems to us very characteristic, both of himself and of that most extraordinary of English writers. We can make room only for a part of it.

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As Bacon seemed to bend all his thoughts to the practice of life, and to bring home the light of science to the bosoms and businesses of men, "Sir Thomas Browne seemed to be of opinion, that the only business of life was to think; and that the proper object of speculation was, by darkening knowledge, to breed more speculation, and "find no end in wandering mazes lost." He chose the incomprehensible and the impracticable, as almost the only subjects fit for a lofty and lasting contemplation, or for the exercise of a solid faith. He cried out for an "oh altitudo" beyond the heights of revelation; and posed himself with apocryphal mysteries as the pastime of his leisure hours. He pushes a question to the utmost verge of conjecture, that he may repose on the certainty of doubt; and he removes an object to the greatest distance from him, that he may take a high and abstracted interest in it, consider it in relation to the sum of things, not to himself, and bewilder his understanding in the universality of its nature, and the inscrutableness of its origin. His is the sublime of indifference; a passion for the abstruse and imaginary. He turns the world round for his amusement, as if it was a globe of pasteboard. He looks down on sublunary affairs as if he had taken his station in one of the planets. The Antipodes are next door neighbours to him; and Doomsday is not far off. With a thought he embraces both the Poles; the march of his pen is over the great divisions of geography and chronology. Nothing touches him nearer than humanity. He feels that he is mortal only in the decay of Nature, and the dust of long-forgotten tombs. The finite is lost in the infinite. The orbits of the heavenly bodies, or the history of empires, are to him but a point in time, or a speck in the VOL. XXXIV. Ŋo. 68.

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Looks ever bright with leaves and blossoming,
And Winter always winds his sullen horn,
When the wild Autumn with a look forlorn
Dies in his stormy manhood; and the skies
Weep and flowers sicken when the Summer flies.
Oh! wonderful thou art, great element:
And fearful in thy spleeny humours bent,
And lovely in repose: thy summer form
Is beautiful, and when thy silver waves
Make music in earth's dark and winding caves,
I love to wander on thy pebbled beach,
Marking the sunlight at the evening hour,

And harken to the thoughts thy waters teach---
Eternity, Eternity, and Power."

And now-whither are gone the lovers now?
Colonna, wearest thou anguish on thy brow,
And is the valour of the moment gone?
Fair Julia, thou art smiling now alone:
The hero and the husband weeps at last-
Alas, alas! and lo! he stands aghast,
Bankrupt in every hope, and silently gasps
Like one who maddens. Hark! the timbers part
And the sea billows come, and still he clasps

His pale pale beauty, closer to his heart,

The ship has struck. One kiss--the last-Love's own.
--They plunge into the waters and are gone.

The vessel sinks,-'tis vanished, and the sea

Rolls boiling o'er the wreck triumphantly,

And shrieks are heard and cries, and then short groans, Which the waves stifle quick, and doubtful tones Like the faint moanings of the wind pass by, And horrid gurgling sounds rise up and die, And noises like the choaking of man's breath-But why prolong the tale--it is of death. pp. 70-76. But they do not die.-They are succoured on the beach by fishermen and Marcian becomes a fisherman himself, and lives for some time in happy lowliness, till a second vision of the former husband drives them again to an inland retreat near his old prison of Laverna. There poor Julia learns, somehow, for the first time, that this ill-sorted mate is still alive, and that she cannot be the lawful wife of Marcian; and rejects his society, and prays to be allowed to retire to a nunnery and die;but he, inflamed with love and madness and despair, administers poison to her, and watches her placid end, and then disappears, like the Corsair, for ever.

This longer poem is followed by three Dramatic Scenes-the first of which, on the death of Julian the Apostate, is the most dignified; the second, called Amelia Wentworth,' the most

pathetic and poetical;-and the last, entitled The Rape of Proserpine,' a very spirited and beautiful imitation of the higher and more fanciful strains of the antient drama. Of this, as the more rare and difficult attempt, we shall give a short specimen. Proserpine is distributing her flowers very poetically to her attendant nymphs, in the florid vale of Enna, when the chariot of the grisly king comes rolling from the earth. The Semichorus then sings

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Mark him as he moves along

Drawn by horses black and strong,
Such as may belong to Night
'Ere she takes her morning flight.
Now the chariot stops: the god
On our grassy world hath trod:
Like a Titan steppeth he,
Yet full of his divinity.
On his mighty shoulders lie
Raven locks, and in his eye

A cruel beauty, such as none
Of us may wisely look upon.

Proser. He comes indeed. How like a god he looks!
Terribly lovely---Shall I shun his eye

Which even here looks brightly beautiful?

What a wild leopard glance he has.-I am

Jove's daughter, and shall I then deign to fly?

I will not yet, methinks, I fear to stay.

Come, let us go, Cyane.

[PLUTO enters.]

Pluto. Stay, oh! stay.

Proserpina, Proserpina, I come

From my Tartarean kingdom to behold you.
The brother of Jove am I. I come to say
Gently, beside this blue Sicilian stream,
How much I love you, fair Proserpina.
Think me not rude that thus at once I tell
My passion. I disarm me of all power;
And in the accents of a man I sue,

Bowing before your beauty. Brightest maid!
Let me still unpresuming-say I have

Roamed through the earth, where many an eye hath smiled
In love upon me, tho' it knew me not;

But I have passed free from amongst them all,
To gaze on you alone. I might have clasped
Lovely and royal maids, and throned queens,
Sea nymphs, and airy shapes, that glide along
Like light across the hills, or those that make
Mysterious music in the desert woods,

Or lend a voice to fountains, or to caves,
Or answering hush the river's sweet reproach-
Oh! I've escaped from all, to come and tell
How much I love you, sweet Proserpina.
SEMICHORUS, (Cyane.)

Come with me, away, away,
Fair and young Proserpina.
You will die unless you flee,
Child of crowned Cybele.-
Think not of his eyes of fire,
Nor his wily heart's desire,
Nor the locks that round his head
Run like wreathed snakes, and fling
A shadow o'er his eyes glancing;
Nor, the dangerous whispers hung,
Like honey, roofing o'er his tongue.
But think of all thy Mother's glory-
Of her love-of every story
Of the cruel Pluto told,

And which grey Tradition old,

With all its weight of grief and crime,
Hath plucked from out the grave of Time.
Once again I bid thee flee,

Daughter of great Cybele.'

pp. 150–153.

The Miscellaneous Poems are full of beauty and feeling; and we should be tempted, if we had room, to extract the most of them. The following lines, on a remembered Voice, are very sweet and fanciful.

• Oh! what a voice is silent. It was soft
As mountain-echoes, when the winds aloft—
The gentle winds of summer meet in caves;
Or when in sheltered places the white waves
Are 'wakened into music, as the breeze
Dimples and stems the current: or as trees
Shaking their green locks in the days of June:
Or Delphic girls when to the maiden moon
They sang harmonious pray'rs: or sounds that come
(However near) like a faint distant hum

Out of the grass, from which mysterious birth
We guess the busy secrets of the earth.

—Like the low voice of Syrinx, when she ran
Into the forests from Arcadian Pan:
Or sad Œnone's, when she pined away
For Paris, or (and yet 'twas not so gay)
As Helen's whisper when she came to Troy,
Half sham'd to wander with that blooming boy:
Like air-touch'd harps in flowery easements hung;
Like unto lovers' ears the wild words sung

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