STELLA. (Staring confusedly and smiling.) Me? FERDINAND. (Gnashing his seeth.) Yes, thee! with the woman whom thou hast seen! with the girl! STELLA. It grows dark. FERDINAND. That woman is my wife-(Stella looks earnestly at him, and falls into his arms.) And the girl is my daughter! Stella! (He observes that she is fainted.) Stella! (He carries her to a chair.) Stella! Oh help! help! [CECILIA and Lucy enter.] FERDINAND. Look! look at this angel! She is gone!--See! O help! help! [CECILIA and Lucy are both busied about her.] LUCY. She is beginning to recover. [He looks at them for some time without speaking.] FERDINAND. And by your aid! by your aid! Exit. STELLA. Who? Where? (Standing up.) Where is he? (She sinks back, and looks round at CECILIA and Lucy who are still employed about her.) Thank you! thank you! Who are you? CECILIA. Compose yourself; We are— STELLA. You? Are you not gone? You are? Heaven, who told it me? Who are you? Are you? (Taking CECILIA by the hand.) No! I lose myself again! CECILIA. Dearest, best of women! Let me press you to my bosom ! STELLA. It lies deep in my soul; tell me; are you? eyes. And I! CECILIA. I am; I am his wife. STELLA. Starting back, and putting her hand before her [She walks wildly backwards and forwards.] CECILIA. Let me conduct you to your apartment." To rid himself of this awkward embarrassment, though, like Macheath, he would have been extremely happy with either, were t'other dear charmer away,' Ferdinand sees no alternative but SUICIDE. Cecilia, however, [the wife] makes a proposal, which is accepted with readiness by all parties, and which, for the sake of the picture we are presented with, the author shall explain in his own words. It does not appear that Goëthe intended the play should conclude with a dance, but it certainly is not complete without one. CECILIA. (Opens a door, and calls.) Stella! (Stella enters, looks wildly at the pistols, at Cecilia, and Ferdinand. Then clasping Cecilia in her arms.) STELLA. Father of mercies! What is this? (Ferdinand starts up, and is running distractedly from them; Cecilia holds him.) CECILIA. Divide with me that heart, Stella, the whole of which be longs to you; you have saved my husband; saved him from himself, and you have restored him to me again. FERDINAND. (Approaches Stella.) My Stella! CECILIA. You will know all; even now your heart explains it. STELLA. (Taking hold of his hands, and hanging upon him). I am thine! CECILIA. We are both thine!" [The play concludes with this sentence.] Some of our readers will no doubt be entertained by the story which serves as the prologue to this act. It is related by the accommodating wife herself. "There was once a Count, a German Count, who from a sense of religious duty, left his wife and country to go to the Holy Land. He travelled through many kingdoms, and was at length taken captive. His slavery excited the compassion of his master's daughter; she loosened his chains; they escaped together; she accompanied him through all the perils of war as his page. Crowned with victory, he returned to his noble wife; but the dear girl (for he thought humanely) he did not desert. His high-born consort hastened to meet him, and thought all her faith and love rewarded by folding him again in her arms. And when the knight proudly threw himself from his horse upon his native soil, and the spoils were laid at her feet-' My wife,' said he' the greatest prize is still behind.' A gentle damsel appeared veiled amidst the crowd: he took her by the hand, and presented her to his wife, saying, 'Here is my deliverer; she freed me from captivity; she made the winds propitious; she attended upon me; fought by me; nursed me. What do I not owe her? here she is ; do you reward her.' The generous wife embraced her, wept on her neck, and cried, Take all that I can give. Let him be yours, he of right belongs to you; he of right too belongs to me; let us not part; let us all remain together.' Then falling into her husband's arms; We are your's!' she exclaimed; We are both your's,' they cried with one voice; 'We are your's for ever;' and heaven smiled propitious on their love! the holy vicar pronounced his benediction on them! and they had but one dwelling and one grave." Notwithstanding these ludicrous circumstances, and the eccentricity, or rather the absurdity, of the plot, the language is sometimes beautifully poetical, and possesses all the glowing and seductive charms of Werter; but the Germans have, (to us at least) the most singular and unaccountable notions of moral obligation; every thing is sacrificed to passion and sentiment. The characters in this drama overflow with sensibility, but it is a sensibility that hurries them beyond the boundary of virtue. A vigorous fancy, and a warm imagination, are poor apolo gies for guilt. COMPARITIVE CRITICISM. MARMION-BY WALTER SCOTT. Extract from the Edinburgh Review. WE are inclined to suspect, that the success of the work now before us will be less brilliant than that of the author's former publication, though we are ourselves of opinion, that its intrinsick merits are nearly, if not altogether, equal; and that if it had had the fortune to be the elder born, it would have inherited as fair a portion. of renown as has fallen to the lot of its predecessor. It is a good deal longer, indeed, and somewhat more ambitious; and it is rather clearer that it has greater faults, than that it has greater beauties; though, for our own parts, we are inclined to believe in both suppositions. It has more tedious and flat passages, and more ostentation of historical and antiquarian lore; but it has also greater richness and variety, both of character and incident; and if it has less sweetness and pathos in the softer passages, it has certainly more vehemence and force of colouring in the loftier and busier representations of action and emotion. The place of the prologuizing minstrel is but ill supplied, indeed, by the epistolary dissertations which are prefixed to each book of the present poem; and the ballad pieces and mere episodes which it contains, have less finish and poetical beauty; but there is more airiness and spirit in the lighter delineations; and the story, if not more skilfully conducted, is at least better complicated, and extended through a wider field of adventure. The characteristicks of both, however, are evidently the same ;-a redundancy of minute description-bursts of unequal and energetick poetry-and a general tone of spirit and animation, unchecked by timidity or affectation, and unchastised by any great delicacy of taste, or elegance of fancy. But though we think this last romance of Mr. Scott's about as good as the former, and allow that it affords great indications of poetical talent, we must remind our readers, that we never entertained much partiality for this sort of composition, and ventured on a former occasion to express our regret, that an author endowed with such talents should consume them in imitations of obsolete extravagance, and in the representation of manners and sentiments in which none of his readers can be supposed to take much interest, except the few who can judge of their exactness. To write a modern romance of chivalry, seems to be much such a fantasy as to build a modern abbey, or an English pagoda. For once, however, it may be excused as a pretty caprice of genius; but a second production of the same sort is entitled to less indulgence, and imposes a sort of duty to drive the author from so idle a task, by a fair exposition of the faults which are in a manner inseparable from its execution." Extract from the Monthly Review. "From the novelty of its style and subject, and from the spir. it of its execution, Mr. Scott's Lay of the last Minstrel' kindled a sort of enthusiasm among all classes of readers; and the concurrent voice of the publick assigned to it a very exalted rank, which, on more cool and dispassionate examination, its numerous essential beauties will enable it to maintain. For vivid richness of colouring and truth of costume, many of its descriptive pictures stand almost unrivalled: it carries us back in imagination to the time of action; and we wander with the poet along Tweed-side, or among the wild glades of Ettricke Forest. Perhaps this is the highest merit of poetry; and to this praise Mr. Scott is most undoubtedly entitled in an eminent degree. His faults, however, are at least equally numerous, if not equally striking, with his excellencies. His fable is generally abrupt, obscure, and, abstracted from the charms of poetry, uninteresting. No proportion of means to effects is observed in the machinery or in the circumstances. The versification, though flowing and easy, is often (we had almost said) shamefully incorrect; and not unfrequently, in the midst of the most splendid passage, we are choaked by an unmusical line, or series of lines, deficient in every characteristick of poetry except rhyme, and sometimes even in that mechanical qualification. To these blemishes it may be added that the author carries even his beauties to a faulty excess; that his descriptions of natural scenery are repeated to tediousness; that his knowledge of the manners of former ages occasionally betrays him into pedantry; and that even the proper names of places which convey a peculiar charm to ears that have been versed in the ancient Scottish minstrelsy, are sprinkled so thickly and often with so little meaning as to make the reader, though delighted at first, begin at last to suspect a trick, and to take offence at that which, if managed with a sparing hand, might have been made a source of unmixed pleasure and approbation. These are the principal faults of Mr. Scott, to which the general pre-eminence of his former poem almost blinded his readers; and of all these, his extreme carelessness was undoubtedly the most material and the least excusable. We regard it as no extenuation of this errour, that in so many successive editions of the work he has chosen to adopt a motto* which expressing his consciousness of the fact, evinces a blameable spirit of defiance or of indifference to the censure occasioned by it. On the contrary, it more peculiarly behoved him to have studied a greater degree of correctness in any future publication: yet even in the volume before us, in the epistle to William Erskine, which he styles an introduction to his third Canto, he not only acknowledges the same errour, but asserts rather than excuses his perseverance in it. Were it requisite to state our opinion of the comparative merits of this and the former poem, we should probably say that the peculiar beauties of each are almost equally balanced; that in Marmion the fable is more interesting, and the delineations of character and manners still more strongly and faithfully portrayed; that, on the other hand, we are gratified by fewer touches of pathos and fewer marks of genuine poetical enthusiasm; in short, that, as a whole, it is superiour: but that, taken to pieces, it presents much less that is worthy of our admiration, or that can excite and interest our affections. With regard to the faults, most of those which we have noticed as inherent in the Lay of the Last Minstrel' are observable, to a much greater degree, in Marmion. The story is so obscure, owing to the abrupt manner in which the several parts are connected together, that it requires a clear head to comprehend it at a single reading; and the instances of incorrect language and slovenly versification become frequent and gross to a most unpardonable ex tent." Extract from the Monthly Mirror. Some persons, self elevated to the critick's chair, have presumed to talk of this poem as much inferiour to the Lay of the Last Minstrel; but thinking that they are judged by a false criterion,, "Dum relego, scripcisse pudet, quia plurima cerno |