e
The offences of some unremembered world.
My blood is running up and down my veins;
A fearful pleasure makes it prick and tingle:
I feel a giddy sickness of strange awe;
My heart is beating with an expectation
Of horrid joy."

_Ohe! jam satis est!!_--The _minutiae_ of this _affectionate_ parent's
curses forcibly remind us of the equally minute excommunication so
admirably recorded in Tristram Shandy. But Sterne has the start of him;
for though Percy Bysshe Shell[e]y, Esquire, has contrived to include in
the imprecations of Cenci, the eyes, head, lips, and limbs of his
daughter, the other has anticipated his measures, in formally and
specifically anathematizing the lights, lungs, liver, and _all odd
joints_, without excepting even the great toe of his victim.--To proceed
in our review; the dying expostulations of poor Beatrice, are beautiful
and affecting, though occasionally tinged with the Cockney style of
burlesque; for instance, Bernado asks, when they tear him from the
embraces of his sister,

"Would ye divide body from soul?"

On which the judge sturdily replies--"That is the headsman's business."
The idea of approaching execution paralyses the soul of Beatrice, and
she thus frantically expresses her horror.

"_Beatr._ (_Wildly_) Oh,
My God! Can it be possible I have
To die so suddenly? So young to go
Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground!
To be nailed down into a narrow place;
To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more
Blithe voice of living thing; muse not again
Upon familiar thoughts, sad, yet thus lost.
How fearful! to be nothing! Or to be--
What? O, where am I? Let me not go mad!
Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be
No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world;
The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!
If all things then should be--my father's spirit
His eye, his voice, his touch surrounding me;
The atmosphere and breath of my dead life!
If sometimes, as a shape more like himself,
Even the form which tortured me on earth,
Masked in grey hairs and wrinkles, he should come
And wind me in his hellish arms, and fix
His eyes on mine, and drag me down, down, down!"

The author, in his preface, observes that he has committed only one
plagiarism in his play. But with all the triumph of vanity, we here
stoutly convict him of having wilfully, maliciously an