Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/315

Rh

Whate'er becomes of me, when thou shalt reach

That envied pinnacle of human greatness

Where faithful monitors but rarely follow,

Even then amidst the kindest smiles of fortune,

Forget not thou wert once distress'd and friendless.

Be strictly just, but yet, like Heaven, with mercy

Temper thy justice. From thy purged ear

Banish base flattery, and spurn the wretch

Who would persuade thee thou art more than man;

Weak, erring, selfish man, endued with power

To be the minister of public good.

If conquest charm thee, and the pride of war

Blaze on thy sight, remember thou art placed

The guardian of mankind, nor build thy fame

On rapines and on murders. Should soft peace

Invite to luxury, the pleasing bane

Of happy kingdoms, know from thy example,

The bliss and woe of nameless millions, springs

Their virtue or their vice. Nor think by laws

To curb licentious man; those laws alone

Can bend the headstrong many to their yoke,

Which make it present int'rest to obey them.

In discarding all supernatural aid, Whitehead has robbed the subject of much of its poetry. The power of fate and of the unseen world is removed, and Aletes influences the Pythian priestess to give a particular response. Now this treatment of the subject, though the play was meant for an English, and not a Greek audience, does not seem to be artistic. If the matter of the plot be drawn from Greek history or mythology, should it not be essentially Greek in plot, incident, thought, feeling, indeed, in everything but the language? Would an ancient dramatist have dared to represent the utterances from the tripod as influenced by such a man as Aletes?

These are the faults of a play which in the main is interesting and pleasing, and will well repay the labour of perusal. We named in connection with the "Creusa" of Whitehead, and the "Ion" of Euripides, the "Ion" of Sir Thomas Talfourd. It borrows only the name of the