It is in his last interview with Elgiva that the character of Leolf is best exhibited. He has rescued her from captivity, and, during a transient pause in her flight with him to Edwin, the inconstant Queen expresses her gratitude, and suggests her contrition. It is a scene of pathos and dignity which we should rejoice to transfer into our pages, but which would be impaired by abridgement, and is too long for quotation as it stands.

If Leolf is the example of the magnanimous endurance of the ills of life, Athulf, his friend and brother soldier, is the portrait of a man born to encounter and to baffle them. It is drawn withi the elaborate care, and touched and retouched with the parental fondness with which authors cherish, and sometimes enervate, their favoured progeny. Unfortunately, Athulf is surrounded by a throng of dramatic persons, who afford him no sufficient space for action or for speech. We become acquainted with him chiefly by observing the impression he leaves on the minds of his associates, his enemies, and his friends. Wulfstan the Wise is one of these; and he will describe Athulf with a warmth and vigour which it is impossible to emulate, although it must be admitted to be not inconsiderably abstruse-an infirmity to which the good Wulfstan is greatly addicted.

Much mirth he hath, and yet less mirth than fancy.
His is that nature of humanity

Which both ways doth redound, rejoicing now
With soarings of the soul, anon brought low :
For such the law that rules the larger spirits.
This soul of man, this elemental crasis,
Completed, should present the universe
Abounding in all kinds; and unto all

One law is common,—that their act and reach
Stretch'd to the farthest is resilient ever,
And in resilience hath its plenary force.
Against the gust remitting fiercelier burns
The fire, than with the gust it burnt before.
The richest mirth, the richest sadness too,
Stands from a groundwork of its opposite;
For these extremes upon the way to meet
Take a wide sweep of Nature, gathering in
Harvests of sundry seasons.'

With Dunstan, Leolf, Wulfstan, and Athulf, are associated a rich variety of other characters-some elaborately, some slightly, sketched-and some exhibited in that rapid outline which is designed to suggest, rather than to portray the image which occupies the poet's fancy. There is Odo the Archbishop, the sport of the winds and currents, into which this victim of dignity and circumstances is passively borne-a sort of rouge dragon, or cla

rencieux king-at-arms, hurried by some misadventure in feats of real chivalry, with nothing but tabard and mantle to oppose to the sharp sword and heavy battle-axe ;-and Clarenbald, by office a Lord Chancellor, a pompous patronizing appendage of royalty, who, in an age of war and treason, and amidst the clash of arms, is no better than a kind of master of the ceremonies in the Aula Regia ;-and Ruold, a hare-brained gallant, whom the frown of a polished brow, or the smile of a dimpled cheek, will mould to the fair one's purposes, though faith, life, and honour should be the forfeit ;-and Edwin himself, the slave in turn of every passion which assails him, love, anger, despondency, impatience, and revenge, ever wasting his energies to no purpose, and playing the fool with the indefeasible dignity of him who at once wears and worships an hereditary crown ;-and Elgiva, the stormcompelling beauty, who sets a world in flames, and who has proceeded from the hands of her dramatic creator with a character entirely neutral and unformed; in order that all may ascribe to her such fascinations as may best explain to each the mystery of her influence over the weak and the wise, the feeble and the resolute; and Emma, a damsel whose virtue (for she is virtuous and good and firm of heart) is but little indebted to her discretion; for the maiden is possessed by the spirit of intrigue and intermeddling, and, at his bidding, assumes by turns the disguises of a wife, of a strolling minstrel, and of a priest, to disentangle the webs which she has spun ;-and there are military leaders and ecclesiastics, fortune-tellers and scholars, jesters, swineherds, and foresters to each of whom is assigned some share in the dialogue or in the plot which glows like the firmament with stars of every magnitude, clustering into constellations of endless variety.

This crowding of the scene at once conduces to the beauty, and impairs the interest of this drama. If our arithmetic fail us not, there appear on the stage not fewer than fifty interlocutors, who jostle and cross each other-impede the development of the fable, and leave on the mind of the reader, or of the spectator, an impression at once indistinct and fatiguing. It is not till after a second or a third perusal, that the narrative or succession of events emerges distinctly from the throng of the doings and the sayings. But each successive return to this drama brings to light, with a still increasing brilliancy, the exquisite structure of the verse, the manly vigour of thought, and the deep wisdom to which it gives most musical utterance; the cordial sympathy of the poet with all that is to be loved and revered in our common nature, and his no less generous antipathy for all that debases and corrupts it; his sagacious and varied insight into the chambers of imagery in the human heart; and the all-controlling and fault

less taste which makes him intuitively conscious of the limits which separate the beautiful from the false, the extravagant, and the affected.

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A great writer is his own most formidable rival. If Edwin the Fair' shall fail of due acceptance, it will be more to Philip Van Artevelde' than to any other hostile critic that such ill success will be really owing. Mr Taylor has erected a standard by which he must be measured and judged. The sect of the Takersdown is a large and active fraternity, among whom there are never wanting some to speak of powers impaired, and of exhausted resources. Untrue, in fact, as such a censure would be, it would not be quite destitute of plausibility. Philip Van Artevelde has a deeper and a more concentrated interest than Edwin the Fair. It approaches far more nearly to the true character of tragedy. Virtues, hazardous in their growth, majestic in their triumph, and venerable even in the fall, shed a glory round the hero, with which the guilt and the impunity of Dunstan form a painful contrast. The scene of the play, moreover, is more warm and genial, and the versification flows more easily, and in closer resemblance to the numerous prose of Massinger, and of Fletcher. There is also less of the uniformity which may be observed in the style of Edwin,' where churchmen, laics, and ladies are all members of one family, and have all the family failing, of talking philosophy. The idle King himself moralizes not a little; and even the rough huntsman pauses to compare the fawning of his dogs with the flatteries of the court. But if the earlier work be the greater drama, the later is assuredly the greater poem. More abundant mental resources of every kind are there knowledge more comprehensive an imagination at once more prompt and more discursive-the ear tuned to a keener sense of harmony-the points of contact and sympathy with the world multiplied-and the visible traces of that kind influence which passing years have obviously shed on a mind always replete with energy and courage, but which had not, till now, given proof that it was informed in an equal degree by charity, benevolence, and compassion.

It is, indeed, rather as a poet than as a dramatist that Mr Taylor claims the suffrage of those with whom it rests to confer the high reward of his labours. In a memorable essay, prefixed to his former tragedy, he explained and vindicated, not his dramatic but his poetical creed, and then, as now, proceeded to illustrate his own doctrines. To the credit of having discovered any latent truth, or of having unfolded any new theory of the sublime art he pursues, he, of course, made no pretension. It would have been utterly at variance with the robust sense which

is impressed on every page he writes. His object was to refute a swarm of popular sectarians, by proclaiming anew the ancient and Catholic faith. As the first postulate of his argument, he laid it down, that if a man would write well, either with rhythm or without, it behoved him to have something to say. From this elementary truth, he proceeded to the more abstruse and questionable tenet, that no man can be a very great poet who is not 'also a great philosopher.'

To what muse the highest honour is justly due, and what exercises of the poetic faculty ought to command, in the highest degree, the reverence of mankind, are problems not to be resolved without an enquiry into various recondite principles. But it is a far less obscure question what is the poetry which men do really love, ponder, commit to memory, incorporate into the mass of their habitual thoughts, digest as texts, or cherish as anodynes. This is a matter of fact, which Paternoster Row, if endowed with speech, could best determine. It would be brought to a decision, if some literary deluge (in the shape, for example, of a prohibitory book-tax) should sweep over the land-consigning to the abyss our whole poetical patrimony, and all the treasures of verse accumulated in our own generation. In that frightful catastrophe, who are the poets whom pious hands would be stretched out to save? The philosophical? They would sink unheeded, with Lucretius at their head. Or the allegorical? The waves would close unresistingly over them, though the Faery Queen herself should be submerged. Or the descriptive? Windsor Forest and Grongar Hill would disappear, with whole galleries of inferior paintings. Or the witty? In such a tempest even Hudibras would not be rich enough to attract the zeal of the Salvors. Or the moral? Essays on man, with an infinite variety of the pleasures' of man's intellectual faculties, would sink unwept in the vast whirlpool. There too would perish, Lucan, with a long line of heroic cantos, romances in verse, and rhymes-amorous, fantastic, and bacchanalian. But, at whatever cost or hazard, leaves would be snatched, in that universal wreck, from the digressions and interstitial passages of the three great Epics of Greece, Italy, and England. The bursts of exultation and agony in the Agamemnon' would be rescued; with some of the Anthologies, and a few of the Odes of Anacreon and Horace. There would be a sacred emulation to save, from the all-absorbing flood, L'Allegro' and Il Penseroso;' with the 'Odes and Fables of Dryden,' 'Henry and Emma,' 'The Rape of the Lock,' and the Epistle to Abelard;' Gray's Bard,' and Elegy,' 'Lord Lyttleton's Monody,' The Traveller,' 'The Deserted Village,' and 'The Task,' Mr Campbell's Shorter

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Poems, and some of Mr Wordsworth's Sonnets; while the very spirit of martyrdom would be roused for the preservation of Burns, and the whole Shakspearian theatre; ballads, and old songs out of number; much devotional Psalmody, and, far above all the rest, the inspired songs of the sweet singers of Israel.

No man, says Johnson, is a hypocrite in his pleasures. At school we learn by heart the De Arte Poetica. At college we are lectured in the Poetics. Launched into the wide world, we criticise or write, as it may happen, essays on the sublime and beautiful. But on the lonely sea-shore, or river-bank, or in the. evening circle of familiar faces, or when the hearth glows on the silent chamber round which a man has ranged the chosen companions of his solitary hours, with which of them does he really hold the most frequent and grateful intercourse? Is it not with those who best give utterance to his own feelings, whether gay or mournful; or who best enable him to express the otherwise undefinable emotions of the passing hour? Philosophy is the high privilege of a few, but the affections are the birthright of all. It was an old complaint, that when wisdom lifted up her voice in the streets, none would regard it; but when was the genuine voice of passion ever unheeded? It is the universal language. It is the speech intelligible to every human being, though spoken, with any approach to perfection, by that little company alone, who are from time to time inspired to reveal man to himself, and to sustain and multiply the bonds of the universal brotherhood. It is a language of such power as to reject the aid of ornament, fulfilling its object best when it least strains and taxes the merely intellectual faculties. The poets, whom men secretly worship, are distinguished from the rest, not only by the art of ennobling common subjects; but by the rarer gift of imparting beauty to common thoughts, interest to common feelings, and dignity to common speech. True genius of this order can never be vulgar, and can, therefore, afford to be homely. It can never be trite, and can, therefore, pass along the beaten paths.

What philosophy is there in the wail of Cassandra? in the last dialogue of Hector and Andromache? in Gray's Elegy?' or in the Address to Mary in Heaven?' And yet when did philosophy ever appeal to mankind in a voice equally profound. About four-and-twenty years ago Mr Wolfe established a great and permanent reputation by half a dozen stanzas. Almost as many centuries have passed since the great poetess of Greece effected a similar triumph with as small an expenditure of words. Was Mr Wolfe a philosopher, or was Sappho ? They were simply poets, who could set the indelible impress of genius on what all