Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/170

 But say a golden slumber chance to tie With silken strings the cover of love's eye, Then dreams, magician-like, mocking present Pleasures, whose fading leaves more discontent.

Perfect in music, faultless in feeling, exquisite in refined simplicity of expression, this passage is hardly more beautiful and noble than one or two in the play which follows. 'The Phoenix' is a quaint and homely compound of satirical realism in social studies with Utopian invention in the figure of an ideal prince, himself a compound of Harun-al-Rashid and 'Albert the Good,' who wanders through the play as a detective in disguise, and appears in his own person at the close to discharge in full the general and particular claims of justice and philanthropy. The whole work is slight and sketchy, primitive if not puerile in parts, but easy and amusing to read; the confidence reposed by the worthy monarch in noblemen of such unequivocal nomenclature as Lord Proditor, Lussurioso, and Infesto, is one of the signs that we are here still on the debatable borderland between the old Morality and the new Comedy—a province where incarnate vices and virtues are seen figuring and posturing in what can scarcely be called masquerade. But the two fine soliloquies of Phoenix on the corruption of the purity of law (Act i. scene iv.) and the profanation