a kind of bravery.

* * * * *

JOHN FORD.

_The Broken Heart_.--I do not know where to find, in any play, a
catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so surprising, as in this. This
is indeed, according to Milton, to describe high passions and high
actions. The fortitude of the Spartan boy, who let a beast gnaw out
his bowels till he died, without expressing a groan, is a faint
bodily image of this dilaceration of the spirit, and exenteration of
the inmost mind, which Calantha, with a holy violence against her
nature, keeps closely covered, till the last duties of a wife and a
queen are fulfilled. Stories of martyrdom are but of chains and the
stake; a little bodily suffering. These torments

"On the purest spirits prey,
As on entrails, joints, and limbs,
With answerable pains, but more intense."

What a noble thing is the soul, in its strengths and in its
weaknesses! Who would be less weak than Calantha? Who can be so
strong? The expression of this transcendent scene almost bears us in
imagination to Calvary and the Cross; and we seem to perceive some
analogy between the scenical suffering which we are here
contemplating and the real agonies of that final completion to which
we dare no more than hint a reference. Ford was of the first order of
poets. He sought for sublimity, not by parcels, in metaphors or
visible images, but directly where she has her full residence, in the
heart of man; in the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds.
There is a grandeur of the soul, above mountains, seas, and the
elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of Giovanni and
Annabella, in the play[1] which stands at the head of the modern
collection of the works of this author, we discern traces of that
fiery particle, which, in the irregular starting from out the road of
beaten action, discovers something of a right line even in obliquity,
and shows hints of an improvable greatness in the lowest descents and
degradations of our nature.

[Footnote: "'Tis Pity she's a Whore."]

* * * * *

FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE.

_Alaham, Mustapha_.--The two tragedies of Lord Brooke, printed among
his poems, might with more propriety have been termed political
treatises than plays. Their author has strangely contrived to make
passion, character, and interest, of the highest order, subservient
to the expression of state dogmas and mysteries. He is in nine parts
Machiave