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JUDGE

Confess, or I will warp

Your limbs with such keen tortures

BEATRICE

Tortures! Turn The rack henceforth into a spinning-wheel! Torture your dog, that he may tell when last

He lapped the blood his master shed not me!

My pangs are of the mind, and of the heart, And of the soul; ay, of the inmost soul, Which weeps within tears as of burning gall

To see, in this ill world where none are true,

My kindred false to their deserted selves; And with considering all the wretched life Which I have lived, and its now wretched end;

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Let us not think that we shall die for this. Brother, sit near me; give me your firm

hand,

You had a manly heart. Bear up! bear up!

120

O dearest Lady, put your gentle head Upon my lap, and try to sleep awhile; Your eyes look pale, hollow, and overworn, With heaviness of watching and slow grief. Come, I will sing you some low, sleepy tune,

Not cheerful, nor yet sad; some dull old thing,

Some outworn and unused monotony,
Such as our country gossips sing and spin,
Till they almost forget they live. Lie
down-

So, that will do. Have I forgot the words?
Faith! they are sadder than I thought they

were.

SONG

False friend, wilt thou smile or weep 130
When my life is laid asleep?
Little cares for a smile or a tear,
The clay-cold corpse upon the bier!
Farewell! Heigh-ho!

What is this whispers low?
There is a snake in thy smile, my dear;
And bitter poison within thy tear.

Sweet sleep! were death like to thee,
Or if thou couldst mortal be,
I would close these eyes of pain;
When to wake? Never again.
O World! farewell!
Listen to the passing bell!
It says, thou and I must part,
With a light and a heavy heart.

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140

(The scene closes)

A Hall of the Prison. Enter CAMILLO and BERNARDO.

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Which prompted your unnatural parent's death.

And he replied - 'Paolo Santa Croce
Murdered his mother yester evening,
And he is filed. Parricide grows so rife, 20
That soon, for some just cause no doubt,
the young

Will strangle us all, dozing in our chairs.
Authority, and power, and hoary hair
Are grown crimes capital. You are my
nephew,

You come to ask their pardon; stay a moment;

Here is their sentence; never see me more Till, to the letter, it be all fulfilled.'

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Blithe voice of living thing; muse not again

Upon familiar thoughts, sad, yet thus lost! How fearful! to be nothing! Or to be What? Oh, where am I? Let me not go mad!

Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be

No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world

The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!

60

If all things then should be my father's spirit, His eye, his voice, his touch surrounding

ine;

The atmosphere and breath of my dead life!

If sometimes, as a shape more like himself,

Even the form which tortured me on earth,

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The Mask of Anarchy was composed in the fall of 1819, soon after the Manchester riot of that summer. The Manchester or Peterloo Massacre,' as it was called, was occasioned by an attempt to hold a mass meeting on August 9, 1819, at St. Peter's Field, Manchester, in behalf of parliamentary reform. It was declared illegal and forbidden by the magistrates, and was in consequence postponed. It was held August 16, and attended by several thousands. The chief constable was ordered to arrest the ringleaders, and in particular the chairman, Henry Hunt, an agitator unconnected with Leigh Hunt. He asked

military aid, and went accompanied by forty cavalrymen; on the failure of the officer and his escort to penetrate the crowd which surrounded them, orders were given three hundred hussars to disperse the people; in the charge six persons were killed, twenty or thirty received sabre wounds, and fifty or more were injured in other ways. Eldon was Lord High Chancellor, Sidmouth, Home Secretary, and Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary; the government supported the authorities and publicly approved their conduct. News of these events reached Shelley while still residing at the Villa Valsovano, near Leghorn, and employed in

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