Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/76

66 romantic interest that sometimes enthrals the mind, testifying the reality, if also the fluctuations, of the author's dramatic power.

Another year (1841) and another play. This time it is a comedy, "Old Maids"—illustrating the heart-experiences of Ladies Blanche and Anne, a vivacious couplet, by themselves consecrated to single blessedness, and by circumstances and emotions "over which they have no control," enwreathed, vastly to their satisfaction, in chains of wedlock; so that in the epilogue they make a grace of their defection, and pray to he applauded as comfortable martyrs in the cause for which they had contended with more zeal than knowledge—hugging their chains, and turning

Sir Philip Brilliant is neatly finished off—the not unnatural and unexampled amalgam of a butterfly in the drawing-room, and a man in the field : his nature is of the true stuff; he is a blade of proof in a dainty scabbard—you may laugh at the scabbard, but you won't at the blade. A living philosopher has remarked that many instances, during the last war, showed us that in the frivolous dandy might often look the most fiery and accomplished of aides-de-camp; and these cases show, that men, in whom the world sees only elegant roués, sometimes from carelessness, sometimes from want of opening for display, conceal qualities of penetrating sagacity, and a learned spirit of observation, such as may be looked for vainly in persons of more solemn and academic pretension. Such a social paradox is Sir Philip, who, before he has done, contrives to amaze his familiars that a man "so slight to contemplate" should realise a "generous manhood so robust in healthy comeliness," and to impel a compassionate lady to argue thus with herself:The comedy is light and heavy by turns—somewhat flighty and extravagant in incident—and at the same time hackneyed in treatment. The wit has a fade lustre, nor does the humour gush with the fresh bubbling effervescence of a newly unsealed spring. Wit and humour there are, notwithstanding; and of a kind more fresh and sparkling than might be looked for from one who had already taxed his brain so many a time and oft. The high-life below stairs, we must add, connected with the episode of dolt-headed John Blount, is but indifferent fooling; and the character of John himself is simply absurd. Harley might squeeze a laugh out of it ; hut in the closet the part suggests but dreary mirth.

The comedy was followed (1842) by a play of the "poetical melodrama species—"The Rose of Arragon:" which tells how Olivia, a peasant wedded to a prince, saves the realm from sedition and anarchy, returning good for evil to the king and court which had despised and wronged her. Olivia is a bright and noble being, conceived and realised in her author's most genial mood; and worthy of her sisterly love is the magnanimous villager, Alasco—the mouthpiece of some of Mr. Knowles's most stirring eloquence, and a quite inexhaustible source of lofty sentiment. His treacherous friend Almagro—the foiled suitor of Olivia, and