her maternal love an animal instinct.

Of a very

different order is Wulfstan the Wise :-a recluse and a philosopher; subtle of intellect, yet simple as a child; a mind rather than a man; searching all things for their inner laws, and scarcely noticing their outward effects; seeing through all objects, and therefore seeing them not; drawing his manifold wisdom from the springs of intuitive and discursive reason, and yet, with amusing and not unnatural perverseness, fancying his especial gifts to be knowledge of the world, and skill in the conduct of business: by the very largeness of his being, exempted from the agitations of life, like a ship which lies along too great an expanse of waves to feel their shocks; yet prompt in sympathy as well as daring where need is, and at a word of kindness moistening his visionary eyes with dews that rise from no Olympian spring. This character could hardly have belonged to the age illustrated here; but it is deeply conceived, and beautifully set forth. Very exquisite too is the sketch of the Princess Ethilda, though it is too slightly drawn to be generally appreciated. She is one of those beings whom in real life we love without exactly knowing why, or caring to know-innocent, devout, solicitous, yet trusting, and adding the gracefulness of her illustrious descent to that of her youth and sex. She has in a singular degree that charm which consists in the absence of selfasserting or disproportionate qualities; and we grow to understand her not a little through the impression she makes on others. The scholar, the minstrel, the

soldier, all love her; and even the queen-mother does not hate her. Earl Athulf is described by Wulfstan—

As one whose courage high and humour gay
Cover a vein of caution: his true heart,
Intrepid though it be, not blind to danger,
But through imagination's optic glass
Discerning, yea, and magnifying it may be,
What still he dares.

prompt for enterprise

By reason of his boldness, and yet apt
For composition, owing to that vein

Of fancy which enhances, prudence which wards
Contingencies of peril.1

This character seems drawn mostly from observation, that of Dunstan from reflection and imaginative induction. Leolf, more than all the rest, bears the impress of that poetic sympathy on the part of the author which is so essential to the vividness of the

picture as well as to its accuracy. He is thus presented to us as he paces the seashore near his castle at Hastings

Leolf.

Here again I stand,

Again and on the solitary shore

Old ocean plays as on an instrument,

Making that ancient music, when not known?
That ancient music, only not so old

As He who parted ocean from dry land,
And saw that it was good. Upon mine ear,

As in the season of susceptive youth,

The mellow murmur falls-but finds the sense
Dulled by distemper; shall I say—by time?
Enough in action has my life been spent
Through the past decade, to rebate the edge
Of early sensibility.
The sun

1 P. 137.

Rides high, and on the thoroughfares of life
I find myself a man in middle age,

Busy and hard to please. The sun shall soon

Dip westerly, but oh! how little like

Are life's two twilights! Would the last were first,
And the first last! that so we might be soothed

Upon the thoroughfares of busy life

Beneath the noon-day sun, with hope of joy

Fresh as the morn,—with hope of breaking lights,
Illuminated mists and spangled lawns,

And woodland orisons and unfolding flowers,
As things in expectation.-Weak of faith!
Is not the course of earthly outlook, thus
Reversed from Hope, an argument to Hope-
That she was licensed to the heart of man
For other than for earthly contemplations,
In that observatory domiciled

For survey of the stars? The night descends,
They sparkle out.

Known rather by his misfortunes than his actions, King Edwin, though sufficient to supply the whole interest of a romantic poem, could hardly have held, except nominally, the chief and central place in the plot of a Tragedy. But the periods of history most fit for a historical drama are not always those in which the conspicuous sufferer is also the great man. Thus much Shakespeare's Richard the Second proves. A personal interest does not suffice where a social and political problem has to be solved. Strange escapes, sudden exaltations, unforeseen calamities, these will never appeal in vain to the sympathies of the most careless reader; but such events, if they involve no moral lesson, yield no field for the highest art of the historical dramatist. He requires one of those periods of social fermentation during which the national ener

gies are evolving themselves according to some internal law; in which principles that have grown up naturally in the human heart, and matured themselves in the mind of the recluse, receive a mission to go forth and wield the destinies of social man; in which several such principles meet together in a war-struggle, and manifesting through opposition their latent might, attest the great truth that the progress of nations, like that of men, is the progress of mind, and depends not merely on the transmission of outward impulses. Such a state of affairs is presented to us by the contest between the monastic orders and the civil power in England's Saxon days.

The subject of Edwin the Fair is then, on the whole, well chosen, though it possesses not the advantage of concentrating the interest on an individual character as imposing as that of Artevelde. Without a principle of unity, indeed, no dramatic work can possibly be good; but that harmony of effect which is produced by some one predominant character, is only one mode of giving unity. In painting and in sculpture, it is not merely by means of a central figure that unity is imparted to a group. When the persons constituting that group, or the larger number of them, fix their attention on a common object or a common action, there we have unity; and we feel it the more strongly if something of a common expression be found in the different faces. Variety is, of course, necessary also; but where variety exists there may be found a generic likeness. There may exist in the various faces a resemblance, as

of kindred; or they may express the same passions in different degrees and stages; or the passions which they express may be allied to each other, or supplemental to each other. Such is the unity which we so often find in pictures of the old masters: and every one who has understood them will admit that the effect of harmony thus conveyed to the mind (whether through a science now forgotton, or by the unconscious genius of the early artists) is often far more full and satisfactory than that which we receive from modern works, designed according to the strictest rules of composition.

Of this nature is the unity which pervades Edwin the Fair. Throughout it we find one spirit; the spirit, namely, of England in the time of that struggle which raged with such violence between the "men of arms and the men of thought." Throughout the whole play we trace this spirit working its way in different characters according to their constitution, varying with their varieties, but everywhere active. No one is too high or too low to take a part in this great contest. The queen-mother's "mean and meagre soul" attaches itself to Dunstan as the only defence, while persecuted by her "past misdeeds and ever-present fears." The princess, too, has caught the infection, though it has not tainted "her pleasant purity of spirit." The monks are "raving of Dunstan," and see signs and wonders in his mode of coughing and discussing the weather; the nobles allow themselves to be marshalled at his pleasure in the field of battle.

The Archbishop of