of his mother, the only link that bound him to the humanities of life. A deeper calamity still has overtaken him. His faith in himself is gone; and henceforward his strength is the strength of dogged resolution alone. As such it bursts forth once more in the concluding scene of the drama. In one point he was vulnerable; and we feel that the iron has entered into his soul. He has lost the wholeness and adamantine unity of his being. He may stand among the ruins which he overshadows, but the fortress of his soul is rifted from the base to the battlements. Victory itself could not restore Dunstan to what he was:

'Why did I quit the Cloister?
I have fought
The battles of Jehovah; I have braved
The perfidies of Courts, the wrath of Kings,
Desertion, treachery, and I murmured not,-
The fall from puissance, the shame of flight,
The secret knife, the public proclamation,-
And how am I rewarded? God hath raised
New enemies against me,-from without
The furious Northman,-from within, far worse,
Heart-sickness and a subjugating grief.
She was my friend-I had but her-no more,
No other upon earth-and as for Heaven,

I am as they that seek a sign, to whom

No sign is given. My Mother! Oh, my Mother!'-p. 236.

From this moment calamity after calamity overtakes the monastic party. Every hour brings intelligence of some new town sacked, or monastery burned, by the Danes. Thirsting for revenge on the murderers of his mother, Dunstan stoops to conciliate, and offers terms to the king: but Elgiva has fallen; and the following is the reply with which his reluctant proposals are greeted:

'Herald.

My Lord, he saith
That with a bloody and a barbarous hand
You have torn out the very sweetest life
That ever sanctified humanity.

He saith that should he covenant to make peace
With the revolted Angels, yet with you

He would not, for he deems you more accursed,

And deeper in perdition. And he saith

Not she that died at Gibeah, whose twelve parts
Sent several through the borders and the coasts
Raised Israel, was avenged more bloodily
Than shall Elgiva be, the murdered Queen.
Wherefore he bids you come to battle forth,
And add another crime or answer this.'-p. 244.

The concluding scene is in the Cathedral of Malpas, where the

monks

monks have been performing a service of thanksgiving for their victory. On a bier in the transept lies the body of Elgiva awaiting burial, where it is found by Edwin, who, mortally wounded, has risen from his bed in the delirium of fever and made his attendants conduct him to the church in which his wife was to be interred. The wanderings of the young king on recognising the corpse, and the breaking out of his mind into light and passion the moment before his death, are deeply affecting, and appear to us, when compared with Leolf's last interview with Elgiva, a remarkable and instructive instance of the difference between the tragic and the pathetic. In this scene the injurer and the injured are once more, and for the last time, confronted. The king's wound opens again, and as the blood flows from him his fever abates, and he knows the voice of his destroyer. He dies summoning Dunstan to answer the cry of innocent blood at the judgment-seat of Heaven. At the same moment the battleshout of the Danes is heard as they surmount the walls and burst the gates of the destined city; and it is in the strength of despair that Dunstan, collecting once more his energies, exclaims

'Give me the crucifix. Bring out the relics.
Host of the Lord of Hosts, forth once again!'

The scene which we would contrast with this, as exemplifying the pathetic without trenching on the tragic, is the only one which suspends for a moment the precipitated movement of the fifth Act; and it is the more touching for its stillness in the midst of commotion, as it hangs like one of those little woody islands so often seen dividing the waters of rivers just before they reach the rapids:

Elgiva.

Oh Leolf! much

I owe you, and if aught a kingdom's wealth
Affords could pay the debt ...

Leolf.

A kingdom's wealth!

Elgiva! by the heart the heart is paid.

You have your kingdom, my heart hath its love.

We are provided.

Elgiva.

Oh! in deeds so kind,

And can you be so bitter in your words!

Have I no offerings of the heart, wherewith
Love's service to requite?

Leolf.
The least of boons
Scattered by Royal charity's careless hand
O'erpays my service. To requite the rest,
All you possess is but a bankrupt's bond.
This is the last time we shall speak together;
Forgive me, therefore, if my speech be bold.
I loved you once; and in such sort I loved,

That

That anguish hath but burnt the image in,
And I must bear it with me to my grave.
I loved you once; dearest Elgiva, yes,
Even now my heart doth feed upon that love
As in its flower and freshness, ere the grace
And beauty of the fashion of it perished.
It was too anxious to be fortunate,
And it must now be buried, self-embalmed,
Within my breast, or, living there recluse,
Talk to itself and traffic with itself;
And like a miser that puts nothing out,
And asks for no return, must I tell o'er
The treasures of the past.

Elgiva.
Can no return
Be rendered? And is gratitude then nothing?
Leolf. To me 'tis nothing-being less than love.
But cherish it as to your own soul precious!
The heavenliest lot that earthly natures know
Is to be affluent in gratitude.

Be grateful and be happy. For myself,
If sorrow be my portion, yet shall hope,

That springs from sorrow and aspires to Heaven,
Be with me still. When this disastrous war
Is ended, I shall quit my country's shores,
A pilgrim and a suitor to the love

Which dies not nor betrays.-What cry is that?
I thought I heard a voice.

Elgiva.

So tender, so severe !

Leolf.

Oh Leolf, Leolf!

Mistake me not.

I would not be unjust: I have not been;
Now less than ever could I be, for now
A sacred and judicial calmness holds
Its mirror to my soul; at once disclosed
The picture of the past presents itself
Minule yet vivid, such as it is seen
In his last moments by a drowning man.
Look at this skeleton of a once green leaf:
Time and the elements conspired its fall;
The worm hath eaten out the tenderer parts,
And left this curious anatomy

Distinct of structure-made so by decay.
So, at this moment, lies my life before me,-
In all its intricacies, all its errors-

If this scene is the only break in the changeful rapidity of the action towards the conclusion of the drama, on the other hand, in the earlier part, there are few exceptions to the smoothness and even tenor of its way. We consider the contrast in this respect to be stronger than is warrantable; yet some justification may be alleged in the art with which the earlier portions prepare us for the catastrophe, not only by familiarising us with the characters of the drama and the part assigned to each, but also by impressing us with the magnitude of the interests at stake, and making us thoroughly enter into the spirit of the age. We feel that the action of the drama is advancing surely, though silently. All day long we watch the exhalations ascending: gradually they form themselves into a canopy over the fatal plain; and as in a moment the sun sets, the collected storm bursts, and the thunderbolt falls.

The instantaneousness of the retribution which overtakes the monastic party is not warranted by the chronological fact; but we are not prepared to say that Mr. Taylor has stretched too far the dramatist's privilege by this condensation of events. The true cause of the Danish conquest is to be found in the divisions of England; and by the eye of the Seer, cause and effect are seen together as one. In real life our actions are so various, the tissue so confused, and the interval between our deeds and their results so considerable, that few men discover the moral of the drama; experience comes too late, and we are left practically to walk by faith, not sight. The poet, by a selection of events not less ideal than his creation of character, and by a privilege of compression which connects historical facts with their moral causes, reduces the chaos of outward circumstance to order, and illuminates it with the light of intellectual truth. For this reason all injurious bonds' of Time are as easily broken through in the poet's marshalling of causes and effects as are those of Space in the battles of the Gods.

We should have wished to give some specimens of the humour with which several scenes abound, as well as of the keen remarks, sarcasms, and truths put in edgewise, that diversify them. We should have been well pleased also to extract Wulfstan's descrip

tion of Oxford: it will touch a sympathetic chord in many a heart that turns with gratitude and love to that ancient and venerable University,' which, after the lapse of so many centuries, remains still a secure asylum for learning and recluse genius. But our space admits only the following passage taken from the first scene in which Edwin and Elgiva converse together :

What a charm

Elgiva.
The neighbouring grove to this lone chamber lends!
I've loved it from my childhood. How long since
Is it that standing in this compassed window
The blackbird sang us forth; from yonder bough
That hides the arbour, loud and full at first
Warbling his invitations, then with pause
And fraction fitfully as evening fell,
The while the rooks, a spotty multitude,
Far distant crept across the amber sky!'

6

We shall now proceed to observe on some faults and failures in Edwin the Fair,' one failure especially which surprises us in so elaborate a work, and one fault which we regard as by no means a trifling one. The underplot of Emma and Ernway, which in the beginning holds out the expectation of a light and pleasant interest to be interwoven with the darker tissue of the main story, very soon falls short of its promise, is but imperfectly blended as the play proceeds, and at the conclusion is left at a loose end with hardly a hint of what we are to suppose the upshot. Ernway is utterly superfluous; and Emma, but that she makes herself agreeable, would be felt to be almost equally so. It is clear to us that in the introduction of these characters the author made a false start, that he did not see his way before him distinctly, that he trusted to Fortune to shape his ends, rough-hew them as he might,' and that Fortune used him but scurvily in the matter. This failure we cannot regard as unimportant; but the other fault which we have to notice is a more serious one. The device of Dunstan, in conjunction with the Queen Mother, for betraying Edwin and Elgiva into an intercourse fatal to honour and innocence is in our judgment not only a blemish in the poetical conception of Dunstan's character, but a feature as derogatory to the higher interests of the story as it is offensive in itself. Dunstan is sufficiently exhibited in his character of tempter by the scene in which he endeavours to procure the abdication of Edwin it was therefore unnecessary to embody the craft of the fanatic in a form so mean as well as so wicked. The scene in question too occurring so early in the work may have the effect of presenting Dunstan in a light so odious as to incapacitate some readers from doing justice to the loftier part of Dunstan's character.

The