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drama after the antique. It must be conceded, perhaps, that woman's mission, as Lord Lytton sings, to

'Bloom still beside the mournful heart,

Light still the caves denied the star;
Oh Eve, with Eden pleased to part,
Since Eden needs no comforter,'

was not her mission, or at any rate not so esteemed, in the plays of the Greek tragedians generally. But Mr. Lancaster can afford to admit this, and having done so, to persevere in introducing such an element of course subordinately to the main plot-into his future classical dramas. His creation of Egle is one of the happy hits of the Philoctetes,' perhaps the one which has won his play popularity, and himself such praise that in publishing another drama, 'Orestes,' he has thrown off his incognito. Not that his delineation of this maiden's love usurps undue prominence, or is presented save in under-plot and byplay the descriptions of the death of Heracles, and the fine speech in which Philoctetes reveals his vision, as well as the management of the characters of Ulysses and Pyrrhus are more prominent and equally poetical: but it is the character of Ægle which entitles Mr. Lancaster to a distinction from the two leaders of his school whom we have noticed in the above remarks; a distinction, to our fancy, of this kind and degree, namely, that while Mr. Arnold's characters are stiff and stately shadows, and Mr. Swinburne's flesh and blood' bodily forms, into those of the author of Philoctetes' is infused what is lacking, or at any rate very secondary in the others, an animating heart, to beat with the emotions of pity, tenderness, love. What can be more plaintive than Ægle's language in page 53, anticipating the possibility of her hero's departure?

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'Selfish am I, and I think

Sometimes that I would rather have thee here
Wounded and in thy sorrow, shame on me,
Than sound and whole away about the world
Every one's hero-jealous am I and base.
But somehow always in those after times
The old way of sitting here would come on me,
May be at spring the saddest, for they say
Old thoughts grow most unruly when the first
Bird calls out to the wood. I know not sure,
But when my brother left me, this I know,
That though the day went well enough with me,
There came a vague trouble with the edge of dusk,
And then the loneness grew, ay me, with power.
But the old kind and motherly face of earth,
After a little, healed me to myself

With her old beauty, and the pleasure of trees,
And all the quiet wonder of the flower.'-P. 54.

Our notice of Mr. Lancaster's more recent metrical drama, 'Orestes,' must be brief; but there are one or two points in which it differs from his 'Philoctetes.' It is not a twice-told tale. Those who have not yet read it may at once dismiss the notion that the hero is Electra's brother, and Clytemnestra's son. This Orestes may have his history in some Greek scholiast, or out-of-the-way chronicler, though we have never chanced upon it. But to all appearance the incidents of the drama are purely fictitious, though the names, scene, and one or two circumstances are so far real as to give an air of probability to the whole. The Aleuad house, powerful in Thessaly in and after the days of Pisistratus, and known to Thucydides for its internal dissensions, was divided into two rival branches, the Crannonian and the Larissaan. Our scene is laid at Larissa, the young king or Tagus of which is the hero of the play; and the plot may have been suggested by the casual mention in Thucydides of an Aleuad Orestes seeking aid from Athens against his rebellious kinsfolk. Dyseris, the queen-mother, and Simus, are names borrowed from Buttmann's genealogy of this dynasty, and an envoy of Crannon appears on the stage. But these are merely nominal links, and do not represent any tradition that could fetter the modern poet's fancy. He has been free to mould a drama after the antique, and to construct on classical principles a plot unencumbered by any immemorial associations. It makes up for these by simplicity of construction and adherence to classic models. It is the old tale of a young sovereign, just grown to man's estate, unable through considerations of filial duty to shake off the regency of a rule-loving, minion-led mother. In the course of the action we discover how the intrigues of the mercenary Simus, compromising more or less the queen-mother Dyseris, and Eudicus, Apollo's priest, are frustrated by the bravery of Orestes, whose gallantry when assailed by two hired assassins on his way as a hostage to Crannon, wins him the regard of the Crannonian envoy, and his aid in disentangling the subtly-woven web of domestic treachery. His mother's guilt and partial complicity with Simus, and the defeat of his hopes of reciprocation of his love by Archedice, whom he finds engaged to his cousin and bosom-friend Medius, disgust him with life, and after having slain the hireling Simus, and commended his mother to a life of penitence, he bequeaths his kingdom to Medius and Archedice, and ends his care-crossed life by a selfinflicted blow. The framework, it will be seen, is slight, but the interest with which a skilful handling has invested it is deeper than might be supposed in a tale not wholly novel in the world's history. Our sympathies are enlisted in behalf of the conscientious heir of a reckless and blood-stained dynasty, striving

vainly to break through the coils of intrigue and unrighteous precedent. The following lines are part of a soliloquy in which Orestes glances at the inheritance of tyranny and wrong bequeathed him by his father:

'O firm pavilions of my warrior sires,

Here was your day: your changes and desires
Flared out above the heavy golden bowls,
Till Atè beckoned each one from his seat
And laid him suddenly silent full of blood.
I fear the silence of your banquet hall :
There is a ghostly lip at every cup
Along the vacant tables, and a scent
Of blood arises from the lees of wine,
And the old stains grow darker on the floor.
O grim dead faces crowded at your feasts,
I am your son, and only on my hands

There is no blood, and ye shall have great scorn
Upon your son, because I am clean of death;
But Zeus hath given me curses of your deeds,
Clean as I am, degenerate I endure

The taint of your oppressions, O exult,

If so ye will, and hence derive all joy,

That in your urns ye are terrible to harm.'-Pp. 8, 9.

On many secondary excellences in 'Orestes' we might dilate, if our space permitted. The character of Dyseris is one worthy of careful analysis, and requires considerable experience of the conflict of passions in the human heart to reconcile it with probabilities. The mother's love is not extinct in her, though her guilty passion for a cowardly paramour makes her connive at any other removal of her son and sovereign, except that by cold steel. Where she indulges in irony in her angry interviews with her son, the author shows power in his representation of that powerful word-weapon, as may be seen in the concluding words of Dyseris in p. 17. And of this same irony Orestes, in p. 43, is shown to be a practised master. Pathos and tenderness are concentrated in the gentle Archedice; and the success of Mr. Lancaster in descriptive passages may be seen and learnt in the narrative of the attempted assassination in pp. 64-67. But we must pass on to the especial difference between this drama and Philoctetes,' to wit, that the author has yielded to what his critics had stedfastly pleaded for, the substitution of rhyme for unrhyme in the choruses. Strange to say, he strikes us as having realized the spirit of the old choral odes in his rhymed metres more evidently than in the non-rhymed strophes which were his first experiment. A finer piece of poetry than a portion of the second chorus in page 22, it would be hard to point out. It breathes, indeed, the heathen dissatisfaction at the slowness of Zeus to heed and answer human prayers, but the

language is in keeping with the finest utterances of the ancient drama, as those who examine the passage will admit. A sample of choral poetry from the third ode is of more manageable length, and has all the ring of the old chorus about it :

'The wise have in their wisdom said
That ever since the world begun,
All blood the father king hath shed
An Atè visits on his son.

Surely some royal house may dread
Her silent feet, to whom is given

To search old crime forgotten as the dead,

And vex the seed of those who hated heaven.

Therefore, O Lord, thy vengeance passes over

Ignoble heads as ours.

Therefore I sit foreboding to discover

Some mighty issue that most dimly lours.'-P. 51.

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There remain on our list two more authors of poems of the same dramatic school, Mr. Ashe and Mr. Simcox. The former has given us a very graceful and refined dramatic poem on the sorrows of Hypsipyle, that una de multis face nuptiali digna, the, in some sense, 'second Hypermnestra,' who was Jason's bride before he had seen Medea or Creusa. Much in the style of Mr. Lancaster-a style, as we have already said, characterised pre-eminently by the introduction of a heart into the bosoms of his interlocutors-Mr. Ashe introduces us to the sufferings and perplexities of the queen of a race of termagants, who had made away with their first husbands in a fit of jealousy, and having so made Lemnos notorious, had shown their own irresolution by taking the Argonauts for mates so soon as the Argo touched there. Hypsipyle, more tender than her subjects, had saved and hidden her sire amid the utter extermination of the males, and sad as she is at Jason's projected departure, seizes the occasion to get Thoas, her father, conveyed out of harm's reach in the good ship. Her complicity in this matter is discovered and reported by a spy; the Lemnian viragos, mad at their desertion and her long-disguised treachery, rush with brands and blades against the palace, and slay her babe Euneus, though she herself is saved by means of a secret passage. In the second part of the drama the poor queen, in mind distraught, wanders to the shore from her concealment in Hera's temple overlooking the coast, and comes by her death in attempting, with a small skiff, to reach a vessel off the coast, which turns out to contain her sire. The pathos of this drama is its most beautiful characteristic. In other respects it is a very pretty picture, subdued, refined, and classical. It lacks power, perhaps; there may be a deficiency of poetic fire: so at least half a dozen critics are certain to say yet it may be safely asserted that none can read

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it without coming to the conclusion that 'tis pitiful, 'tis wondrous pitiful,' and that its author knows the key to touch, if he would have his readers 'give him for his pains a world of sighs.' The other characters are drawn with a nice regard to their traditionary characteristics; but the author is most at home in portraying the love-lorn queen, and in making the chorus of Nereids pity and sympathize with the sorrows of Hypsipyle. This chorus, too, shapes its song to sweet English rhymes, and in some places, e. g. in the conclusion of the last ode (pp. 104, 105), has a plaintive charm which clings to the memory. It describes Hypsipyle's end :

'She is drifting away, away!

They will not see her! woe the day!
Foam-born sisters, whose green hair
Shines with many an amber gem;
She was true as she was fair:
Mortals took of her no care ;-

Made too exquisite for them.

She will weep and sigh no more.
Lay the body on the brink

Of their brook; and they will think
While their breasts with anguish bleed,
Like a wreck, or like a weed,

Waves have tossed her on the shore.'

An earlier choral ode, by the way, describes the departure of the Argo's crew, and in a few graphic touches passes each of them in array before us. It concludes by predicting the successful issue of the enterprise, and the whole of it may be cited as a union of remarkable powers of description with a skilful use of the more intricate varieties of rhyme. The sorrows of Hypsipyle,' however, are a theme to which extracts can do scant justice, and we commend the poem in its entirety to the real lovers of modern English poetry. We are not quite so sure that

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readers would thank us if we said as much for the 'Prometheus Unbound,' the work of a young scholar of equal poetic gifts to those of Mr. Ashe, if indeed his gifts are not superior. He has made a very favourable impression by his poetical contributions in the Cornhill Magazine, and it is perhaps to the high hopes built upon these that the sense of disappointment, which is the residuum of a reading of the Unbound Prometheus,' is to be ascribed. He has erred in a too slavish adherence to prescribed tradition: in overcrowding the stage with a succession of characters fatal to what professes itself an imitation of the Attic drama; he has in his nomenclature, and in his minute imitation of the twists and turns of Greek phraseology, creates the impression of a caricature or a parody. Alone of the four

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