responded, and the coarse music which he produced to please them, disciplined him to the perfection to which he now approaches. I do not go on with Charles the First. I feel too little certainty of the future, and too little satisfaction with regard to the past to undertake any subject seriously and deeply. I stand, as it were, upon a precipice, which I have ascended with great, and cannot descend without greater peril, and I am content if the heaven above me is calm for the passing moment.'

Medwin adds some details: 'I must now speak of his Charles the First. He had designed to write a tragedy on this ungrateful subject as far back as 1818, and had begun it at the end of the following year, when he asked me to obtain for him that well-known pamphlet, which was in my father's libraryKilling no Murder. He was, however, in limine, diverted at that time to more attractive subjects, and now resumed his abandoned labors, of which he has left a very unsatisfactory, though valuable, bozzo. The task seemed to him an irksome one. His progress was slow; one day he expunged what he had written the day before. He occasionally showed and read to me his MS., which was lined and interlined and interworded, so as to render it almost illegible. The scenes were disconnected, and intended to be interwoven in the tissue of the drama. He did not thus compose The Cenci. He seemed tangled in an inextricable web of difficulties, as to the treatment of his subject; and it was clear that he had formed no definite plan in his own mind, how to connect the links of the complicated yarn of events that led to that frightful catastrophe, or to justify it. Shelley meant to have made the last of King's fools, Archy, a more than subordinate among his dramatis personce, as Calderon had done in his Cisma de l'Inglaterra, a fool sui generis, who talks in fable, "weaving a world of mirth out of the wreck of all around." . . . Other causes, besides doubt as to the manner of treating the subject, operated to impede its progress. The ever-growing fastidiousness of his taste had, I have often thought, begun to cramp his genius. The opinion of the world, too, at times shook his confidence in himself. I have often been shown the scenes of this tragedy in which he was engaged; like the MSS. of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, in the library at Ferrara, his were larded with word on word, till they were scarcely decipherable.'

Mrs. Shelley writes: Whether the subject proved more difficult than he anticipated, or whether in fact he could not bend his mind away from the broodings and wanderings of thought divested from human interest, which

Rather say the Pope:

61

London will be soon his Rome. He walks
As if he trod upon the heads of men.
He looks elate, drunken with blood and
gold.

Beside him moves the Babylonian woman
Invisibly, and with her as with his shadow,
Mitred adulterer! he is joined in sin,
Which turns Heaven's milk of mercy to
revenge.

THIRD CITIZEN (lifting up his eyes) Good Lord! rain it down upon him! Amid her ladies walks the papist queen, As if her nice feet scorned our English earth.

The Canaanitish Jezebel! I would be 70 A dog if I might tear her with my teeth! There's old Sir Henry Vane, the Earl of

Pembroke,

Rose on me like the figures of past years, Treading their still path back to infancy, More beautiful and mild as they draw

nearer

The quiet cradle. I could have almost wept To think I was in Paris, where these shows Are well devised - such as I was ere yet

My young heart shared a portion of the burden,

jects. One scale is full of promises, and the other full of protestations; and then another devil creeps behind the first out of the dark windings [of a] pregnant lawyer's brain, and takes the bandage from the other's eyes, and throws a sword into the left-hand scale, for all the world like my Lord Essex's there.

STRAFFORD

pleasure

Yes, pray your Grace look: for, like an unsophisticated [eye] sees everything upside down, you who are wise will discern the shadow of an idiot in lawn sleeves and a rochet setting springes to catch woodcocks in haymaking time. Poor Archy, whose owl-eyes are tempered to the error of his age, and because he is a fool, and by special ordinance of God forbidden ever to see himself as he is, sees now in that deep eye a blindfold devil sitting on the ball, and weighing words out between king and sub

ARCHY

Ay, and some are now smiling whose tears will make the brine; for Fool sees ...

STRAFFORD

Insolent! You shall have your coat turned and be whipped out of the palace for this.

ARCHY

the protestant writers, while the knaves When all the fools are whipped, and all are whipping the fools ever since a thief was set to catch a thief. If all turncoats were whipped out of palaces, poor Archy would be disgraced in good company. Let the knaves whip the fools, and all the fools laugh at it. [Let the] wise and godly slit each other's noses and ears (having no need of any sense of discernment in their craft); and the knaves, to marshal them, join in a procession to Bedlam, to entreat the madmen to omit their sublime Platonic contemplations, and manage the state of England. Let all the honest men who lie penned up at the prisons or the pillories, in custody of the pursuivants of the High-Commission Court, marshal them.

Enter Secretary LYTTELTON, with papers

KING (looking over the papers)

These stiff Scots 80 His Grace of Canterbury must take order To force under the Church's yoke. — You, Wentworth,

Shall be myself in Ireland, and shall add
Your wisdom, gentleness, and energy,
To what in me were wanting. - My Lord
Weston,

Look that those merchants draw not without loss

Their bullion from the Tower; and, on the payment