of endurance. Albovine, the king, sets bare
his heart, confessing:

The devil and God are crying in either ear
One murderous word for ever, night and day,
Dark day and deadly night and deadly day,
Can she love thee who slewest her father? I
Love her.

Rosamund, his wife, meditating her monstrous revenge, confesses:

I am yet alive to question if I live
And wonder what may ever bid me die.
... There is nought
Left in the range and record of the world
For me that is not poisoned: even my heart
Is all envenomed in me.

And she recognises that

No healing and no help for life on earth
Hath God or man found out save death and sleep.

The two young lovers, caught innocently in a net of intolerable shame,
can but question and answer one another thus:

HILDEGARD.

Hast thou forgiven me?

ALMACHILDES.

I have not forgiven God.

And at the end Narsetes, the old councillor, the only one of the persons
of the drama who is not the actor or the sufferer of some subtle horror,
sums up all that has happened in a reflection which casts the
responsibility of things further off than to the edge of the world:

Let none make moan. This doom is none of man's.

As in the time of the great first volume of _Poems and Ballads_,
Swinburne is still drawn to

see
What fools God's anger makes of men.

He has never been a philosophical thinker; but he has acquired the
equivalent of a philosophy through his faithfulness to a single outlook
upon human life and destiny. And in this brief and burning play, more
than in much of his later writing, I find the reflection of that unique
temperament, to which real things are so abstract, and abstract things
so coloured and tangible; a temperament in which there is almost too
much poetry for a poet--as pure gold, to be worked in, needs to be
mingled with alloy.

There is, perhaps, no more terrible story in the later history of the
world, no actual tragedy more made to the hand of the dramatist, than
the story of the Borgias. In its entirety it would make another _Cenci_,
in the hands of another Shelley, and another Censor would prohibit the
one as he prohibits the other. We are not permitted to deal with some
form of evil on the stage. Yet what has Shelley s