was immediately ushered into Ellen's presence.

She was alone. Hermann examined her rapidly. He saw an extremely beautiful woman, whose frank and fearless eyes were fixed on him with a questioning look.

Hermann had not frequented the society of women much, and was usually rather embarrassed in their presence. But on this occasion he thought only of his friend, and found no difficulty in explaining the motive of his visit. He told her his friend was ill-very illdying and that he had opened the letter addressed to Warren. Ellen did not answer for some time; she seemed not to have understood what she had heard. After a while her eyes filled with tears, and she asked whether she could see Mr Warren. On Hermann answering in the affirmative, she further inquired whether her brother might accompany her.

"Two visitors might fatigue the invalid too much," said Hermann; "your brother may come later."

66

Are you not afraid that my visit may tire him?"

"I do not think so; it will make him very happy."

Ellen only took a few minutes to put on her hat and cloak, and they started. The short journey was accomplished in silence. When they reached the house, Hermann went in first to see how the dying man was. He was lying in his bed, in the delirium of fever, muttering incoherent sentences. Nevertheless. he recognised Hermann, and asked for something to drink. After having allayed his thirst, he closed his eyes, as if to sleep.

"I have brought you a friend," said Hermann; "will you see him?" "Hermann? He is always wel

come.

"No; it is a friend from America."

I lived

How de

"From America? there many years. solate and monotonous were the shores I visited! . . ."

"Will you see your friend?"

"I am carried away by the current of the river. In the distance I see dark and shadowy forms; there are hills full of shade and coolness, . . . but I will never rest there."

Hermann retired noiselessly, and returned almost immediately with Ellen.

Warren, who had taken no notice of him, continued to follow the course of his wandering thoughts.

"The river is drawing near to the sea. Already I can hear the roar of the waves. The banks are beginning to be clothed with verdure. The hills are draw

ing nearer. . . It is dark now. Here are the big trees beneath which I have dreamed so often. A radiant apparition shines through their foliage. It comes towards me. Ellen!"

She was standing beside the bed. The dying man saw her, and without showing the least surprise, said with a smile, "Thank God! you have come in time. I knew you were coming."

He murmured a few unintelligible words, and then remained silent for a long while. His eyes were wide open. Suddenly he cried, "Hermann !"

Hermann came and stood beside Ellen.

"The pendulum. . . . You know what I mean?" A frank childish smile the smile of his student days-lighted up his pallid face. He raised his right hand, and tracing in the air with his forefinger a wide semicircle, to imitate the oscillation of a pendulum, he said, "Then." He then figured in the same manner a more limited and

slower movement, and after repeating it several times, said, "Now." Lastly, he pointed straight before him with a motionless and almost menacing finger, and said, with a weak voice, "Soon."

He spoke no more, and closed his eyes. The breathing was becoming very difficult.

Ellen bent over him, and called him softly, "Henry, Henry!" He opened his eyes. She brought her mouth close to his ear, and said, with a sob, "I have always loved you."

"I knew it from the first," he said, quietly and with confidence.

A gentle expression stole over his countenance, and life seemed to return. Once more he had the confident look of youth. A sad and

beautiful smile played on his lips; he took the hand of Ellen in his, and kissed it gently.

"How do you feel now?" inquired Hermann.

The old answer, "Very well."

His hands were plucking at the bed-clothes, as if he strove to cover his face with them. Then his arms stiffened and the fingers remained motionless.

"Very well," he repeated.

He appeared to fall into deep thought. There was a long pause. At last he turned a dying look, fraught with tender pity and sadness, towards Ellen, and in a low voice, which was scarcely audible, he said these two words, with a slight emphasis on the first-" Perfectly well."

THERE are analogies, which it is always interesting to trace, between Shakespeare's tragedies and those of the Greek stage. Nature is found to have presented substantially the same crimes, the same sorrows, and the same mournful grandeurs, to the hand whose business it was to "ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears," in the days of Burleigh and of Bacon, as to that of the tragedian of the times of Themistocles or of Pericles. Under other skies, other government, other faith, man is still viewed by a keen observer as the same sinner and the same sufferer. His direst calamities are still the same; he still presents the same mark for the arrows of fate to pierce. And yet the likeness does not hold at all points. There are some parts vulnerable now, which were not exposed of old: others have acquired defensive armour which they lacked before. Man's cheek can still be crimsoned with shame; his heart still torn by anguish; but not always from the cause which stirred the like feelings in the elder days. For instance: the Hæmon of Sophocles and the Romeo of Shakespeare both alike kill themselves for love. But the passion of the latter for Juliet does not shun notice like that of the former for Antigone. Romeo's is an ever-burning Etna: Hæmon's a Vesuvius, whose hidden unsuspected fires only burst forth with sudden ruin at the last. Juliet frankly returns Romeo's passion almost unasked, and indignantly refuses to survive him: Antigone's despair and death are not caused by Hæmon. As we compare the Eng

1. Las Comedias de Calderon. Spanish by D. F. MacCarthy, Esq.

lish with the Greek play, we feel that a new power has entered the world since the time of Sophocles; a power which has so consecrated and so purified the most vehement of human affections, that from thenceforth it need have no cause to shrink back ashamed out of the light. Or, again, in that far deeper tragedy than "Romeo and Juliet," in which the dutiful Cordelia recalls to us the Antigone of the "Edipus Coloneus," where the curse of the aged and discrowned Lear is mighty, as that of the Theban king, to draw destruction down on the heads of his own unnatural children, we are not left without witness that, if Sophocles wrote in the early morning twilight, it was the brightness of the noon-day that encircled Shakespeare. The unrelenting sternness of Edipus speaks of a mind nurtured in a creed that knew little of mercy; while Lear is softened, not hardened, by his sufferings, and yields himself no unapt scholar to the teaching of adversity. In like manner the fatal oracles of the "King Edipus" find their counterpart in those predictions of the weird sisters which lure Macbeth to his destruction; and Lady Macbeth, so strong to evil, bears no distant resemblance to the Clytemnestra of Eschylus and of Sophocles, with her bold leadership in crime. But the Attic dramatists depict their crowned murderess as remorseless to the close of her career: no "sleep-walking" scene in their dramas unveils to us, as in Shakespeare's, the agonies of a high-born criminal whose own awakened conscience is slowly work-. ing out upon her the behests of

justice. Clytemnestra only shudders at the possible consequences of her evil deed in this world. Lady Macbeth stands aghast at the stain of innocent blood upon her hand, which she knows will cry out against her before the last dread seat of judgment. And then, again, if that play (which in the outline of its story comes so close to the Electras of the tragic poets of Greece), Hamlet, is placed by the trilogy of Eschylus, how vast is the difference between the two sons who have each received a supernatural summons to slay the murderer of a father! Orestes is Apollo's passive instrument, and it needs the persecution of the Furies to enlighten him as to the horrible nature of his deed of vengeance; but Hamlet communes with his own heart, reflects and questions till he has all but outstayed the time for action, and shows by his very waverings of purpose how strongly the sense of individual responsibility has been awakened in man since the Greek tragic muse grew silent. But nowhere are we made so sensible of the gulf between the ancient and the modern world, as when we look round for some masterpiece of antiquity with which to compare Othello, and find none. We have indeed famous Greek dramas surviving on the subject of jealousy; but it is jealousy on the wife's part, not on the side of the husband, which produces their tragic situations. Deïaneira slays Herakles (though without purposing his death) in the attempt to recall to herself his alienated affections; Medea avenges the infidelity of Jason upon her own hapless children; and the great Agamemnon's murder finds its pretext at least in Clytemnestra's wrath at the sight of the captive Trojan maiden in his company. But Menelaus takes back his guilty wife to the splendid

palace which she forsook, and calmly reinstates her in her forfeited grandeur; although his daughter Hermione burns with wrath on finding the heart of her husband Pyrrhus given to the enslaved Andromache. The husband's jealousy of his wife's affection was not thought an appropriate theme for Hellenic tragedy; because the preciousness of that affection was but dimly apparent to Euripides and to Sophocles. They can depict a wife stung to fury by the sense of her own wrongs, or, if of gentler nature, overwhelmed with grief at the sight of her irreparable loss; but the sacredness of the affection that has been outraged, the solemn sanctions of the tie that has been broken, are beyond their ken. Othello-armed against the wife whom he still loves tenderly by his belief in the holiness of that innermost sanctuary which he has been told that she has violated, standing forth as the minister of the divine vengeance to inflict less after all than he himself suffers, unable to survive the discovery of the innocence which his thoughts have wronged-is a conception which would have been impossible to the greatest tragedians of old. They lacked the materials out of which to form it; for the true mystery of marriage had not yet been revealed to men.

It is not, then, on the Greek stage that we must seek a parallel to what is, after all, the most moving of the tragedies of Shakespeare. Shall we succeed better if we seek it in what

Schlegel rightly calls the only national drama that Europe has produced besides the Greek and the English, as opposed to the literary drama of a court or a coterie-in the drama of Spain? Spanish plays, it is perhaps superfluous to remark, bear a greater external resemblance to our Elizabethan tragedies than Greek plays can bear. Calderon,

like Shakespeare, disregards the unities of time and place, and dresses the warriors and the beauties of distant lands and ages in the garb of his own period. But though the methods by which his genius finds expression are the same, his genius in itself is essentially different. Never when we read him can we say, "Ah, here is Shakespeare talking Spanish ;" although often, while perusing Sophocles, we have said to ourselves, "So would Shakespeare have thought in Greek."

Accordingly, while three of Calderon's plays end with the same catastrophe as does Othello (so far as the wife is concerned), the resemblance between their heroes and the noble Moor is of the slightest. Their pangs are chiefly those of wounded honour; his, above all, those of wronged affection. To enjoy these sensational and unquestionably horrible tragedies, it is therefore expedient to forget Shakespeare for the time, and to surrender our consciences for the moment to the rule of the Spaniard's code of honour; just as we have provisionally to adopt his religion if we would fully enter into the weird grandeur of Calderon's "Devotion of the Cross," with its mysterious bursts of light and Salvator Rosa-like gloom. Nor do we find Calderon more successful on any other ground, except perhaps, in his fine Martyr-plays,* than in these tragedies of jealousy. A Spaniard above all things, he is nowhere more completely himself than he is here.

There is a fourth play by Calderon which, from its subject, Herod and Mariamne, might also promise a parallel with Othello. But its treatment excludes this; its author having, with his wonted disregard of historic truth, chosen

to convert Herod's awful story into what admirers have been pleased to term, "a genuine fate-drama, colossal both in the conception and execution," by introducing into it the old apparatus of predictions which work their own fulfilment, despite of earnest efforts to avert it on the part of a man worthier throughout of pity than of blame. Mariamne is threatened with death from "the world's greatest monster." Herod is informed that his dagger is fated to slay the thing he loves best. It seems impossible that both prophecies can come true, since both evidently point at Mariamne ; yet in the end both are fulfilled, since the monster, jealousy, aims the dagger, though at another than the hapless queen, in whose breast it sheathes itself against its holder's will. Herod's jealousy is excited by no less a person than Octavius himself, who, far from being the "dull, cold-blooded Cæsar" of whom Cleopatra complains, was only rendered insensible to her charms by his passion for Mariamne's picturea part of his spoils after the battle of Actium! Herod, a captive in his hands, about to suffer death under the walls of Jerusalem, despatches the well-known order for his beloved consort's death, rather than let the original pass into those hands in whose keeping he has with rage seen the portrait. The order becomes known to Mariamne, and the conflict in her breast between love and anger is well depicted. She resolves that though as a queen she must, yet as a wife she will not, pardon the husband who could not trust her. So she goes forth in mourning robes to supplicate the victor for his life; and having obtained it, with a facility that surprises her, from the love-smitten