tween Marie-Antoinette, the Queen of France, and that giant of the Revolution, Mirabeau. Hers, as well remarked by Carlyle, was a high imperial heart, which instinctively knew the great men she might trust, and drew them to her. Her colloquy in that Garden with Mirabeau at the very turning point-the very cardinal hinge-of the Revolution, has never been revealed; but it were worthy of the highest genius to imagine and tell us how she charmed the "wild submitted Titan" at the very right moment when proudly conscious, and satisfied with the consciousness, of his own amorphous strength, which he had blindly wooed the Revolution for the very pleasure of aimlessly, so it be but grandly, indulging, he was now taken with the magnificent desire of saving, by his sole arm, the Monarchy he himself had so nearly destroyed. How he met the lofty rebukes, and heart-touching appeals, and soothing trust of his Queen, with eloquent apologies, and far-seeing rapid plans of loyal policy, yet with a generous provision for the liberty he loved; and wound up the interview, big with the fate of nations, by kissing the Queenly hand, and saying with enthusiasm, "Madame, the Monarchy is saved;" and plunged away from her into the dark night to turn words into instantaneous actions, would task even a Shakspeare fully to portray-who would give the subject a still more intense interest by prophetic indications of the over-wearied failing life of that gigantic man on whom the fate of his King and this his lovely high-spirited Queen, to say nothing of monarchy and nations, was thus made to hang. THE HEART OF NAPOLEON. The following curious circumstance was stated to me on good authority :-When the body of Napoleon was opened at St. Helena, his heart was taken out, and, preparatory to its final destination, put in a basin of spirits and water, and left for the night on a table in the bed-room of the medical man who had charge of the matter. In the course of the night, the Doctor was awakened from a light slumber by a heavy splash from the basin, and starting up alarmed, he rested on his elbow, and by the light of a taper looked eagerly round the apartment before he should spring from bed. Not the shadow of an intruder was to be seen. What had moved the basin? Had that mighty heart, scorning to be quelled even by death, regained some of its terrible energies? Was it still leaping with life? Ha! catching the appearance of something moving in the corner of the room, he saw the heart of Buonaparte going into a hole in the wall; and jumping from bed, was just in time to seize and rescue it from the teeth of a rat. The blood of Ahab was licked up by dogs. And it is recorded by Bishop Burnet that, after the body of Charles II. had been disembowelled, the servants of that licentious and heartless palace, utterly regardless of dead Royalty, emptied their basins, containing some of the inward parts and the fatty matter of the entrails, into an open sewer, and many of the clotted lumps were seen for days sticking to a grate over the mouth of a drain into which the sewer ran. How nearly had a still more marked visitation come on the remains of Napoleon-to have his heart eaten by rats! TRAGEDY. There are two kinds of Tragedy. In the one the catastrophe may be said to be gratuitous or incidental, inasmuch as it is the result of circumstances which evolve themselves with many an interchange of hope and fear, and which often seem to be on the point of bringing out a happy consummation, when all at once they are overfilled with struggling labours, and cast out the woful births of despair and death. Romeo and Juliet is a fine example of this species of tragic result; which is an infinitely affecting one, as it might easily have been avoided by a slight change in the circumstances preceding the catastrophe: Youth and beauty and love are cut off at the very moment, and by the very means, of coming joy: How sad! The other kind of Tragedy is where the rueful end is foreseen from the very first as a thing inevitable. "I see as from a tower the end of all." The Bride of Lammermoor (making no distinction for the present between prose and poetry) is an example of this species of Tragedy. The old prophecy at the outset is itself sufficient to weigh down the heart with the entire certainty of a baleful end. How uneasy in their light, how unnaturally lustrous, how fearful are the gleams and flashes of young love relieved against that heavy gloom of impending fate! Such are the loves of the Master of Ravenswood and his Lucy. Tragedy, with these solemn pre-determined issues, is altogether of a higher order than the first-mentioned kind. On a similar, but more stern, because religious, principle of Destiny, most of the Greek Tragedies are composed. Beauty and youth, all affection and all pleasure, are remorselessly given up by the austere Masters of that old drama to feed the hungry and closeupgathering spindle of inexorable Fate. This is the deepest and most spirit-quelling style of the Tragic Muse. It is indispensable to a great tragedy that it have one overmastering passion running through it; and the catastrophe must be brought about by passion and character, and not by mere circumstance and incident, as in melodrame. If incident and plot are wanting, however, the play cannot be of the highest order, whatever may be the power of the main passion that pervades it. This we know from "Timon of Athens," which having no plot properly so called, and no incidents but such as are obviously contrived in successive gradations to draw out the one character of the piece, is more like a dramatised satire than a regular tragedy. Of all known plays, "King Lear" is most absorbingly interesting in its combination of leading passion, multiplicity of characters, varying fortunes-kept in due subordination to the main one, and surprising evolutions of plot: The sphere of action is broader and more varied; the language more wild and poetic; the characters of greater diversity, from the simplest on to the most startling and almost lawlessly unnatural; the strokes and turns of the chief and the subordinate interests more numerous, rapid, and striking, than in any other play: We have in it all the bustle and excitement of the most romantic novel; everything at the same time being tributary to, and losing itself in that great gulf-stream of overbearing passion which runs through this prodigious drama, sucking everything into its own mælstrom. In all these great respects in one, "King Lear" is the foremost of tragedies. We may say, then, that there are two farther styles of Tragedy: The one as exemplified in "Timon of Athens," and the "Philoctetes" of Sophocles, where the simple interest is like the growth of the palm-tree-all stem, and few or no side branches; the other, as represented by King Lear," where the gigantic stock is also multitudinously mighty in circumstantial boughs, all of them, to the uttermost twig and leaf, tossing and tearing themselves in one frantic vitality of filial unison with the terrible stress of the parent trunk, bending and groaning to the very earth in the tragic tempest. DEATH. The two-fold image of Death, full of loathsome terrors, and yet a sweet sleep to the world-wearied head, is exquisitely portrayed in the following sonnet by Wordsworth : "Methought I saw the footsteps of a throne Which mist and vapours from mine eyes did shroud— Sick, hale, old, young, who cried before that cloud With her face up to heaven; that seemed to have The blent unity of this crowded conception, crowning ghastliness and terror with serene repose, is beyond the power of painting, except in a series. How striking the multitudinous type! Death is not seen within his cloud: his essential form of terror is unknown. But round about the base of his throne lie scattered all the well-known dishonours of the grave; and in the midst of the dead are the living looking eagerly unto that cloud, and conscious of their king, Death. High above the rottenness and fears of mortality, even there where the throne itself of Death should be, in or above the cloud, there is no Death at all! Nothing but a Beauty laid in a sweet sleep, looking up to heaven, and yet drawing pleasing remembrances from the days of earth-most lovely emblem of our immortal hopes! THE PICTURESQUE. In poetry there are two kinds of the picturesque: They may be termed the graphic picturesque, and the diffusive picturesque. In the former a single word often makes the whole picture, in the latter a host of rich circumstances are brought together from every province of Imagination to make it. The former is the nobler and more difficult species of writing. Dante is the greatest master of the former, Spencer of the latter. SELF-DENIAL IN POETRY. Does that man deserve the name of an architect who huddles many beautiful parts together in the form of an aggregate building, yet without one simple plan of proportions preserving the whole in subserviency to the necessary utility of the structure? Tried by this rule, how many of our poets, who are exquisite at lines and stanzas, yet deserve not the title of poets at all. Shelley is a great master of beautiful words and images; but we defy any man to trace any grand outline-any frame-work-any ossification, in many of what are called his leading poems. All is a splendid confusion of beauty, intervolved and interminable. Self-denial is the greatest virtue in poetry. How succinct, for instance, is Milton's description of the Lazar-house; where Shelley, in his weakness of over-ambition, would have given us every form and feature of nosology. How simple and few, but how characteristic, are the paintings which Eneas beheld in the Carthaginian Temple, significant of the Trojan war. A lesser genius than Virgil's would have given us a whole gallery of pictures. Thom |