Sus. Why, then I thank you more :
You have done lovingly, leaving yourself,
That you would thus bestow me on another.
Thou art my husband, Death, and I embrace thee
With all the love I have. Forget the stain
Of my unwitting sin; and then I come.
A crystal virgin to thee: my soul's purity

Shall, with bold wings, ascend the doors of Mercy;
For innocence is ever her companion.

Fr. Not yet mortal? I would not linger you,
Or leave you a tongue to blab.

[Stabs her again. Sus. Now, Heaven reward you ne'er the worse for me!

I did not think that Death had been so sweet,

Nor I so apt to love him. I could ne'er die better,
Had I stayed forty years for preparation;

For I'm in charity with all the world.

Let me for once be thine example, Heaven;

Do to this man, as I him free forgive;
And may he better die, and better live!

[Dies.

Having completed this dastardly murder, Frank wounds his own body and contrives to tie himself to a tree, where he calls aloud for help. His father and old Carter enter to his cry; he charges the crime on two former suitors of Carter's daughter, Somerton and Warbeck, and is taken back to Carter's house to have his wounds cured. Winnifrede, who knows nothing of his guilt in this last fact, follows him still dressed like a page, and in his sick-bed he is waited on by her and Susan's sister, Katharine, another fair type of womanhood. The prolonged dialogue, which constitutes the beauty of this play, rises nowhere to a higher point of Euripidean realism than in a scene where Frank is discovered conscience-smitten, feverish, and haunted by delirious fancies, between Katharine and Winnifrede. The ghost of Susan stands at his bedside. He cannot distinguish phantoms from reali

THE END OF FRANK.

477

ties. For a while he strives to maintain the fiction of Susan's murder by Somerton and Warbeck. At the last he breaks down, and reveals the truth to Winnifrede. Meantime, the two women surround him with gentle ministrations and consolatory words, going about their work with heavy hearts indeed, but bent on helpful service, until the point when Katharine discovers a bloody knife in Frank's coat pocket, jumps at once to the conclusion of his guilt, and hurries out to warn her father. The play runs fast to its conclusion now. Frank is, of course, executed, and, of course, goes manfully, repentant, to his death. Very touching scenes are written in this part for old Thorney and for Winnifrede, who grows continually upon our sympathy:

Thor. Daughter, be comforted.

Win. Comfort and I

Are too far separated to be joined

But in eternity; I share too much

Of him that's going thither.

War. Poor woman, 't was not thy fault.

Win. My fault was lust, my punishment was shame.

Frank is led by:

Thou much-wronged woman, I must sigh for thee,

As he that's only loath to leave the world

For that he leaves thee in it unprovided,
Unfriended.

Winnifrede responds :

Might our souls together

Climb to the height of their eternity,

And there enjoy what earth denied us, happiness!

Students of the text will judge how far such pas

sages as these are marred by elaborate expansion in Ford's frigidly rhetorical manner. For my own part, I can bear the exhibition of the playwright's conscious art, because I recognise its dramatic effectiveness.

I said that Frank Thorney's romance is joined to the second story of this drama by a slender thread. That thread I have omitted in my exposition. His sudden impulse to murder Susan is supposed to proceed from a spell cast on him by Mother Sawyer, the Witch of Edmonton, whose familiar spirit, in the shape of a black dog, appears upon the stage at the moment of his crime, and again reappears before the discovery of the bloody knife. But the playwrights bungled their work sadly in the opening of the third act, where the witch's malice might have been motived and brought into play. They took no pains to connect her with Frank Thorney, and suffered her to wreak her spite upon a crowd of minor personages. I cannot, indeed, avoid the suspicion that we either possess ‘The Witch of Edmonton' in a mutilated form, or that its authors hastily patched two separate compositions together with slight attention to unity.

This want of cohesion is no drawback to the force and pathos of Mother Sawyer's portrait; perhaps the best picture of a witch transmitted to us from an age which believed firmly in witchcraft, but drawn by men whose humanity was livelier than their superstition. From the works of our Elizabethan Dramatists we might select studies of witch life more imaginative, more ghastly, more grotesque: Middleton's Hecate and Stadlin, Marston's Erichtho, Jonson's Maudlin, Shakspere's weird sisters and Sycorax. None of

these, however, are so true to common life; touched with so fine a sense of natural justice. The outcast wretchedness which drove old crones to be what their cursed neighbours fancied them, is painted here with truly dreadful realism. We see the witch in making, watch the persecutions which convert her from a village pariah to a potent servant of the devil, peruse her arguments in self-defence, and follow her amid the jeers and hootings of the rabble to her faggot-grave. Mother Sawyer first appears upon the stage gathering sticks :

And why on me? Why should the envious world
Throw all their scandalous malice upon me?
Cause I am poor, deformed, and ignorant,
And like a bow buckled and bent together
By some more strong in mischief than myself,
Must I for that be made a common sink
For all the filth and rubbish of men's tongues
To fall and run into? Some call me witch;
And being ignorant of myself, they go
About to teach me how to be one; urging

That my bad tongue, by their bad usage

made so,

Forspeaks their cattle, doth bewitch their corn,

Themselves, their servants, and their babes at nurse.
This they enforce upon me; and in part

Make me to credit it.

Beaten before our eyes by a brutal peasant, she falls to cursing, and stretches out her heart's desire toward the unknown power more strong in mischiefs than herself:

What is the name? Where, and by what art learned,

What spells, what charms or invocations,

May the thing called Familiar be purchased?

The village rabble fall upon her, lash her with their

leathern belts, and din the name of witch into her ears, until the name becomes a part of her :

I have heard old beldams

Talk of familiars in the shape of mice,

Rats, ferrets, weasels, and I wot not what,

That have appeared, and sucked, some say, their blood;
But by what means they came acquainted with them,
I now am ignorant. Would some power, good or bad,
Instruct me which way I might be revenged

Upon this churl, I'd go out of myself,
And give this fury leave to dwell within
This ruined cottage, ready to fall with age!
Abjure all goodness, be at hate with prayer,
And study curses, imprecations,

Blasphemous speeches, oaths, detested oaths,
Or anything that 's ill: so I might work.
Revenge upon this miser, this black cur,

That barks and bites, and sucks the very blood
Of me, and of my credit. 'T is all one

To be a witch, as to be counted one.

Vengeance, shame, ruin light upon that canker !

As the devil himself, later on in the play, observes:

Thou never art so distant

From an evil spirit, but that thy oaths,

Curses and blasphemies pull him to thine elbow.

This Mother Sawyer now experiences; for the familiar she has been invoking, starts up beside her in the form of a black dog:

Ho! have I found thee cursing? Now thou art

Mine own.

From him she learns the formula by which he may be summoned, seals their compact by letting him suck blood from her veins, and proceeds to use him against her enemies.