Lar.

Oh, I'll be sworn for 't; trust me,

outward bearing
Glasses the man within.
Is in itself more costly and
Than duller seeming brass.
That trains their feet i' th'

True gold, that shines most, more noble

That agile force, dance, will in the fight

Show bravely in their arms, and their bright swords
Tread such quick measure on the heads of foes,
The ringing helms their music, that Dismay
Shall seize them at the force of 't, and Defeat,
Ever his follower, clear the field of them.

That is not a specimen of the best poetry in "Eliduke," but it is a fair specimen of the fire and spirit with which the play abounds. The subject of the two plays is in essence the samethe struggle of a fine nature, full of noble instincts and high resolves, with the temptations of life, those temptations naturally centring in the relations between men and women. In the early play, Eliduke, noble as he is by nature meant to be, succumbs to passion; in the later one, Ethel, equally noble, obtains the victory over the most overwhelming of all the temptations that could beset the heart of man. I do not hesitate to say that "Violenzia," though it hinges on a most painful subject, the subject of outrage, is an exceedingly fine drama, sustained in its interest from first to last, overwhelming in its tragic close, and full of the most genuine poetry. I do not know that I should call either play in the highest sense dramatic. The plots are full of power and passion, and the reader's mind is never once allowed to lose its high-wrought suspense till the play ends; but for all that, but few of the characters are powerfully delineated, and the whole real passion of either

play is concentrated in the hero. Mr. Roscoe, I need hardly say, had written both plays long before Lord Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" had ever been heard of. But Ethel, Earl of Felborg, is in many respects an anticipation of Tennyson's Arthur, and will be charged by many readers with the same defect which has been brought against him—namely, that he is too much of a preacher, that he is more of a saint with a sword in his hand than a soldier and statesman. It is, indeed, far from easy to paint a great ideal character under circumstances in which almost all men would flash into the fiercest passion of loathing, without giving room to the charge of a certain spiritual priggishness. It is the common accusation brought against Tennyson's Arthur, though I myself have never felt its truth. And it will be brought again against the still higher and more spiritual character delineated in this striking play, "Violenzia." I doubt whether any attempt to paint a character that, in such circumstances as these, was perfectly victorious over temptation, could fail to be liable to such objections. But for my own part, I believe that such a character as Ethel's, if it had been long trained in the school of true Christian faith, would be quite possible, and that the picture of it here given is thoroughly inspiring, though it will undoubtedly give occasion to sneers at its too perfect and solemn virtue. That the picture is not wanting in the highest poetical vividness, a single extract will sufficiently show. It is the morning of the day on which a great battle is to be fought :

Eth. "Twill not be till noon. O peaceful morning-tide, with what rude deeds

Will they deface thy evening! Is it not heavenly?
The air is cool and still; soft dawn shoots up
Into the fleecy heaven, that, like a mother
Uncovering her rosy naked babe,

Looks down upon the tender new-born day.
Strange prelude to a battle.

Cor.

And best not thought of.

Eth.

True, it is piteous,

Piteous it is indeed,

And yet not best not thought of, so is nothing.
We dare not faint at woe and violence,

When we are sure our cause is with the right.
And gaping wounds, and the red skeleton death,
Painted in blood of many slaughtered men,

Though they may stir our gorge more, are in themselves,

And should be to our spirits, less abhorrent

Than living men, walking like sepulchres

Of their dead spiritual lives.

Cor.

I have seen such men.

Eth. So sick, I have seen many, and some dead.
He is noble that can hang a shield of patience

Between himself and injuries, but most base
That sees injustices unremedied.

Cor. That did you never.

Eth.

No, nor you, Cornelius,

Nor any man who doth believe in heaven,

But when he sees a wrong must war with it—

By sufferance, if sufferance best abates it,

But only then.

And always in his spirit

Eager antagonism, not passive spirits,

Oppose the dangerous devil's mastery ;

But sworded and aggressive warriors,

Who with swift charge beat down his mustered ranks, And all day long maintain the weary war,

And die in faith of unseen victory.

Cor. Warriors of God; servants of God ;-great titles.

Eth. Oh, that we might be worthy to be such! Our youth is like this morning, and we stand Between the night of our unconscious childhood And the world's monstrous battle, whose loud roar Grows in our ears. Well, when we mix in it,

God keep us in His hand!

I should add that the picture of Malgodin, the true tempter of the play, is extremely vigorous. He is a Mephistopheles who surpasses Goethe's Mephistopheles in sardonic evil, and I think, even in resource. When Goethe set himself to delineate the tempter, as in the scene with the medical student, or the scene in which he prompts Faust to compass the ruin of Gretchen, Goethe's touch is very fine. But Mephistopheles too often seems to forget his main object in cultivating Faust so closely, and rambles off into disquisitions which are not specially satanic. Malgodin is as evil a tempter as ever entered into the heart of man. Mr. W. C. Roscoe's poems should win him a permanent, if a modest place, in the English literature of the nineteenth century. His genius was not fertile, but it was singularly true and discerning, and, what is more, it was a genius that worked in the finest material, that translated its conceptions into the most perfect and expressive forms of human speech. Mr. Roscoe worked in cameo, not in wood or brass, and the execution is at least as beautiful as the imagination.

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN POETRY

PROFESSOR COURTHOPE, in his Oxford lecture on "Poetical Decadence," insisted very earnestly on the recent "vast growth of individual self-consciousness" as one of the main causes of the poetical decadence which he finds in the last generation of our literary life. Professor Courthope has steadily maintained that, without a universal element as well as an individual element in poetry, there can be no poetry of the higher kind. And no doubt he is right if he interprets the universal and the individual elements in poetry with subtlety and accuracy. But I doubt whether he does not greatly underrate the universal element contained in what may yet be fairly termed "individual self-consciousness," and overrate that petty and egotistical element in it which unfits it for the purposes of the truly great poet. The poets whom he picks out for the purpose of illustrating the decadence in our most considerable recent poetry are Matthew Arnold, Algernon Swinburne, and Rudyard Kipling. I understand what he means in thus distinguishing Matthew Arnold, though I disagree widely from his judgment, but with regard to the two other poets I should not have thought that, whatever their faults may be, there was any exaggerated element of individual