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 wit ness, 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 temperament 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

151

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 selftude 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. heart had been devoted, were henceforth con- sions he becomes the calumniator of his speTo feed these gloomy passecrated 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. private revenge-for his foes are antagonists his personal resentments the meanness of a of the purposes of heaven; and to crush them can be no unacceptable homage to the Supreme Arbiter of rewards and punishments. With the cold unsocial propensities of a withered heart, disguised from others and from himself by the sophistries of a palsied conscience, Dunstan finds his way back to the busy world. He lives among men to satiate an ambition such as might be indulged by an incarnation of the evil spirit-an ambition exfor the increase and the display of it, but ulting in conscious superiority, and craving spurning and trampling in the dust the victims over whom it triumphs. Patriotism, loyalty, humility, reverence-every passion by which man is kind to his brethren-all are dead in him; and an intense selfishness, covered by holy pretexts, reigns in undisputed sovereignty in his soul. Man is but the worthless instrument of his will; and even to his Creator he addresses himself with the unawed familiarity of a favourite. Proud, icy-cold, and remorseless, he wades through guilt sneeringly and exultingly-the subject of a strange spiritual disease, compounded of a paralysis of all 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.

But the Severn leaping down the rocks of Plinlimmon, and the same stream when expanded into a muddy and sluggish estuary, does not differ more from itself, than St. Dunstan, the abbot of Glastonbury, from Dunstan the metropolitan of the church, and the minister of the crown of England. During five successive reigns, all the powers of the government were in his hands, but he ruled ingloriously. When his supreme power had once been firmly secured, all the fire and genius of his earlier days became extinct. the sublime example of Alfred, and the more With recent glories of Athelstan before his eyes, he accomplished nothing and attempted nothing for the permanent welfare of his country. No one social improvement can be traced to his wisdom or munificence. He had none of the vast conceptions, and splendid aims, which have ennobled the usurpations of so many other churchmen. After an undisputed possession of power for forty years' continuance, he left the state enfeebled, and the crown in hopeless degradation. To him, more than to any man, must be ascribed the ruin of the dynasty under which he flourished, and the invasions 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

this tragedy, is wanting in one essential eleThe fanaticism of Dunstan, as delineated in 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 tive anticipations of the everlasting wo of his as criminal; nor does he revel in any vindictheological 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 because they disturb the repose or the self-com

1

tions which revive in all their youthful warmth
and beauty as he contemplates the agonies of
his captive king, and tempts him to abdicate
his crown by the prospect of his reunion to
Elgiva.

"When Satan first
Attempted me, 'twas in a woman's shape;
Such shape as may have erst misled mankind,
When Greece or Rome uprear'd with Pagan rites
Temples to Venus, pictured there or carved
With rounded, polish'd, and exuberant grace,
And mien whose dimpled changefulness betray'd,
Thro' jocund hues, the seriousness of passion.
I was attempted thus, and Satan sang,
With female pipe and melodies that thrill'd
The soften'd soul, of mild voluptuous ease,
And tender sports that chased the kindling hours
In odorous gardens or on terraces,

To music of the fountains and the birds,

Or else in skirting groves by sunshine smitten,
Or warm winds kiss'd, whilst we from shine to shade
Roved unregarded. Yes, 'twas Satan sang,
Because 'twas sung to me, whom God had call'd
To other pastime and severer joys.
But were it not for this, God's strict behest
Enjoin'd upon me,-had I not been vow'd
To holiest service rigorously required,

I should have owned it for an Angel's voice,
Nor ever could an earthly crown, or toys
And childishness of vain ambition, gauds
And tinsels of the world, have lured my heart
Into the tangle of those mortal cares

That gather round a throne. What call is thine
From God or man, what voice within bids thee
Such pleasures to forego, such cares confront?
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 fo-
rest with dismal howlings, to intimate to the
passers-by that the hour of fierce conflict be-
tween 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 remon-

strances of conscience.

"And call'st thou this a fraud, thou secular lack-brain?
Thou loose lay-priest, I tell thee it is none.
Do I not battle wage in very deed
With Satan? Yea, and conquer! And who's he
Saith falsehood is deliver'd in these howls,
Which do but to the vulgar ear translate
Truths else to them ineffable? Where's Satan?
His presence, life and kingdom? Not the air
Nor bowels of the earth, nor central fires
His habitat exhibits; it is here,

Here in the heart of Man. And if from hence
I cast him with discomfiture, that truth
Is verily of the vulgar sense conceived,
By utterance symbolic, when they deem
That, met in bodily oppugnancy,

I tweak him by the snout. A fair belief
Wherein the fleshy and the palpable type
Doth of pure truth substantiate the essence.
Enough. Come down. The screech-owl from afar
Upbraids thy usurpations. Cease, I say."

It is with admirable truth and insight into human character that Dunstan is made to resort to artifices, as various as the occasions suggesting them, to evade the expostulations with which conscience still tracks him in the path of guilt. From scorn of man he passes to a kind of adoration of the mystical abstract Being, to which, in the absence of more palpable idols, it is so easy to render an extravagant 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.

An

To the dramatic character of Dunstan, the antithesis is that of Wulfstan the Wise. 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 confined, as often as any obstacle is opposed overflows the banks by which it should be 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 derstanding in the camp or the exchange. His worse spared than the shrewdest practical unwide 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. 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 munificent diffusion of his mental treasures, the good man is not merely happy, but invulnerable! Let fortune play her antics as she will, each shall furnish him with a text; and he will embellish all with quaint conceits or diagnostic expositions. His daughter steals an unworthy match; but he rebounds from the shock to moralize on parental disappointment and conjugal constancy. He is overborne and 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 become the historian. Could Samuel Taylor

To

154

Coleridge have really thus blossomed in the iron age of the Anglo-Saxons? It is a hard problem. But the efflorescence of his theatrical representative is rendered probable to all who ever performed the pilgrimage to the Hierophant at Highgate, in the golden era of George IV. Never was there a group of auditors better disposed or better able to appreciate the wisdom of a sage, than those who are collected round Wulfstan. See with what fine discrimination and keen relish his portrait is sketched by one of them.

"Still

This life and all that it contains, to him
Is but a tissue of illuminous dreams

Fill'd with book wisdom, pictured thought, and love
That on its own creations spends itself.

All things he understands, and nothing does.
Profusely eloquent in copious praise
Of action, he will talk to you as one

Whose wisdom lay in dealings and transactions; Yet so much action as might tie his shoe Cannot his will command; himself alone By his own wisdom not a jot the gainer. Of silence, and the hundred thousand things 'Tis better not to mention, he will speak, And still most wisely-But, behold! he comes.' Leolf, who thus delineates the character of Wulfstan, is about to announce to the old man the secret marriage of his daughter; and as the earl cautiously approaches the unwelcome topic, the philosopher finds in each turn of the discourse some theme which hurries him away to a boundless distance from the matter in hand. Obeying the law by which his own ideas are associated, but with the tendency observable in all dreamers, sleeping or waking, to reconcile the vision with any suggestion from without, he involves himself in an inquiry how a man in middle life should wed, and on that critical topic thus makes deliver

ance:

"Love changes with the changing life of man:
In its first youth, sufficient to itself,
Heedless of all beside, it reigns alone,
Revels or storms, and spends itself in passion.
In middle age-a garden through whose soil
The roots of neighbouring forest-trees have crept-
It strikes on stringy customs bedded deep,
Perhaps on alien passions; still it grows
And lacks not force nor freshness: but this age
Shall aptly choose as answering best its own,
A love that clings not, nor is exigent,
Encumbers not the active purposes,

Nor drains their source; but proffers with free grace
Pleasure at pleasure touch'd, at pleasure waved
A washing of the weary traveller's feet,
A quenching of his thirst, a sweet repose
Alternate and preparative, in groves
Where loving much the flower that loves the shade,
And loving much the shade that that flower loves,
He yet is unbewilder'd, unenslaved,
Thence starting light, and pleasantly let go,
When serious service calls."

Mr. Shandy's expenditure of eloquence on
the death of his son, was not more consola-
tory to the bereaved rhetorician, than are the
disquisitions of Wulfstan on his daughter's
undutiful marriage. She must no longer be
mutable of purpose. She must study the ex-
cellent uses of constancy, and abide in quietude
of mind. The fickle wind may be her teacher.
Then, as if himself floating on the wings of
some soft and balmly gale, the poetical sage
drowns all his parental anxieties in this light
and beautiful parable:

"The wind, when first he rose and went abroad
Thro' the vast region, felt himself at fault,
Wanting a voice; and suddenly to earth

Descended with a wafture and a swoop,
Where, wandering volatile from kind to kind,
He woo'd the several trees to give him one.
First he besought the ash; the voice she lent
Fitfully with a free and lashing change
Flung here and there its sad uncertainties:
The aspen next; a fluttered frivolous twitter
Was her sole tribute: from the willow came,
So long as dainty summer dress'd her out,
A whispering sweetness, but her winter note
Was hissing, dry, and reedy: lastly the pine
Did he solicit, and from her he drew
A voice so constant, soft, and lowly deep,
That here he rested, welcoming in her
A mild memorial of the ocean cave
Where he was born."

An

The spirit of rumination possesses all the No wonder, then, that persons of this drama. Leolf feeds on his own thoughts, as best becomes a discarded lover. But of that deplorable class of mankind, he is a remarkable, if not altogether a new variety. He had climbed the central arch and in the bridge of life, painfully conscious of the solitude of his heart in the midst of the busy crowd, and cherishing a vague but earnest desire for deliverance. ideal form, lovely as the day-spring, and radiant with love to him, haunted his path, and he lived in the faith that the bright reality would at length be disclosed, when his spirit should know the blessedness of that union which mystically represents to man the design and the perfection of his being. She came, or seemed to come, in the form of Elgiva-the glorious impersonation of that dazzling fantasy-the actual fulfilment of many a dream, too fondly courted by his solemn and overburdened mind. Nature had made her beautiful, and, even when the maiden's ruby lips were closed, her beaming eye and dimpled cheek gave utterance to thoughts, now more joyous or impassioned, now more profound or holy, than any which could be imparted through the coarser vehicle of articulate speech. So judged the enamoured interpreter of that fair tablet-mistaking for emanations of her mind the glowing hues reflected by the brilliant surHe threw over the object face from his own.

of his homage all the most rich and graceful draperies stored in the wardrobe of his own pensive imagination; unconsciously worshipped the creature of his own fancy; and adorned her with a diadem which, though visible to him alone, had for a true heart a greater value than the proudest crown which could be shared with kings.

Such was not Elgiva's judgment. Her ear drank in the flatteries of Edwin; nor had he long to sue for the hand which had been plighted to the champion and defender of his One word from him would have throne. A ready vengeance was in the grasp sealed the doom of his successful rival. But of Leolf. he probes the incurable wound which had no such words passed his lips. In his solitude blighted all the hopes, and dispelled all the illusions of life. He broods with melancholy intentness over the bleak prospect, and drains to the dregs the bitter cup of irremediable desolation. But in his noble spirit there is no place for scorn, resentment, or reproach. His duty, though it be to protect with his life the authors of his wretchedness, is performed in the true spirit of duty;-quietly, earnestly, and without