CATILIN E.

ACT I. SCENE I.

A Room in Catiline's House.

The Ghost of Sylla rises.

Dost thou not feel me, Rome? not yet! is night
So heavy on thee, and my weight so light?"
Can Sylla's ghost arise within thy walls,

Less threatening than an earthquake, the quick falls
Of thee and thine? Shake not the frighted heads
Of thy steep towers, or shrink to their first beds?
Or, as their ruin the large Tyber fills,

Make that swell up, and drown thy seven proud hills?

▪ Dost thou not feel me, Rome? not yet! is night

So heavy on thee, and my weight so light?] "The poet opens his play with the ghost of Sylla. This is an imitation of Seneca's Thyestes, in which the ghost of Tantalus appears, attended by the Furies. Perhaps this first scene ought rather to be considered as a prologue:" (no doubt of it) "There are other instances in the ancient dramatic writers, where these shadowy beings are introduced in the beginning of a play. In the Hecuba of Euripides, the ghost of Polydorus opens the tragedy. WHAL.

Oldham informs us that his "first satyr" (that on the Jesuits) was drawn by Sylla's ghost in the great Jonson, which may be perceived (he adds) by some strokes and touches therein, however short they come of the original.”

What sleep is this doth seize thee so like death,
And is not it? wake, feel her in my breath:
Behold, I come, sent from the Stygian sound,
As a dire vapour that had cleft the ground,"
To ingender with the night, and blast the day;
Or like a pestilence that should display
Infection through the world: which thus I do.-
[The curtain draws, and Catiline is disco-
vered in his study.

Pluto be at thy counsels, and into
Thy darker bosom enter Sylla's spirit!

All that was mine, and bad, thy breast inherit.
Alas, how weak is that for Catiline!

Did I but say-vain voice!-all that was mine?—
All that the Gracchi, Cinna, Marius would,

What now, had I a body again, I could,

Coming from hell, what fiends would wish should be,
And Hannibal could not have wish'd to see,
Think thou, and practise. Let the long-hid seeds
Of treason in thee, now shoot forth in deeds
Ranker than horror; and thy former facts
Not fall in mention, but to urge new acts.
Conscience of them provoke thee on to more:
Be still thy incests, murders, rapes before
Thy sense; thy forcing first a vestal nun;
Thy parricide, late, on thine own only son,

2 Behold, I come, sent from the Stygian sound,

3.

As a dire vapour that had cleft the ground.] From Seneca :

3

Mittor,ut dirus vapor

Tellure rupta, vel gravem populis luem
Sparsura pestis.

Thyest. ver. 87.

Thy forcing first a vestal nun ;

Thy parricide, late, on thine own only son.] This priestess of Vesta, defiled by Catiline, is said to have been a sister of Tully. (If Whalley alludes to Fabia, she was sister to Terentia, Cicero's wife.) He killed his son, in order to make room for his mistress, Aurelia Orestilla: the quartos 1611 and 1635 read

After his mother, to make empty way
For thy last wicked nuptials; worse than they,
That blaze that act of thy incestuous life,
Which got thec at once a daughter and a wife.
I leave the slaughters that thou didst for me,
Of senators; for which, I hid for thee
Thy murder of thy brother, being so bribed,
And writ him in the list of my proscribed·
After thy fact, to save thy little shame ;
Thy incest with thy sister, I not name:
These are too light; fate will have thee pursue
Deeds, after which no mischief can be new;
The ruin of thy country: thou wert built
For such a work, and born for no less guilt.
What though defeated once thou'st been, and known,
Tempt it again: that is thy act, or none.
What all the several ills that visit earth,
Brought forth by night with a sinister birth,
Plagues, famine, fire, could not reach unto,
The sword, nor surfeits; let thy fury do:
Make all past, present, future ill thine own;
And conquer all example in thy one.
Nor let thy thought find any vacant time
To hate an old, but still a fresher crime

Drown the remembrance; let not mischief cease,

But while it is in punishing, increase :^

thine own natural son: the lection I follow, is that of the eldest folio, 1616, which I think the most emphatical. WHAL.

Let not mischief cease,

But while it is in punishing, increase:] These, with the preceding and following verses, are likewise from Seneca:

Nec vacet cuiquam vetus

Odisse crimen; semper oriatur novum ;
Nec unum in uno; dùmque punitur scelus
Crescat.

Jusque omne pereat; non sit à vestris malis

Immune cælum

Nox atra fiat, excidat cælo dies. WHAL.
VOL. IV.

P

Conscience and care die in thec; and be free
Not heaven itself from thy impiety:

Let night grow blacker with thy plots, and day,
At shewing but thy head forth, start away
From this half-sphere; and leave Rome's blinded

walls

To embrace lusts, hatreds, slaughters, funerals,
And not recover sight till their own flames
Do light them to their ruins! All the names
Of thy confederates too be no less great
In hell than here: that when we would repeat
Our strengths in muster, we may name you all,
And furies upon you for furies call!
Whilst what you do may strike them into fears,
Or make them grieve, and wish your mischief theirs.
[Sinks.

CATILINE rises, and comes forward.

Cat. It is decreed: nor shall thy fate, O
Rome,

Resist my vow. Though hills were set on hills,
And seas met seas to guard thee, I would through;
Ay, plough up rocks,' steep as the Alps, in dust,
And lave the Tyrrhene waters into clouds,
But I would reach thy head, thy head, proud
city!

Ay, plough up rocks, &c.] All the copies concur in reading I, the old affirmative, which Whalley mistook for the pronoun, and corrupted into I'd plough, &c., to the injury of the spi rit of the passage. In the numerous editions of this play, there are many petty variations, with which it is scarcely necessary to trouble the reader; especially as, in almost every instance, that of 1616, the only one which appears to have been printed under Jonson's own eye, is carefully followed. In this place the 4to. 1635, reads “ I, pluck up" &c.

Robert Baron, in his tragedy of Mirza, not content with bor

The ills that I have done cannot be safe
But by attempting greater; and I feel
A spirit within me chides my sluggish hands,
And says, they have been innocent too long.
Was I a man bred great as Rome herself,
One form'd for all her honours, all her glories,
Equal to all her titles; that could stand
Close up with Atlas, and sustain her name.
As strong as he doth heaven! and was I,
Of all her brood, mark'd out for the repulse
By her no-voice, when I stood candidate
To be commander in the Pontic war!
I will hereafter call her step-dame ever.
If she can lose her nature, I can lose
My piety, and in her stony entrails
Dig me a seat; where I will live again,
The labour of her womb, and be a burden
Weightier than all the prodigies and monsters
That she hath teem'd with, since she first knew
Mars-

Enter AURELIA ORESTILLA,

Who's there?

Aur. "Tis I.

Cat. Aurelia?

Aur. Yes.
Cat. Appear,

And break like day, my beauty, to this circle : Upbraid thy Phoebus, that he is so long

In mounting to that point, which should give thee Thy proper splendour. Wherefore frowns my

sweet?

rowing the plan and distribution of Catiline, has taken almost the whole of this and the preceding speech to himself. If we are not more honest than our ancestors, we certainly are at more pains to conceal our thefts; for Baron's plagarisms are open and undisguised.