Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 099.djvu/45

Rh however, of strength and beauty—more than most barristers could find brains and time to insert in the product of a Christmas vacation. The description of Iomone's death recals that of Lady Randolph in Home's now unacted drama: the lines that tell how the frenzied queen, at the cave's mouth,add reflex energy and pathos to her own fine utterance,and her destiny is wrought out with highly impressive art, "as fits a matron of heroic line"—her majestic form lost finally in clouds and mystery, departed like Œdipus, where none may follow or inquire. Thoas declaims with glowing rhetoric, and plays the high-soul'd warrior almost grandly—cleaving in captivity to "the loveliness, the might, the hope of Athens"—one that is "foe to Corinth—not a traitor, nor one to league with treason"—whose bearing and speech under the pressure of thraldom are shaped, "with a difference," after those oi the Miltonic Agonistes.—"Glencoe" is more peremptorily repudiated, as a Highland tragedy, by North Britishers, than the "Athenian Captive" and "Ion," as Greek tragedies, by Hellenising Southrons. Lord Jeffrey permitted it to be inscribed to him, but his countrymen protest against the stage massacre, as "murder most foul and most unnatural," committed on their unapproachable territory; so perilous is it to meddle with the national property of a people characterised, according to Elia, by such "Imperfect Sympathies" with the rationale of homage ab extrà. Thus, one Edinburgh critic—Professor Aytonn, was it not?—was spokesman for a phalanx of others, all armed to the teeth, when he declared that a more lamentable failure than this attempt to found a tragedy on the woful massacre of Glencoe—"a grosser jumble of nonsense about ancestry and chieftainship"—was never perpetrated. As though even in Glencoe's ashes lived their wonted fires,—nemo me impunè lacesset being practically synonymous with noli me tangere—for "off at a tangent" of the tenderest quality flies the genus irritabile, and "take that, you pock-pudding!" (illustrated by the administration of a "conker") is the reward of any such "ordeal by touch." We fear that had this particular tragedy been a stage triumph, it would have been "damned" with something else than "faint praise," across the Tweed. But even sturdy Cis-Tweedites are constrained to own that "Glencoe" is flat and feeble, and that no mountain breeze freshens it, no mountain cataract chants a wild obligato to the stem theme, no swelling pibroch utters its wail, no heather-legged son of somebody shows us where we are, to the oblivion of an accomplished Londoner in his study, inspired by Macready as model of Celtic heroism, and content with the stage of the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, as a tolerable approximation to the romantic fastness of the Macdonalds.

Thus, by public judgment, both from the closet and from the playhouse. Sir Thomas Talfourd's second dramatic venture was pronounced a decline from the first, and still more decidedly the third from the second.