and excess of his passion for right. This most difficult task has been accomplished by Mr. Horne with complete success.

In the scene immediately following, we are introduced to the trembling, terror-stricken Duchess she is alone, and as she perceives the Duke approach, retreats in dread at his appearance (he has just killed Garcia), her words finely expressing his habitual strength of self-command by the excess of her astonishment and fear at the wildness he now displays

The agonised cry of the mother for her child, and the horrible conviction that in her state of maddened apprehension she will immediately rush into the presence of his weltering corpse, would produce a thrilling, overpowering effect in representation. Even in reading, the imagination seems to hear, with Cosmo, the sound of doom for his two sons, magnified by passion into a sense of universal doom, the earth being now no more for him

How finely do these half glimpses, and startling momentary sounds and sights, described by the attendants and retainers of the court, suggest the sources of the historical tradition concerning these sudden deaths, which the official records of the period all very dutifully attribute to a pestilence. Still Cosmo falls not: supported by his inward strength and greatness of purpose, he stands firm. With Grecian simplicity and grandeur he is most graphically presented to the imagination in the majesty of his grief, by Passato the sculptor, as he appears in the gardens of the ducal palace at sunset;

"Pass. 'Tis Cosmo yonder! Darkly and tall he stands, Like an extinguish'd beacon of the night,

Whose watchman hath been cast into the sea."

The following sublime soliloquy concludes the scene that ensues between them:

"Cos. On the grey slope of life, when friends fall off, And e'en the fresh flowers and the clouds look old ;

When natural sweets are bitter in the mind,

Hope dying of sick memory soon as born,
And beauty, like a lily's pure, cold urn,
Standing in Lethe's waters, wakes no sense
To ravishment, no thoughts to urge our steps;
While grief, experience, and oblivion,

In sequence old, come to dismiss the heart ;
Mighty revealings of an after-state

Flit through the brain, and sobbings fill the ear
From the great winds' quadruple origin,

And make man fear himself. But Justice reigns!

Creation and destruction are the extremes,

With all the heavens for centre. Still, we shudder:
Yet one power holds. Unwavering consciousness
Of general practice in humanity,

Is all that shores us up against the eye
Of deep self-scrutiny; the only power
Which can enable man, howe'er appall'd,

To look his own being steadily in the face."

The tragedy approaches its consummation. The pirate Zacheo, (who witnessed the death of Giovanni in the forest, after the fight which he himself provoked, and madly commenced,) has been seized, and pardoned by order of the Duke, before whom he now appears to return thanks for his life, and through him the whole truth is revealed. Stunned and appalled, Cosmo hears his story, and his noble spirit folds its wide-spanning wings at the recital, with anguished words. He has now reached the final bourne of desolation. The passion which has carried him onwards, towering over all human weakness, and even human affection, now hurries him rushing downwards to the dark abyss of doom. His great pride is made low, his grand and stately course is proved crooked and uneven. His attendants mark the change; how artist-like and grand, and how affecting is this description:—

"Chios. Within this hour he seems to have lost himself,
Like Saturn wandering through a wilderness;

Or he doth stand, a solid Dismay! How different
He looked when Titian painted him!”

We quote, without comment, a portion of the last scene. It is in the interior of the chapel of San Lorenzo. Three biers are elevated in the

centre. The priests and mourners, and Ippolita, the chief mourner, are present. Cosmo enters, "his face all pale, and with disordered hair."

"Cos. (advancing slowly and abstractedly.)
My lofty and firm motives that once held
United as the Alps, are changed i' the acting
To martyr'd ashes- staked humanity!

This world's a bubble: see! where now it bursts,
And men and things fly off, and melt in air!
Yon spheres are temporal, and a yawn will end
The Ptolemaic dream! Our brain 's mere dust,
Moisten'd and moved by rays and dews from heaven :
Soon dark-dry — void Creation's final lord -

-

Oblivion, crown'd with infinite blank stars -
Inherits all! I've done a hydra wrong!

Nor will its monstrous constellation blazon

My deed, till heaven dissolve!

"Priest. My liege!

"Chios Your Highness!

"Cos. (still in abstraction). Could I do otherwise?—I might have

waited!

The reference made in the last line to the words of the poor scholar, in the scene we formerly quoted, is another of those intimate touches of the dramatic art, which may be truly called identification. The circumstance, marking as it does the deep impression made at the time by those words, and the application here, are deeply and intensely pathetic.

Cosmo now recollecting the desolate present, sees the biers and the preparations, and prepares for the commencement of the funeral ceremony, but refusing his chair of state seats himself in "a confessional." He is impelled there by a mental consciousness a confession to be spoken, but not audibly nor to man's ear, since none of earth be this expression noted "can thoroughly know what's in the soul."

66 MASS.

Celestial beams dry up our grief,

While these bright spirits now ascend ;

Our hearts pour forth but for relief –
We know their life can never end!
No stain, no guilt is theirs:
Then purify our prayers,

And clear our souls

COSMO starts forward. The Mass pauses abruptly.

"Cos. This mass I like not!-it is vague - defective,

And most reproachful! Cease it on the instant!

How should my prayers be pure? Yet, wherefore not?
Giovanni died of pestilence - -so did Garcia;

By a worse pestilence cut off — an error,

As monstrous, dark, and pagod-like in state,
As the united sense of right is vast

In all its bright proportions!

"Priest. Good, my liege!

“Chios (aside). Grief hath disturb'd his brain.
"Dal. (aside). What he hath done

Is now too plain. How terrible a secret
For his appall'd successor's ear!

"Chios (to PRIEST). Speak to him.

Lo! where his heavy scalding tears pour down!

"Cos. (with forlorn dignity). Continue! Noble gentlemen and friends, I cannot explain these things. My present state

Savours too much o' the elements. 'Tis a story

Such as in pealing thunder might be told ·

Yet better lost in echoes o'er the sea,

Since none can thoroughly know what's in the soul.
Pray ye, excuse me! I am not much in years;

And tho' this morn methought my hair look'd grey,

"Tis but a few nights' snows. Yet, sorrow is strong,

And I an unarm'd and a childless man.

Once more, your pardon. [He advances to the lofty chair placed for him.
Let the mass proceed!

MASS.

From depths of gloom and grief

Seek not a vain relief,

Till the heart's heavy load o'erflow:

But grant us strength, O Heaven! to bear
This weight of agony and fear

That presses down the atmosphere,

And round our brows with searing glow

Clings like the leaden crown of Woe!

[Seats himself.

[As the Mass concludes, Cosmo falls back in the chair.

"Dal. The Duke! he faints!

"All. The Duke!

[Nobles and Attendants rush towards him.

"Cos. 'Tis well. Great God, thou knowest!

[Dies."

We here close our extracts from this great tragedy, a work not more lofty in its conception than grand and majestic in execution. It is the pure, high tragic drama; dealing with the elemental passions of our being, elements most powerful, and no less fearful; involving in their terrible conflicts mighty woes, unutterable griefs, such as strong natures only can follow to their results, while the weaker, appalled, stop half way. Cosmo de' Medici is carried onwards uncompromisingly to the last; the whole course of the passion, the actions it involves, and their consequences, are unflinchingly gone through. This it is which forms the grandeur of the work, and will ensure it immortality of fame. Mr. Horne has accomplished the lofty purpose of tragedy; looking our being "steadily in the face," he has recognised its conditions, and has not shrunk from meeting them. With the truth of a high poetic imagination, and a strong dramatic genius, he has given himself up to his subject, and has followed it to its depths and its heights. Hence his work is, as we have said, a study of noble humanity, and from the study the heart rises chastened and purified.

Between the period when Cosmo enters "a solid Dismay," in the last scene of the tragedy, his great mind being shaken to its foundations, and the last words with which his spirit throws off the weight of mortality, how great a work is wrought? Ages pass over him in that short space of time; and, through him, over the spirits of those whose imaginations and sympathies throw them into unity with his spirit. It is on his entrance to that there, in the presence of death, that he sees in its dark and dire

can

chapel

completeness the gulph of desolation into which he has plunged. His being has become ashes, the mere residue and witness of the fiery torment through which he has passed. Out of those ashes, before the close of this wonderful scene, the renovated spirit, purified in the furnace of mortal agonies, rises regenerate, born again to the grandeur of humility, and the child-like peacefulness of faith. There are four great epochs in his spirit during the course of this scene. The first we have noticed: it is utter and conscious desolation; the second is remorse, with its fearful accompaniment of horror, standing aghast at the view it opens, when he starts forward and stops the Mass: the third commences when his soul recognises the strength of sorrow, and taking the lofty chair placed for him, and clothed in the dignity of forlorn humanity, he unresistingly faces his destiny; then it is when,

"This weight of agony and fear,

That presses down the atmosphere,
And round our brows with searing glow,
Clings like the leaden crown of woe

then it is that the great work is finished —

""Tis well. Great God, thou knowest.

[Dies."

We had intended to have gone entirely through the "Death of Marlowe," but our limits will not permit of this; and rather than bestow upon it an incomplete share of attention, or give short extracts which can convey no just impression of its fair proportions as a whole, we prefer quoting a criticism which appeared at the time of its publication, from the pen of a well-known philosophical writer and speaker; despairing of characterising it so truly in such few words:

"An intensity of truth, passion, and poetry pervades this sketch, if such it must be called, which demonstrates the hand of a master. But the deep philosophy of the heart, the soul of purity in pollution, the rapid and resistless power of the catastrophe, indeed the whole composition is catastrophe of a foregone and shadowed play, and the strong imbuing of all with the genuine spirit of the Elizabethan drama, can only be understood by the qualified and appreciating reader."

We have fearlessly recorded our conviction that another great dramatic age has commenced; with such witnesses as we have here before us who can doubt it? We hail at such a moment the appearance of a second edition of Mr. Black's translation of the "Lectures of Schlegel on Dramatic Literature," worthily and appropriately accompanied with an Introduction by Mr. Horne, written in a spirit of the profoundest metaphysical truth. This is an earnest of an increasing desire and appreciation of just and enlightened criticism, one of the great requisitions towards the rise of our modern drama. But another desideratum still more important must be looked for in the reformation of our theatres, their restrictions, their faulty management, and gaudy Dutch-painting-like style of decoration. The theatre, with all its appurtenances, cannot satisfy the imagination, but must learn to excite it by passionate representations, self-dependent, and untrammelled by externals.