of its own
doom. There is a delight in playing one's high part: we are all gladiators,
crying _Ave Imperator!_ To quote Burke's matter of fact: "In grief the
pleasure is still uppermost, and the affliction we suffer has no
resemblance to absolute pain, which is always odious, and which we endeavor
to shake off as soon as possible." Poe went farther, and was an artist even
in the tragedy of his career. If, according to his own belief, sadness and
the vanishing of beauty are the highest poetic themes, and poetic feeling
the keenest earthly pleasure, then the sorrow and darkness of his broken
life were not without their frequent compensation.

In the following pages, we have a fresh example of an artist's genius
characterizing his interpretation of a famous poem. Gustave Dore, the last
work of whose pencil is before us, was not the painter, or even the
draughtsman, for realists demanding truth of tone, figure, and perfection.
Such matters concerned him less than to make shape and distance, light and
shade, assist his purpose,--which was to excite the soul, the imagination,
of the looker on. This he did by arousing our sense of awe, through
marvellous and often sublime conceptions of things unutterable and full of
gloom or glory. It is well said that if his works were not great paintings,
as pictures they are great indeed. As a "literary artist," and such he was,
his force was in direct ratio with the dramatic invention of his author,
with the brave audacities of the spirit that kindled his own. Hence his
success with Rabelais, with "Le Juif-Errant," "Les Contes Drolatiques," and
"Don Quixote," and hence, conversely, his failure to express the beauty of
Tennyson's Idyls, of "Il Paradiso," of the Hebrew pastorals, and other
texts requiring exaltation, or sweetness and repose. He was a born master
of the grotesque, and by a special insight could portray the spectres of a
haunted brain. We see objects as his personages saw them, and with the very
eyes of the Wandering Jew, the bewildered Don, or the goldsmith's daughter
whose fancy so magnifies the King in the shop on the Pont-au-Change. It was
in the nature of things that he should be attracted to each masterpiece of
verse or prose that I have termed unique. The lower kingdoms were called
into his service; his rocks, trees and mountains, the sky itself, are
animate with motive and diablerie. Had he lived to illustrate Shakespeare,
we should have seen a remarkable treatment of C