Page:The Venetian Bracelet.pdf/182



The hint of "The Ancestress" is taken from a German play by Grillparzer, called "The Ahnfrau." The following is the account of it, contained in Blackwood's Magazine for September 1825:—"The guilt of the Ahnfrau having introduced a spurious heir into the noble family of Borotin, she cannot rest in her grave until her crime is expiated, and its consequences remedied, by the extinction of the intrusive line. This is finally effected in the play through a series of horrible calamities. The son of the Count having been stolen in his infancy by a robber, is brought up in his supposed father's profession; falls in love, as unwittingly as Œdipus, with his sister; kills his father in a scuffle with the Bow-street officers of Poland; and finally dies in the embrace of his ghostly Ahnfrau, whom he mistakes for Bertha. The old lady, when her penance is completed, by the disasters of her descendants, which, with truly disinterested maternal love, she had vainly endeavoured to prevent, ends the tragedy by going quietly home into her hitherto untenanted monument."