Ag. But she, as chaste as was her name, And reads a music-lecture to the planets! Earine, Died undeflowered and now her sweet Here in the air above us, and doth haste all And with this thought he's run to call 'em hearers. Cla. Alas, this is a strained but innocent I'll follow him, and find him if I can : He will acquaint you with an accident, Kar. What is it, Lionel, wherein I may Why do you so survey and circumscribe me, Lio. I wish you had a window in your Or in your back, I might look thorough you, The winged archer, hath shot home a shaft eyes, She says, his stand is, and between your He runs forth his divisions to her ears, Go with me, Karol, and bestow a visit things with a compass, which hath one foot fixed and the other extended to form the circle. -WHAL. In charity, upon the afflicted maid, Who pineth with the languor of your love. [As they are going out, enter Maudlin (in the shape of Marian) and Douce. Maud. Whither intend you? Amie is recovered, Feels no such grief as she complained of lately. This maiden hath been with her from her mother Maudlin, the cunning woman, who hath sent her Herbs for her head, and simples of that nature, Have wrought upon her a miraculous cure; Settled her brain to all our wish and wonder. Lio. So instantly! you know I now but left her, Possessed with such a fit almost to a phrensie: Yourself too feared her, Marian, and did urge My haste to seek out Karol, and to bring him. Maud. I did so: but the skill of that wise woman, And her great charity of doing good, And to astonishment; we can but thank, In her extremes. Rob. Stay; What was't you ha' told my friend? [He seizes Maud by the girdle, and runs out with her, but returns immediately with the broken girdle in his hand, followed at a distance by the witch in her own shape. Maud. Help, murder, help! You will not rob me, outlaw? thief, restore Maud. Not in your gripe. Rob. Was this the charmed circle, The copy that so cozened and deceived us ? I'll carry hence the trophy of your spoils : My men shall hunt you too upon the start, And course you soundly. Maud. I shall make them sport, And send some home without their legs or 1 I cannot but lament with the reader the loss of the remaining parts of this play, which we could have borne with the greater patience, had even this act been fortunately completed. We have no account how it came down to us in this mutilated condition; and conjectures can be at best but precarious. Possibly it might have been in the number of those pieces which were accidentally burnt; though indeed there is no particular mention of it in The Execration upon Vulcan: or Jonson might have undertaken it in the decline of his days, and did not live to finish it; as was the case with his tragedy of Mortimer: and to this conjecture we are induced by the first line of the prologue "He that hath feasted you these forty years.' There is indeed one reason which might lead us to believe that the poet left it unfinished by design. He beheld with great indignation the ungenerous treatment which Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess met with from the people at its first appearance; and he was witness also to the small encouragement that was shown to its revival under the patronage of Charles I. Possibly these circumstances deterred him from going through with the performance. As his composition was of a kindred nature to that of Fletcher, he might presage the same unfortunate event should he ever introduce it on the stage. So that posterity can only bewail the perversity of taste in their injudicious ancestors, whose discouragement of the first contributed to deprive us of the second pastoral drama that would do honour to the nation. What we now have serveth only to increase our regret; like the remains of some ancient master, which beget in us the most inexpressible desire of a perfect statue by the same hand. When a work is not completed by its author, or maimed by the hand of time, one would either wish the remains to be inconsiderable, or the beauties less exquisite and charming. In the former case the deficiency is not so much deplored, from our inability to judge of the perfection of the whole; and in the latter, we are very little anxious for what appears to be hardly worth preserving: but when a piece is so far advanced as to convince us of the excellence of the artist, and of its own superior delicacy, we are naturally touched with concern for what is lost, and set a proper value on the parts which still subsist. WHAL. I cannot compliment my predecessor either on the taste or judgment displayed in this summary, which is drawn up somewhat in the formal style of Vellum. The gravity with which he ventures to conjecture a circumstance which Jonson himself had expressly affirmed, is of a ludicrous cast; but indeed Whalley appears inconsequential and confused throughout. Jonson had already "feasted the public forty years;" this brings down the date of The Sad Shepherd to 1636; yet the critic imagines that the conclusion of it might have perished when his study was burnt, which took place at least a dozen years before; since Howell, in a letter written on the appearance of The Magnetic Lady, reminds Jonson that he had prevented his study from taking fire, and alludes to the former accident, in which his papers perished, as of a remote date. The next conjecture, namely, that Jonson might have left this drama unfinished on account of the ungenerous treatment which The Faithful Shepherdess experienced on its first appearance, is incredibly wild: that pastoral was brought out in 1610, perhaps before, and not heard of again till 1633, when it was acted at Court, so that Jonson, after suffering the terrors of its expulsion from the stage to hang over him near thirty years, must have been finally overcome by them, just as the play had acquired a certain degree of favour, and appeared again on the stage. But how little does Whalley seem to know of Jonson! He was not a man to regulate his expectations of good or ill success by the fate of any other person; and though he might, and, in fact, did express his indignation at the audience who witnessed the fall of his friend's piece, he was far more likely to brave the censure of what he calls "the many-headed bench," than to be deterred by it from following his example. I know not, however, why such clamour should be raised against those who disapproved of The Faithful Shepherdess. As a poem it is insufferably tedious, and as a drama of action, its heaviness can only be equalled by its want of art. The lyric part of it indeed (that which is most easily written), is highly poetical, and there is occasionally great beauty in the language of Clorin; but the genius of the author may be said to come in and go out with the Satyr. The whining and the wanton lovers, who appear, "vent their folly," and vanish in succession, without order, connexion, or apparent purpose, would exhaust all the patience of good humour itself. Add to this, that the supernatural parts of the story (the holy well, &c.) are foreign from our native and traditionary superstitions, and can therefore excite little emotion, or interest, in any perceptible degree, the faith and feelings of the spectator. In The Sad Shepherd (written, as the judicious Mr. Weber positively assures us, "in emulation of Fletcher's poem, but far short of it") there is nothing of this. With equal felicity and judgment, Jonson has resorted to the agency of witches, with which all were familiar, and which all were prepared to receive without hesitation. The thoughts are natural and elegant, the style appropriate, the language inexpressibly beautiful, and, in some detached passages, worthy of the highest praise: the various turns of fortune too, though surprising, are yet probable, and according to the established creed; and the persons of the drama supported with the characteristic discrimination of the author's golden days. Whalley believes that this drama was left unfinished by the author: I can scarcely think that we should have found a prologue to it in that case; a prologue, too, which manifestly refers to a piece ready for representation. On the margin of his copy, he observes, from Mr. Waldron, that Lord Falkland seems to confirm his opinion in some lines on Jonson's death, first printed in the Jonsonius Virbius. "If the end crown all, Old Trent will send you more such tales as these, And shall grow young again, as one doth please." of taste, that the whole of The Sad Shepherd has I lament with Whalley, and with every reader not reached us. That it was completed I have little doubt: its mutilated state is easily accounted for by the confusion which followed the author's death. Into whose hands his papers fell, as he left apparently no will nor testamentary document of any kind, cannot now be told: perhaps into those of the woman who resided with him as his nurse, or some of her kin : but they were evidently careless or ignorant, and put his manuscripts together in a very disorderly manner, losing some and misplacing others. Had they handed down to us The Sad Shep"herd in its complete state, we should have possessed a poem which might have been confidently opposed to the proudest effort of dramatic genius that time has yet bequeathed us. "Not long before his death, our woods he meant To visit, and descend from Thames to Trent.' But this is merely an allusion to the poet's own words in the prologue: The Fall of Mortimer. THE FALL OF MORTIMER.] This fragment, the last draught of Jonson's quill, appears in the folio, 1640. It seems to have been overlooked at first, and is awkwardly shuffled in among the poetry at the end of the volume. The title-page has this motto from Horace : Et docuit magnumque loqui, nitique cothurno. Hor. Art. Poetic. and at the conclusion, we have ( Left Unfinished;" a memorandum that seems to confirm the conjecture hazarded on the Sad Shepherd, of which the abrupt termination is followed by no such notice. |