ander
the Pope who fills the Vatican and the world with his contagious clouds.
The father, up to this moment, has held all his vices well in hand; he
has no rival; his sons and his daughter he has made, and they live about
him for their own pleasure, and he watches them, and is content. Now one
steps out, the circle is broken; there is no longer a younger son, a
cardinal, but the Duke of Gandia, eldest son and on the highest step of
the Pope's chair. It is, in this brief, almost speechless moment of
action, as if the door of a furnace had suddenly been thrown open and
then shut. One scene stands out, only surpassed by the terrible and
magnificent scene leading up to the death of Darnley--a scene itself
only surpassed, in its own pitiful and pitiless kind, by that death of
Marlowe's king in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle, which, to all who can
endure to read it, 'moves pity and terror,' as to Lamb, 'beyond any
scene ancient or modern.' And only in _Bothwell_, in the whole of
Swinburne's drama, is there speech so adequate, so human, so full of
fear and suspense. Take, for instance, the opening of the great final
scene. The youngest son has had his elder brother drowned in the Tiber,
and after seven days he appears calmly before his father.

ALEX. Thou hast done this deed.
CAESAR. Thou hast said it.
ALEX. Dost thou think
To live, and look upon me?
CAESAR. Some while yet.
ALEX. I would there were a God--that he might hear.
CAESAR. 'Tis pity there should be--for thy sake--none.
ALEX. Wilt thou slay me?
CAESAR. Why?
ALEX. Am I not thy sire?
CAESAR. And Christendom's to boot.
ALEX. I pray thee, man,
Slay me.
CAESAR. And then myself? Thou art crazed, but I
Sane.
ALEX. Art thou very flesh and blood?
CAESAR. They say,
Thine.
ALEX. If the heaven stand still and smite thee not,
There is no God indeed.
CAESAR. Nor thou nor I
Know.
ALEX. I could pray to God that God might be,
Were I but mad. Thou sayest I am mad: thou liest:
I do not pray.

There, surely, is great dramatic speech, and the two men who speak face
to face are seen clearly before us, naked to the sight. Yet even these
lines do not make drama that would hold the stage. How is it that only
one of our greater poets since the last of Shakespeare's contemporaries,
and that one Shelley, has understood t