having noted it,
we cannot but long, with a fruitless longing, for such confidences as to
the impersonation of the leading characters in other memorable plays of
the period. There is some really good rough humor in the part of this
honest clown and his fellows; but no duly appreciative reader will doubt
that the author's heart was in the work devoted to the tragic and poetic
scenes of a play which shows that the natural bent of his powers was
toward tragedy rather than comedy. Alike as poet and as dramatist, he
rises far higher and enjoys his work far more when the aim of his flight
is toward the effects of imaginative terror and pity than when it is
confined to the effects of humorous or pathetic realism. In the very
first scene we breathe the air of tragic romance and imminent evil
provoked by coalition rather than collision of the will of man with the
doom of destiny; and the king's defiance of prophecy and tradition is so
admirably rendered or suggested as a sign of brutal and egotistic rather
than chivalrous or manful daring as to prepare the way with great
dramatic and poetic skill for the subsequent scenes of attempted
seduction and ultimate violation. With these the underplot, interesting
and original in itself, well conceived and well carried through, is
happily and naturally interwoven. The noble soliloquy of the invading
and defeated Moorish king is by grace of Lamb familiar to all true
lovers of the higher dramatic poetry of England. Nothing can be livelier
and more natural than the scenes in which a recent bridegroom's heart is
won from his loving and low-born wife by the offered hand and the
sprightly seductions of a light-hearted and high-born rival. But the
crowning scene of the play and the crowning grace of the poem is the
interview of father and daughter after the consummation of the crime
which gave Spain into the hand of the Moor. The vivid dramatic life in
every word is even more admirable than the great style, the high poetic
spirit of the scene. I have always ventured to wonder that Lamb, whose
admiration has made it twice immortal, did not select as a companion or
a counterpart to it that other great camp scene from Webster's "Appius
and Virginia" in which another outraged warrior and father stirs up his
friends and fellow-soldiers to vindication of his honor and revenge for
his wrong. It is surely even finer and more impressive than that
selected in preference to it, which closes with the immola