odern times,
including the _Sardanapalus_ of Lord Byron, the _Remorse_ of
Coleridge, and the _Cenci_ of Shelley. The portraiture of Philip is
one of those elaborate and highly-finished studies which repay as well
as require minute investigation. He is at once profoundly meditative
and surpassingly active. His energy of brain is only rivalled by his
readiness of hand. In him the active mood and the passive--the
practical and the ideal--the objective and the subjective--are not as
parallel lines that never meet, but are sections of one line,
describing the circle of his all-embracing mind. His youth has been,
that of a dreamy recluse, the scorn of men of the world. 'Oh, fear him
not, my lord,' says one of them to the Earl of Flanders:

--'His father's name
Is all that from his father[6] he derives.
He is a man of singular address
In catching river fish. His life hath been
Till now, more like a peasant's or a monk's,
Than like the issue of so great a man.'

Similarly the earl himself describes him as 'a man that as much
knowledge has of war as I of brewing mead--a bookish nursling of the
monks--a meacock.' But when the last scene of all has closed his
strange eventful history, the testimony of a nobler, wiser foe,[7]
ascribes to him great gifts of courage, discretion, wit, an equal
temper, an ample soul, rock-bound and fortified against assaults of
transitory passion, but founded on a surging subterranean fire that
stirs him to lofty enterprise--a man prompt, capable, and calm,
wanting nothing in soldiership except good-fortune. Ever tempted to
reverie, he yet refuses, even for one little hour, to yield up the
weal of Flanders to idle thought or vacant retrospect. Having once put
his hand to the plough of action, with clear foresight, not blindfold
bravery, his language is--'Though I indulge no more the dream of
living, as I hoped I might have lived, a life of temperate and
thoughtful joy, yet I repine not, and from this time forth will cast
no look behind.' The first part of the drama leaves him an exultant
victor, an honourable prosperous, and happy man. The second
part--which alike in interest and treatment is very inferior to the
first--finds him falling, and leaves him 'fallen, fallen, fallen, from
his high estate.' His sun, no longer trailing clouds of glory, sets in
a wintry and misty gloom. And yet in the act of dying he emits flashes
of the ancient brightness, and we