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 above-described 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,

Into a foaming flood: upon its brink

The Lord and his small train do stand appalled.
With torch and bell from their high battlements
The monks do summon to the pass in vain;
He must return to-night."

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.

Of her, as far as she is concerned in this fourth 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 everywhere 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 British 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:

Of the fifth 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 m a chapel, with all the vessels and other preparations for the holy sacrament. A hymn is actually sung on the stage by the chorister boys! For the rest, Imogine, who now and then talks deliriously, but who is always light-headed as far as her gown and hair can make her so, wanders about in dark woods with cavernrocks and precipices in the back scene; and a number of mute dramatis persona move in and out continually, for whose presence there is always at least this reason, that they afford something to be seen by that very large part of a Drury Lane audience who have small chance of hearing a word. She had, it appears, taken her child with her, but what becomes of the child, whether she murdered it or not, nobody can tell, nobody can learn; it was a riddle at the representation, and after a most attentive perusal of the play, a riddle it remains:

"No more I know, I wish I did,
And I would tell it all to you;
For what became of this poor child
There's none that ever knew."

WORDSWORTH's Thorn.

Our whole information* is derived from the following words:

Where is thy child?

CLOTIL. (pointing to the cavern into which she has looked):

Oh, he lies cold within his cavern tomb!

Why dost thou urge her with the horrid theme?

PRIOR (who will not, the reader may observe, be disappointed of his dose of scolding) It was to make (query wake) one living chord o' th' heart,

And I will try, tho' my own breaks at it.

Where is thy child?

IMOG. (with a frantic laugh):

The forest-fiend hath snatched him

He (who? the fiend or the child?) rides the night-mare thro' the wizard 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 wizardstream by which Milton, in his Lycidas, so finely characterises the spreading Deva, fabulosus amnis. Observe, too, these images stand unique in the speeches of Imogine, without the slightest resemblance to any thing she says before or after. But we are weary. The characters in this act frisk about, here, there, and everywhere, as teasingly as the Jack o'Lantern lights which mischievous boys, but for its timely appearance. How ungrate ful then act further to notice its fate?

This child is an important personage, for I see not by what possible means the author could have ended the second and third acts

from across a narrow street, throw with a looking-glass on the faces of their opposite neighbours. Bertram disarmed, outheroding Charles de Moor in the Robbers, befaces the collected knights of St. Anselm (all in complete armour), 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 youthful sinner metamorphosed into an old scold, and that this Bertram would appear at last to be his son. Imogine reappears 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 folly and impudence to exclaim :

"I died no felon's death;

A warrior's weapon freed a warrior's soul !"

IT

CHAPTER XXIV.

CONCLUSION.

T 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 of the magnet manifest the being and 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 phenomena of Time: and the perception and acknowledgment of the proporsionality and appropriateness of the Present to the Past, prove to the afflicted Soul, that it has not yet been deprived of the sight of God, that it can still recognise the effective presence of a Father, though through a darkened glass and a turbid atmosphere, though of a Father that is chastising it. And 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 it an intelligible effect of an intelligible cause: even though the discovery did at the same moment preclude all hope of restoration. Hence the mystic theologians, 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) has 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 enduring—an eternity without time, and as it were below it-God 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.

* Classically too, as far as consists with the allegorizing fancy of the modern, that still striving to project the inward, contradistinguishes itself from the seeming ease

with which the poetry of the ancients reflects the world without. Casimir affords, perhaps, the most striking instance of this charac teristic difference. For his style and diction

"Me longus silendi

Edit amor facilesque luctus

"Hausit medullas. Fugerit ocyus,
Simul negantem visere jusseris
Aures amicorum, et loquacem
Questibus evacuâris iram.

"Olim querendo desinimus queri,
Ipsoque fletu lacryma perditur,
Nec fortis æquè, si per omnes
Cura volat residetque ramos.

"Vires amicis perdit in auribus
Minorque semper dividitur dolor,
Per multa permissus vagari
Pectora."

Id. Lib. iii. Od. 5.

I shall not make this an excuse, however, for troubling my readers with any complaints or explanations, with which, as readers, they nave little or no concern. It may suffice (for the present at least) to declare that the causes that have delayed the publication of these volumes for so long a period after they had been printed off, were not connected with any neglect of my own; and that they would form an instructive comment on the chapter concerning authorship as a trade, addressed to young men of genius in the first volume of this work. I remember the ludicrous effect produced on my mind by the first sentence of an autobiography, which happily for the writer was as meagre in incidents as it is well possible for the life of an individual to be "The eventful life which I am about to record, from the hour in which I rose into existence en this planet, &c." Yet when, notwithstanding this warning example of self-importance before me, I review my own life, I cannot refrain from applying the same epithet to it, and with more than ordinary emphasis-and no private feeling, that affected myself only, should prevent me from publishing the same (for write it I assuredly shall, should life and leisure be granted me) if continued reflection should strengthen my present belief, that my history would add its contingent to the enforcement of one important truth, viz. that we must not only love our neighbours as ourselves, but ourselves likewise as our neighbours; and that we can do neither unless we love God above both.

are really classical: while Cowley, who resembles Casimir in many respects, completely barbarizes his Latinity, and even his metre, by the heterogeneous 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, ex

cited the surprise of all scholars. I was much amused last summer with the laughable affright, with which an Italian poet perused a page of Cowiey's Davideis, contrasted with the enthusiasm with which he first ran through, and then read aloud, Milton's Mansus and Ad Patrem.