which they sate, and whose highest am-
bition seemed then to consist in being the
first in his roll of royal dependants. Hav-
ing thus premised, we give Mr. Milman's
lines.

"Then at some viewless summoner's stern call
Uprose in place the imperial criminal.
In that wan face nor ancient majesty

Left withered splendour dim, nor old renown
Lofty disdain in that sad sunken eye;
No giant ruin e'en in wreck elate
Frowning dominion o'er imperious fate,
But one to native lowliness cast down.
A sullen, careless desperation gave

The hollow semblance of intrepid grief;
Not that heroic patience nobly brave,

That e'en from misery wrings a proud relief,
Nor the dark pride of haughty spirits of ill,
That from the towering grandeur of their sin,
Wear on the brow triumphant gladness still,

Heedless of racking agony within;
Nor penitence was there, nor pale remorse,
Nor memory of his fall from kingly state
And warrior glory in his sun-like course,

Fortune his slave, and victory his mate!
Twere doubt if that dark form could truly feel,
Or were indeed a shape and soul of steel."

The verses commemorating the queen of Prussia, are written with great sweetness and feeling; but here again we have occasion to notice the wilful misrepresentation of facts that mark the whole of this performance. The circumstance on which Mr. Milman has lavished the tears of poesy, is thus related by persons. whose station gave them opportunity of becoming acquainted with the truth, and whose respectability guarantees their testimony. When Napoleon was setting out for the campaign of Jena, he was informed that the queen of Prussia was with the army, and that she was ambitious of meeting him in the field at the head of the Prussian troops-on hearing this the emperor, turning to some of his officers, said with more than usual vivacity"We must be quick, and not keep the lady waiting"-and against this harmless sentence have the following verses been indited, to hand down to future times the atrocious outrage committed by Napoleon on the delicacy and gentleness of a royal female:

rowed cheek,

"Then blanch'd the soldier's bronzed and fur-
While of coarse taunting outrage he 'gan speak
To her the beautiful the delicate,
The queenly, but too gentle for a queen,-
But in sweet pride upon that insult keen
She smiled, then drooping, mute though broken-
hearted,

To the cold comfort of the grave departed."

Then appear in succession the different nations whose sovereigns had experienced the vengeance and clemency of Napoleon, VOL. III.-No. vi.

54

and even England is introduced as preferring her accusations against a monarch who in his most ambitious designs can only be charged with following the glorious example set by herself in Hindustaûn. Writing for Englishmen, and in praise of England, Mr. Milman is of course very patriotic,-it was his first attempt at laudatory strains on his own country, and as they contain very little more than what might be, and is, produced many times annually at London anniversary dinners, may be dismissed as unworthy a place among the passages we would select as indicative of the eminence which the author has attained by the publication of Samor. The following lines, however, in which vent is given to the imaginary grief and resentment of the assembled nations, are (with the exception of the concluding vulgarism in italics) finely descriptive of the thirst of revenge which the emancipated and triumphant victims of a tyrant may be supposed to feel in the moment of victory:

"Then all at once did from all earth arise

Fierce imprecations on that man of sin,
And all the loaded winds came heavy in
With exultations and with agonies.
From the lone coldness of the widow's bed,
The feverish pillow of the orphan's head,
From dying men earth's woful valleys heaping,
From mouldering cities in their ashes sleeping,
Like the hoarse trembling of a torrent flood
Mingled the dismal concord, Blood for blood!"""

It is now time to say something of Fazio, a composition certainly not a little extravagant in its plot, but in which the play of the finest affections of the human heart is delineated with heart-touching elu

quence.

In his youth, Fazio, a native of Flo-' rence, and of respectable family but of reduced fortunes, suffers himself, as many other silly young men have done, to become in love with a beautiful coquettethe gaze of all the men, and the envy of all the women of his native city. For a while, as is the custom with young ladies of the class to which Aldabella belongs, she suffers him to dangle in her train, write love-sick sonnets (whether to her lips or eyebrows, Mr. Milman has not condescended to inform us) and then gives him a cool intimation that he has amused her sufficiently, and that the cessation of his attentions would be a desirPoor Fazio deable close to the farce. parts-wounded to the soul, and retaining, like a barbed arrow in the breast of a deer, his love for Aldabella-distracted, he turns for relief to the attractions of chemical science, involves himself in the

T

Slide from my lips, and I do mirror him
In the clear glass of my poor eloquence.

FAZIO.

In coarse and honest phraseology, A flatterer.

FALSETTO.

Flatterer. Nay, the word's grown gross.
An apt discoverer upon things of honour-
Wealth is the robe and outward garb of man,
The setting to the rarer jewelry,
The soul's unseen and hidden qualities.
And then, my lord, philosophy-'tis that,
The stamp and impress of our divine nature,
By which we know that we are gods, and are so.
But wealth and wisdom in one spacious breast!-
Who would not hymn so rare and rich a wedding?
Who would not serve within the gorgeous palace
Glorified by such strange and admired inmates?
FAZIO (aside.)

Now the poor honest Fazio had disdained
Such scurvy fellowship-howbeit lord Fazio
Must lackey his new state with these base jack-
als."

This is a fine and admirable description of a parasite, and the effect is greatly increased by making him his own draughtsman. Its merit, indeed, is of a rare kind, for not only is the baseness of the flatterer brought out in the clearest manner, but the effect of his glozing. adulation upon Fazio, who is represented as fully conscious of the hollowness of his professions, is so managed as to show the influence of panegyric upon human nature in general, notwithsanding the person flattered is fully aware of the vile ness of its source. "Howbeit lord Fazio must lackey his new state with these base jackals."

His address to Bianca, after the discovery of his guilt, is written with considerable feeling and pathos.

"Mine own Bianca-I shall need much mercy,
Or ere to-morrow, to be merciless.
It was not well, Bianca, in my guilt
To cut me off-thus early-thus unripe:
It will be bitter, when the axe falls on me,
To think whose voice did summon it to its office.

No more no more of that-we all must die.
Bianca, thou wilt love me when I'm dead;
I wrong'd thee, but thou'lt love me."

The last interview between Fazio and

me,

Some whispering me, some dragging me," &c.

There is a soliloquy of Bianca possessing merit of a very sweet and impressive have passed over the lonely and sleepless description. The night is supposed to pillow of the injured and suffering wifemorning comes, but Fazio comes not with solate Bianca wastes the hours in mournthe morning-and the tender and disconful and heart-touching reflections and complaints. The speech in which these are imbodied, we do not hesitate to pronounce one of the finest representations we have ever met with of a heart wounded in its most secret places, and giving vent in words to the sorrows that

consume it.

"Not all the night, not all the long, long night Not come to me-not send to me-not think on me!

Bianca is conceived with no inconsider-wander up and down these long arcades. Like an unrighteous and unburied ghost able tenderness of sentiment. A beautiful contrast is afforded in the wild and tender despair of Bianca, and the tran-, quil endurance of misfortune in her husband.

Oh in our old poor narrow home, if haply
He lingered late abroad, domestic things
Close and familiar crowded all around me!
The ticking of the clock, the flapping motion
Of the green lattice, the gray curtain's folds,
The hangings of the bed myself had wrought;
Yea, even his black and iron crucibles
Were to me as my friends. But here, oh here
Where all is coldly, comfortlessly costly,
All strange, all new, in uncouth gorgeousness,
Lofty and long,-a wider space for misery-
E'en my own footsteps on these marble floors
Are unaccustomed, unfamiliar sounds→→→

Oh, I am here so wearily miserable
That I should welcome my apostate Fazio
Though he were fresh from Aldabella's arms.
Her arms-her viper coil! I had forsworn
That thought lest he should come, and find me
mad,

And so go back again, and I not know it.
Oh, that I were a child, to play with toys,
Fix my whole soul upon a cup and ball;
Oh, any wild pitiful poor subterfuge,
A moment to distract my busy spirit
From its dark dalliance with that cursed image.
I have tried all-all vainly;-now-but now
I went in to my children. The first sound
They murmur'd in their evil-dreaming sleep
Was a faint mimicry of the name of father.
I could not kiss them-my lips were so hot.
The very household slaves are leagued against

How true all this is to nature, it surely is not necessary for us to explain or insist upon. How admirably, and in a mauner that comes home most dearly to the heart, has the author painted the feelings of the woman and the wife-the inextinguishable love-the tender jealousy that will not suffer the object of its affection to bestow a glance on another's loveliness-avaricious of his every look, smile, and word-yet still so deeply devoted to the beloved apostate, that though he were to come

"fresh from ALDABELLA's arms," she would welcome him with transport, and endeavours to banish from her remembrance the maddening thought of her husband's infatuated and unholy intercourse with that unchaste and fallen beauty

"I had forsworn That thought, lest he should come, and find me mad, And so go back again, and I not know it."

Immediately after the soliloquy, a domestic returns with intelligence concerning her Fazio that confirms all the sad forebodings of Bianca. Lost to all the pure

Or her soul fonder? Fazio, my lord Fazio,
Before the face of man mine own, mine only,
Before the face of heaven Bianca's Fazio,
Not Aldabella's-Ah, that I should live
To question it.-Now henceforth all our joys
Our delicate endearments, all are poisoned.
Aye-if he speak my name with his fond voice,
It will be with the same tone that to her
He murmured hers-it will be or 'twill seem so.
If he embrace me, 'twill be with those arms
In which he folded her; and if he kiss me
He'll pause and think-which of the two is sweeter,"

There are few passages, in the whole range of dramatic poetry, that are finer than this-Beaumont and Fletcher have nothing more affecting, nor Shakespeare any thing more natural. It is the sweet overflowing with the mingled emotions of and bitterly-delicious effusion of a soul tenderness and fond resentment, and may be justly classed among those felicitous copies of nature that only genius of the highest order is capable of producing.

We must now conclude our observations upon Fazio. We have, it is true, bringing it before our readers at all; but gone a little out of our usual way in of so beautiful a composition we could not resist giving our readers an outline, and by the extracts we have made, affording them a taste of a production, whose extraordinary merits gave rich promise of loftier achievement,—a satisfactory earnest of those more splendid labours of the author, which have resulted in "SAMOR"-and which ought, we think, to have long since secured the publication of Fazio on this side of the Atlantic. The play has been before the British public above two years-and as yet there is no American edition!

So frequent of late years, have been the attempts and failures in the province of heroic song, that we had almost reconciled ourselves to the probability of an age or two passing away without leav ing any of those grander memorials of poetic genius, that subsist through all times as the proud and lasting monuments of its might and majesty. Homer, Virgil, in high and secluded state, the royal emiTasso, Camoens, and Milton, occupied nences of Parnassus, and swayed in august fraternity over its most elevated regions-but no kindred genius was fired with the glorious ambition of emulating their exploits and rivaling their renown. Like gods, they dwelt in light unapproached and unapproachable by feebler spirits, and the radiance that invested their immortal forms at once dazzled and deterred the weaker worshipOh, Fazio-is her smile more sweet than mine, pers of the muses. It seemed, too, as if

and honourable endearments of homeand sacrificing on the shrine of wantonness every conjugal duty, he has passed in the society of Aldabella those hours on which Bianca had so sacred a claim. The exquisite beauty and wild tenderness of the speech in which she gives utterance to her feelings on this accomplishment of her fears, will, we think, be felt by every one.

"Oh, Fazio,

they had monopolized to themselves the
events most favourable for epic display,
and the subjects of their works were, all
of them, of a kind for which the habits
of our youth have imbrued us with a
special reverence and predilection, and
which are so intimately connected with
our civil or religious education, and so
thoroughly mixed up with all our earliest
ideas of a pleasing or impressive descrip-
tion, that it is with difficulty we can
lend our sympathy to a poem bearing the
title of epic, or carrying in its form and
character pretensions to the same class
of productions with those which we
have so long been accustomed to con-
sider as works which it is impossible
should be equalled by succeeding writers,
and which our prejudices would almost
induce us to wish should remain un-
rivalled. A general notion had become
prevalent that it would be an act of hope-
less presumption in any modern poet to
attempt heights so long held sacred to an
illustrious few, and though there were
not wanting those who endeavoured to
vindicate their claim to equal eminence
with those mighty bards, the rashness of
their ambition was proved in its failure,
and the crowd of bastard epics with
which the last hundred years have teem-
ed, seemed to justify the opinion that all
the great masters of heroic song had al-
ready appeared-and that to no future
minstrel would be accorded the sceptre
they swayed or the laurels they wore.
From Blackmore to Southey extends the
list of the " mighty mad," and Joan of
Arc has long taken her station by the
side of Prince Arthur. During the lat-
ter part of this period, however, the hu-
man genius was silently ripening, and
preparing for efforts not altogether un-
worthy of being compared with its achieve
ments in the days of old. A Poet has
appeared to whose principal production
we may justly grant the praise of being
a worthy supplement to the great work
of Milton, and in the poem before us,
the earlier events in the history of our
ancestors have been clothed with all the
interest, majesty and magnificence cha-
racteristic of the epic.

Our readers must now be not a little anxious to become acquainted with "SAMOR"-and it is with the most heartfelt pleasure, and, let us add, not without feelings of exultation in the genius that has so nobly contributed his share to the li

The Rev. GEORGE TOWNSEND, of Cambridge, England, and author of ARMAGEDDON.

terary glory of our times, that we proceed to its examination.

A short preface is given, which we extract as explanatory of circumstances with which some of our readers may, possibly, not be sufficiently acquainted.

"The historians* of the empire near the period of time at which this poem commences, make mention of Constantine, who assumed the purple of the western empire, gained possession of Gaul and Spain, but was defeated and slain at the battle of Arles. He had a son named Constans, who became a monk, and was put to death at Vienna.

"About the same time a Constantine appears in the relations of the old British Chronicles and Romances. He was brother of the king of Armorica, and became himself king, or rather an elected sovereign of the petty kings of Britain, who continued their succession under the Roman dominion. He was called Vendigard and Waredur, the Defender and Deliverer. He had three sons, Constans, who became a hermit, and was murthered, either (for the traditions vary) by the Picts, by Vortigern, or by the Saxons; Emrys, called by the Latin writers Aurelius Ambrosius; and Uther Pendragon, the father of Arthur. These two Constantines are here identified, and Vortigern supposed to have been named king of Britain, as the person of greatest authority and conduct in the wreck of the British army, defeated at Arles. Many, however, of the chiefs in the island advancing the hereditary right, before formally settled on the sons of Constantine, Vortigern, mistrusting the Britons, and prest by invasions of the Caledonians, introduced the Saxons to check the barbarians and strengthen his own sovereignty.. "The hero of the poem is an historical character, as far as such legends can be called history. He appears in most of the chronicles as Edol, or Eldol, but the fullest account of his exploits is in Dugdale's Baronage, under his title of earl of Gloucester. William Harrison, however, in the Description of Britain prefixed to Holinshed, calls him Eldulph de Samor. But all concur in ascribing to him the acts which make the chief subject of the fifth and last books of this poem.

"Most of our present names of places being purely Saxon, and the old British having little of harmony or association to recommend them, I have frequently, on the authority of Camden and others, translated them. Thus the Saxon Gloucester, called by the Britons, Caer Gloew, is the Bright City. The Dobuni, the inhabitants of the vales, are called by that name. "Some

* "Gibbon, chap. 31.

"Whitaker, Hist. of Manchester.
"Lewis, Hist. of Britain.