council-board of Susa. Shakspere gives us enumerations of armies, and returns of killed and wounded, which are not, we suspect, much less accurate than those of Herodotus. There are passages in Herodotus nearly as long as acts of Shakspere in which everything is told dramatically, and in which the narrative serves only the place of stage-directions. It is possible, no doubt, that the substance of some real conversations may have been repeated to the historian. But events, which, if they ever happened, happened in ages and nations so remote that the particulars could never have been known to him, are related with the greatest minuteness of detail. We have all that Candaules said to Gyges, and all that passed between Astyages and Harpagus. We are, therefore, unable to judge whether, in the account which he gives of transactions respecting which he might possibly have been well informed, we can trust to anything beyond the naked outline; whether, for example, the answer of Gelon to the ambassadors of the Grecian confederacy, or the expressions which passed between Aristides and Themistocles at their famous interview, have been correctly transmitted to us. The great events are, no doubt, faithfully related; probably, are many of the slighter circumstances: but which of them it is impossible to ascertain. The fictions are so much like the facts. and the facts so much like the fictions, that, with respect to many interesting particulars, our belief is neither given nor withheld, but remains in an uneasy and interminable state of abeyance. We know that there is truth, but we cannot decide exactly where it lies. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. TO HIS MISTRESS, THE QUEEN OF BOHEMIA. (THE PRINCESS ELIZABETH, DAUGHTER OF JAMES I., OF ENGLAND.) "OU meaner beauties of the night, YOU That poorly satisfy our eyes You common people of the skies, You curious chanters of the wood, That warble forth dame Nature's lays, By your weak accents, what's your praise You violets that first appear, By your pure purple mantles known, Like the proud virgins of the year, As if the spring were all your own, What are you when the rose is blown? So when my mistress shall be seen In form and beauty of her mind, By virtue first, then choice, a queen, Tell me if she were not designed The eclipse and glory of her kind? SIR HENRY WOTTON. When some were kind on whom I had no claim, And some forsook on whom my love relied, And some, who might have battled for my sake, Stood off in doubt to see what turn the world would take. Thou gav'st me what the poor do give the poor; Kind words, and holy wishes, and true tears; The loved, the near of kin could do no more, Who changed not with the gloom of varying years TO THE DUCHESS OF SUTHER- But clung the closer when I stood forlorn, And blunted Slander's dart with their indignant scorn. LAND. NCE more, my harp, once more! although Never to wake thy silent strings again, A wandering dream thy gentle chords have wrought, And my sad heart, which long hath dwelt in pain, Soars, like a wild bird from a cypress bough, Into the poet's heaven, and leaves dull grief below. And unto thee, the beautiful and pure, Whose lot is cast amid that busy world Where only sluggish dullness dwells secure, And Fancy's generous wing is faintly furled; To thee, whose friendship kept its equal truth Through the most dreary hour of my embittered youth, I dedicate the lay. Ah! never bard, In days when poverty was twin with song, Nor wandering harper, lonely and ill-starred, Cheered by some castle's chief, and harbored long, Not Scott's Last Minstrel, in his trembling lays, Woke with a warmer heart the earnest meed of praise. For easy are the alms the rich man spares To sons of Genius, by misfortune bent; But thou gav'st me, what woman seldom dares, Belief; in spite of many a cold dissent, When, slandered and maligned, I stood apart From those whose bounded power hath wrung, not crushed, my heart. Thou, then, when cowards lied away my name, And scoffed to see me feebly stem the tide, A dream of thee, aroused by Fancy's power, And they who never saw thy lovely face P MILTON, DANTE, AND ESCHYLUS. (From the Essay on "Milton."') OETRY which relates to the beings of another world ought to be at once mysterious and picturesque. That of Milton is so. That of Dante is picturesque indeed beyond any that was ever written. Its effect approaches to that produced by the pencil or the chisel. But it is picturesque to the exclusion of all mystery. This is a fault on the right side, a fault inseparable from the plan of Dante's poem, which, as we have already observed, rendered utmost accuracy of description necessary. Still it is a fault. The supernatural agents excite an interest; but it is not the interest which is proper to supernatural agents. We feel that we could talk to the ghosts and dæmons without any emotion of unearthly awe. We could, like Don Juan, ask them to supper, and eat heartily in their company. Dante's angels are good men with wings. His devils are spiteful ugly executioners. His dead men are merely living men in strange situations. The scene that passes between the poet and Farinata is justly celebrated. Still, Farinata in the burning tomb is exactly what Farinata would have been at an auto da fe. Nothing can be more touching than the first interview of Dante and Beatrice. Yet what is it, but a lovely woman chiding, with sweet austere composure, the lover for whose affection she is grateful, but whose vice she reprobates? The feelings which give the passage its charm would suit the streets of Florence as well as the summit of the Mount of Purgatory. The spirits of Milton are unlike those of almost all other writers. His fiends, in particular, are wonderful creations. They are not metaphysical abstractions. They are not wicked men. They are not ugly beasts. They have no horns, no tails, none of the "fee-faw-fum” of Tasso and Klopstock. They have just enough in common with human nature to be intelligible to human beings. Their characters are, like their forms, marked by a certain dim resemblance to those of men, but exaggerated to gigantic dimensions, and veiled in mysterious gloom. Perhaps the gods and dæmons of Æschylus may best bear a comparison with the angels and devils of Milton. The style of the Athenian had, as we remarked, something of an oriental character; and the same peculiarity may be traced in his mythology. It has nothing of the amenity and elegance which we generally find in the superstitions of Greece. All is rugged, barbaric, and colossal. The legends of Eschylus seem to harmonize less with the fragrant groves and graceful porticoes in which his countrymen paid their vows to the God of Light and the Goddess of Desire, than with those huge and grotesque labyrinths of eternal granite in which Egypt enshrined her mystic Osiris, or in which Hindostan still bows down to her seven-headed idols. His favorite gods are those of the elder generation, the sons of heaven and earth (compared with whom Jupiter himself was a stripling and an upstart), the gigantic Titans, and the inexorable furies. Foremost among his creations of this class stands Prometheus, half fiend, half redeemer, the friend of man, the sullen and implacable enemy of heaven. Prometheus bears undoubtedly a considerable resemblance to the Satan of Milton. In both we find the same impatience of control, the same ferocity, the same unconquerable pride. In both characters also are mingled, though in very different proportions, some kind and generous feeling. Prometheus, however, is hardly superhuman enough. He talks too much of his chains and his uneasy posture; he is rather too much depressed and agitated. His resolutions seems to depend on the knowledge which he possesses that the fate of his torturer is in his hands, and that the hour of his release will surely come. But Satan is a creature of another sphere. The might of his intellectual nature is victorious over the extremity of pain. Amidst agonies which cannot be conceived without horror, he deliberates, resolves, and even exults. Against the sword of Michael, against the thunder of Jehovah, against the flaming lake, and the marl burning with solid fire, against the prospect of an eternity of unintermitted. misery, his spirit bears up unbroken, resting on its own innate energies, requiring no support from anything external, nor even from hope itself. To return for a moment to the parallel which we have been attempting to draw between Milton and Dante, we would add, that the poetry of these great men has in a considerable degree taken its character from their moral qualities. They are not egotists. They rarely obtrude their idiosyncrasies upon their readers. They have nothing in common with those modern beggars for fame, who extort a pittance from the compassion of the inexperienced by exposing the nakedness and sores of their minds. Yet it would be difficult to name two writers, whose works have been more completely, though undesignedly, colored by their personal feelings. The character of Milton was peculiarly distinguished by loftiness of spirit; that of Dante by intensity of feeling. In every line of the Divine Comedy we discern the asperity which is produced by pride struggling with misery. There is perhaps no work in the world so deeply and uniformly sorrowful. The melancholy of Dante was no fantastic caprice. It was not, as far as at this distance of time can be judged, the effect of external circumstances. It was from within. Neither love, nor glory, neither the conflicts of earth nor the hope of heaven could dispel it. It turned every consolation and every pleasure into its own nature. It resembled that noxious Sardinian soil of which the intense bitterness is said to have been perceptible even in its honey. His mind was, in the noble language of the Hebrew poet, a land of darkness, as darkness itself, and where the light was as darkness." The gloom of his characters discolors all the passions of men, and all the face of nature, and tinges with its own livid hue the flowers of Paradise and the glories of the eternal throne. All the portraits of him are singularly characteristic. No person can look upon the features, noble even to ruggedness, the dark furrows of the cheek, the haggard and woeful stare of the eye, the sullen and contemptuous curve of the lip, and doubt that they belong to a man too proud and sensitive to be happy. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. ZIMRI. (George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.) IN the first rank of these did Zimri stand; ing, Blest madman, who could every hour employ |