from any compromise or undertaking on his part. This we have always regarded as one of the highest displays of poetic thought which that splendid effort exhibits. When Manfred approaches his end, he does not quake like a coward felon-he feels the nobleness of his nature, and the supremacy which it gives him over the foul spirits. When they taunt him as "his soul is ebbing from him," he replies in these expressions of scorn, and utter defiance :

Thou false fiend, thou liest!

My life is in its last hour,—that I know,
Nor would redeem a moment of that hour;
I do not combat against death, but thee
And thy surrounding angels; my past power
Was purchased by no compact with thy crew,
But by superior science-penance-daring-

And length of watching-and strength of mind-and skill
In knowledge of our fathers-when the earth
Saw men and spirits walking side by side,
And gave ye no supremacy: I stand

Upon my strength-I do defy-deny-
Spurn back, and scorn ye!—

Spirit.

Have made thee

Man.

But thy many crimes

What are they to such as thee?

Must crimes be punished but by other crimes
And greater criminals?-Back to thy hell!
Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel,
Thou never shalt possess me, that I know:

Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me;
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey--
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.- Back, ye baffled fiends!
The hand of death is on me-but not your's!

[The Demons disappear.

The manner, too, in which the power thus acquired is exercised by Manfred, is totally dissimilar from its employment by the others. Faustus devotes his, almost exclusively, to the paltry gratification of exciting wonder by supernatural feats, such as resuscitation, and others of a like nature; and sometimes by mere juggler's tricks, fit only to amuse a schoolboy. Faust employs the aid of his familiar in procuring for him the gratifications of sense, by facilitating the seduction of a lovely and innocent creature,-and subsequently in affording means for her rescue from the consequences of the guilt into which he has drawn her. Manfred, on the other hand, exercises his intellect in superhuman studies and pursuits chiefly, if not solely, for the mere sake of that exercise, as being the strongest excitation left to a mind shaken and almost palsied by irrevocable and terrible misfortune and crime. If we were to attempt a definition, we should say that the supernatural beings of Marlow were the spirits of the Earth, those of Goëthe of Hell, and those of Byron of Air. The coarse and vulgar purposes, and language of much of Marlow's play, seem beneath the pride of "the great Lucifer." Goethe's Demon is indeed of Hell ;it is impossible for any thing to be more utterly fiendish than the cool scoffing and contemptuous bearing of this monster, throughout. The manifestations of Manfred's spirits are

Sweet and melancholy sounds

As music on the waters; he sees
The steady aspect of a clear large star

But nothing more.

The beings which he evokes,

have no forms beyond the elements

Of which they are the mind and principle.

Again. Can there be an imagination more ethereal than that of the Witch of the Alps? A being, dwelling in the

rainbow which Noon forms upon the mountain-cataractfar exceeding "the charms of Earth's least-mortal daughters," in her spiritual loveliness,-the very essence of all that is calm and purely passionless in angelic nature, mirrored in the excellence of human beauty-such a being is truly one of the loftiest, simplest, and most delightful creations which poetry has ever given to the world.

Marlow's Tragedy abounds in all the blemishes of a barbarous age; but it displays throughout great vigour of thought, and has passages of very splendid writing. Marlow was one of the earliest, and certainly one of the greatest, of the poets, who shed such glory on what has been somewhat loosely termed the Elizabethan age*. He died as early as the year 1593;-so that, if we consider how almost totally destitute he was of models and guides, and how coarse and unformed the public taste then was, we shall confess that he was a man of no common degree of genius. The chief fault, as it appears to us, of his very extraordinary production, The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus, is the coarse and paltry purposes to which is applied the power, bought at so fearful a price as the resignation of the immortal soul. The buffooneries of the clownish followers of Faustus, who all seem to share his power, are to be passed over in consideration of the universal taste and practice of the time;-but the occupations of Faustus himself seem to be little higher. The bantering the Pope, and the snatching the meat out of his hand, &c., the raising pageants of Alexander, Darius, and Thais, to please the emperor-the fulfilling the wish of a sceptical courtier that, if Faustus succeeds in these juggleries, he "will be Acteon, and turn himself to a stag,"-these, and

* Marlow, it is true, lived and died in Queen Elizabeth's reign; but Shakspeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Jonson, and nearly all the other great names of the period, produced many of their chief efforts long after her death.

such as these, are somewhat dearly purchased, one would think, at such a price. It is true, that he ultimately asks Helen "for his paramour," but even this seems to have been chiefly caused by her form having been previously evoked to gratify the pedantry of a few scholars. If it were not irreverent, also, we should say that Faustus makes a strangely-bad bargain, in asking only "four-and-twenty years, letting him live in all voluptuousness."

But, in despite of all these blemishes and defects, the play abounds in striking and beautiful passages. The following lines are philosophic as well as poetical, both in idea and expression:

Faustus. Where are you damn'd?
Mephistopheles. In hell.

Faust. How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?
Meph. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Think'st thou that I, that saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being deprived of everlasting bliss ?"

And, again, in a subsequent scene,—

Faust, First I will question thee about hell.
Tell me where is the place that men call hell?

Meph. Under the heavens.

Faust. Ay, so are all things else; but whereabouts?

Meph. Within the bowels of these elements;
Where we are tortured, and remain for ever.
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed *
In one self place; but where we are is hell;
And where hell is, there must we ever be:
And, to be short, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,

All places shall be hell that are not heaven.

The scene in which Faustus calls up and questions the Seven Deadly Sins is exceedingly curious. The following is the speech put into the mouth of Envy ;—

"I am Envy; begotten of a chimney-sweeper, and an oysterwife I cannot read, and therefore wish all books burned: I am lean with seeing others eat. O that there would come a famine over all the world, that all might die, and I live alone; then thou shouldst see how fat I'd be! But must thou sit and I stand? come down with a vengeance!"

The lines in which Faustus addresses Helen are eminently soft and beautiful:-but they have been so often quoted, that we prefer concluding our extracts from this play, with the vigorous and even awful representation of the manner in which he meets his fate, at the expiration of the covenanted term :

(The clock strikes eleven.)

Faust. Oh, Faustus!

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then must thou be damned perpetually.
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heav'n,
That time may cease, and midnight never come.
Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but a year,
A month, a week, a natural day,

That Faustus may repent and save his soul.

O lente, lente, currite noctis equi!

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus will be damned.

*

(The watch strikes.

Oh! half the hour is past: 't will all be past anon.
Oh! if my soul must suffer for my sin,
Impose some end to my incessant pain.
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,