Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/74

64 and embarrassed her with quest of apologies—how she had a horror of lightning; how it took away her wits; how she was appalled by a vision of sudden death; and so forth. So, again, the scene with Huon, when she secures his promise to sign the marriage articles with another; and when he returns from the wars, the preux chevalier of the empire and favourite of the empress; and, once mere, the interview between countess and empress in the last act In depicting this mental strife, Mr. Knowles was treading on ground well worn by himself as well as brother playwrights; but he acquitted himself once more with emphasis and discretion. Huon, too, is ably drawn—a man "to envy, though a serf"—one who reads with a music as a lute did talk, and writes like a graver, and translates dark languages, and is wise in rare philosophy, and is a master of the hautboy, viol, lute—why not also harp, sackbut, psaltery, and all kinds of instruments? We could have relished a little more of savage grandeur in his composition, and somewhat less of the drawing-room hero: but passing that, he is a leal-hearted and deserving fellow, whom we like well enough to hope that he had no occasion, in after times, to enact private rehearsals of "Taming the Shrew"—a too possible hypothesis when a strong-minded female like the countess, with all her attractions, makes up the better half of a man's domestic felicity. The other Catherine is one of Mr. Knowles's stock characters; modelled after the type of her vivacious but heart-whole namesake in Scott's "Abbot," from whose history, moreover, a parallel may be found for the mystification of sex, which so nearly involves Sir Rupert in an unseemly battle o' the breeks. Ulrick, the sage, shrewd counsellor, is carefully painted, and gives utterance to some of the best poetry and best sense in the play.

Next year Mr. Knowles was ready with another, of less mark and likelihood—"John of Procida; or, the Bridals of Messina"—written, like the last, "in the sweet solitudes of Loch Ard," and, like it, produced at Covent Garden Theatre, under the then management of Mr. and Mrs. Mathews. It is a tragedy, and in parts an impressive one; fertile in dramatic effects, full of glowing rhetoric, and not deficient in instances of strong passion. But it is unequally written; the energy is often strained and spasmodic; the versification is rather eloquent than poetical. Occasionally, however, we meet with noble sentiment finely phrased, and situations ably contrived. The story turns upon the efforts of John of Procida to rid his beloved Sicily of the presence of the usurping and insolent Gaul. When Charles of Anjou seized the crown of Manfred, the latter was succeeded in his "struggle with the arch-felon" by Conradine, and he was beheaded by the royal victor, meeting the scaffold in his own kingdom,beseeching some kinsman to take it up, as a symbol of the Sicilian cause: he that picked up the gage, and so espoused the "rightful quarrel," with all its possible train of calamities, and evil report and good report, was John of Procida. Stanch and steadfast was he to redeem the pledge. With this empty glove, and no other seconding.,