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By Root 21853 0

and finally shown himself powerless to handle the simplest elements of masculine passion, of manly character and instinct; so in this less important case we feel that the writer, having ventured on such a subject as the compulsory temptation of a daughter by a father, who has been entrapped into so shameful an undertaking through the treacherous exaction of an equivocal promise unwarily confirmed by an inconsiderate oath, must be judged by the result of his own enterprise; must fail or stand as a poet by its failure or success. And his failure is only not complete; he is but just redeemed from utter discomfiture by the fluency and simplicity of his equable but inadequate style. Here as before we find plentiful examples of the gracefully conventional tone current among the lesser writers of the hour.

Warwick. How shall I enter on this graceless errand?

I must not call her child; for where’s the father

That will in such a suit seduce his child?

Then, Wife of Salisbury;—shall I so begin?

No, he’s my friend; and where is found the friend

That will do friendship such endamagement?—

Neither my daughter, nor my dear friend’s wife,

I am not Warwick, as thou think’st I am,

But an attorney from the court of hell;

That thus have housed my spirit in his form

To do a message to thee from the king.

This beginning is fair enough, if not specially fruitful in promise; but the verses following are of the flattest order of commonplace. Hay and grass and the spear of Achilles—of which tradition

the moral is,

What mighty men misdo, they can amend—

these are the fresh and original types on which our little poet is compelled to fall back for support and illustration to a scene so full of terrible suggestion and pathetic possibility.

The king will in his glory hide thy shame;

And those that gaze on him to find out thee

Will lose their eyesight, looking on the sun.

What can one drop of poison harm the sea,

Whose hugy vastures can digest the ill

And make it lose its operation?

And so forth, and so forth; ad libitum if not ad nauseam. Let us take but one or two more instances of the better sort.

Countess. Unnatural besiege! Woe me unhappy,

To have escaped the danger of my foes,

And to be ten times worse invir’d by friends!

(Here we come upon two more words unknown to Shakespeare; besiege, as a noun substantive, and invired for environed.)

Hath he no means to stain my honest blood

But to corrupt the author of my blood

To be his scandalous and vile soliciter?

No marvel though the branches be infected,

When poison hath encompassèd the roots;

No marvel though the leprous infant die,

When the stern dam envenometh the dug.

Why then, give sin a passport to offend,

And youth the dangerous rein of liberty;

Blot out the strict forbidding of the law;

And cancel every canon that prescribes

A shame for shame or penance for offence.

No, let me die, if his too boisterous will

Will have it so, before I will consent

To be an actor in his graceless lust.

Warwick. Why, now thou speak’st as I would have thee speak;

And mark how I unsay my words again.

An honourable grave is more esteemed

Than the polluted closet of a king;

The greater man, the greater is the thing,

Be it good or bad, that he shall undertake;

An unreputed mote, flying in the sun,

Presents a greater substance than it is;

The freshest summer’s day doth soonest taint

The loathèd carrion that it seems to kiss;

Deep are the blows made with a mighty axe;

That sin doth ten times aggravate itself

That is committed in a holy place;

An evil deed, done by authority,

Is sin, and subornation: Deck an ape

In tissue, and the beauty of the robe

Adds but the greater scorn unto the beast.

(Here are four passably good lines, which vaguely remind the reader of something better read elsewhere; a common case enough with the more tolerable work of small imitative poets.)

A spacious field of reasons could I urge

Between his glory, daughter, and thy shame:

That poison shows worst in a golden cup;

Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash;

Lilies that fester