From Fraser's Magazine. the English public. But though living in MR. HENRY TAYLOR'S PLAYS AND POEMS.* the midst of modern commotions, though THE collected issue of Mr. Henry Tay- observing and gauging them with rare lor's plays and poems was hailed with satis- acuteness and judgment, he can in no sense faction, not only by lovers of the historical be said to have been exclusively a man of drama as such, but by all who know how to the times. Mr. Tennyson's senior by, we value sterling intellectual worth and power believe, about ten years, he is naturally in relation to poetical composition. These bound by more powerful ties to the age of works form a link between the present and Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. He more than one past era of English thought. distinctly states himself to have largely enTheir author's latest work appeared so re-joyed and largely profited by opportunities cently as in 1862, three years after the pub-of conversation with Wordsworth; and the lication of Idylls of the King. But he be- preliminary essay to Philip van Artevelde gan to write more than forty years ago; be- bears acknowledged traces of that influfore Catholic Emancipation and the Re-ence, and of impressions drawn from Coleform Bill, before the opening of the first railway, when notwithstanding the vigorous efforts towards the advancement of knowledge already made by a few distinguished men- the general tone of the educated classes in England was, perhaps, much more like what had prevailed a century before, than like that which prevails to-day. Among men of letters, Scott and Goethe were still living; Byron and Shelley had been dead only a very short time; and Wordsworth, reposing in stately retirement, but largely influencing his contemporaries, had twenty years of life still remaining to him. Of the influences, partly religious and partly intellectual, which have so powerfully worked upon the minds of younger Englishmen during the waning and rising generations, not one was yet fairly in operation. Geology and comparative anatomy were outside a very limited circle almost unheard-of-sciences. The first volume of the Cours de Philosophie positive had not appeared; the first Tract for the Times was unwritten; Hare and Thirlwall were but just introducing English readers to the pregnant historical speculations of Niebuhr; and the very earliest poems of the present Laureate which have been described by one of his ablest critics as little more than methods of feeling the way to mastery over the instruments to his art - had not yet been committed to the press.

Mr. Taylor has thus been writing throughout a period which, short as it is, we justly regard as one of unusual development in

* Plays and Poems. By Henry Taylor, author of Philip van Artevelde, St. Clement's Eve, &c. Three vols. Chapman and Hall.

ridge's Biographia Literaria. And he is still more evidently attracted, first to the earlier and more masculine periods of English composition, the literatures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which are the sources from whence derive the principal channels of Mr. Taylor's method both of conception and language; and, secondly, to the world of medieval life, which few living Englishmen have studied with equal industry, in the best contemporary chronicles, and in their soundest historical critics. He has been in particular the ardent and unwearied disciple of M. de Barante, whose Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne placed him forty years ago in the front rank of historical fame in France; an author who, more than any other modern historian, seems to live in the times of which he writes.'*

The comments which a man of genius makes on other men of genius, furnish the readiest and most interesting key to the constitution of his own mind and the direction of his tastes; and Mr. Taylor in his own case, has supplied us with such a key in the preface to Philip van Artevelde. That preface contains a brief, but very careful examination of the main features in the poetry of Byron and Shelley. It required some courage in 1834 to speak in qualified terms of their school. Mr. Taylor enumerates with genuine admiration the ' great sensibility and fervour, the profusion of imagery, the force and beauty of language, the easy and adroit versification, which are prominent characteristics of both poets. He recognizes, besides, the wonderful vigour

* Preface to St. Clement's Eve.

of an intellectual balance. He thinks nobly of the imagination, and would not have its forces wasted. He regards it as a sacred fire of divine energy, capable when husbanded of achieving the most splendid tasks, and worthy of being served with the most careful and costly nutriment, which, so far from smothering it, will only make the flame burn brighter:

and clearness of understanding which By- | has never suffered himself to deviate from ron possessed, and Shelley's almost infinite his own creed. Nor are his principles sweep of imagination. But he distinctly framed so as unduly to depreciate the use points out their grave deficiencies, naming as the foremost a want of subject matter. A feeling came to them more easily than a reflection; and an image was always at hand when a thought was not forthcoming.' Lord Byron was, he thinks, in knowledge never more than a man of belles-lettres; he had a working and moulding spirit, but a great want of material to work up; and his affected misanthropy, as well as his many other affectations, were only the signs and Ter liquido ardentem perfudit nectare Vestam, symptoms of his shallow intellectual cultiva-Ter flamma ad summum tecti subjecta reluxit. tion.

'Poetry,' says Mr. Taylor, of which In glancing over the principal works of a sense is not the basis, sense rapt or in- man eminent in any division of art, it is spired by passion, not bewildered or sub-natural to inquire whether he has advanced verted, poetry over which the passionate or gone back, or exhibited any of those vioreason of man does not preside in all its lent revolutions of method which are somestrength as well as all its ardours, though it times found in a poet or a painter. Mr. may be excellent of its kind, will not long Taylor seems to have arrived tolerably early be reputed to be poetry of the highest at the maturity of his powers. Though order.' And he adds the following admir-greater freedom and skill of workmanship able observations:

Lord Byron's conception of a hero is an evidence, not only of scanty materials of knowledge from which to construct the ideal of a human being, but also of a want of perception of what is great or noble in our nature. His heroes are creatures abandoned to their passions, and essentially, therefore, weak of mind. Strip them of the veil of mystery and the trappings of poetry, resolve them into their plain realities, and they are such beings as, in the eyes of a reader of masculine judgment, would certainly excite no sentiment of admiration, even if they did not provoke contempt. When the conduct and feelings attributed to them are reduced into prose, and brought to the test of a rational consideration, they must be perceived to be beings in whom there is no strength except that of their intensely selfish passions, - in whom all is vanity; their exertions being for vanity under the name of love or revenge, and their sufferings for vanity under the name of pride. If such beings as these are to be regarded as heroical, where in human nature are we to look for what is low in sentiment or infirm in character?

may be observed in Edwin the Fair, and far more delicate finish in the exquisite drama of St. Clement's Eve, his latest task, yet his dramatic genius attained his full growth in the longest and most elaborate of his compositions, which appeared thirty years ago. It is upon this that his fame will rest. He will go down to posterity as the author of Philip van Artevelde.

It is difficult to say of any man of undoubted genius, that he has mistaken his vocation, true genius acting as its own best pioneer. But assuredly, if Mr. Taylor had not been a poet, he would have made one

of the first of our modern historians. The

latter half of the fourteenth century is the very period powerfully to attract such a mind. The latter Flemish disturbances, which began in 1381 with the dispute between Ghent and Bruges about canal communication from the latter city to the river Lis, were symptomatic of vast revolutionary tendencies overspreading the Continent. The cause of feudalism was receiving or These words are no barren critical utter- dreading a general European shock. Engances. If they embody strict rules of art, lish statesmen regarded the temporary trithese are rules to which Mr. Taylor has umph of the younger Artevelde as the cause most faithfully adhered throughout the of the internal outbreaks under Richard whole of his elaborate compositions. He II.:

Jack Straw, Wat Tyler, Lister, Walker, Ball,
That against servage raised the late revolt,
Were deemed the spawn of his success.

describes the weakness and the strength,
the solitariness and the supports, of his own
position:

Lo! with the chivalry of Christendom
I wage my war- no nation for my friend,
Yet in each nation having hosts of friends!
The bondsmen of the world, that to their lords
Are bound with chains of iron, unto me
Are knit by their affections. Be it so.
From kings and nobles will I seek no more
make my treaty, and the heart of man
Aid, friendship, nor alliance. With the poor
Sets the broad seal of its allegiance there,
And ratifies the compact. Vassels, serfs,
Ye that are bent with unrequited toil,
Ye that have whitened in the dungeon's dark-

ness

Through years that knew not change of night and day,

And it was believed that entire prosperity on the part of Ghent would bring on a general rising almost throughout Christendom. Our native policy during the whole period is not a very gratifying subject for contemplation. Edward III. had been in close political connection with the brewer of Ghent' - the great and generous Jacques I van Artevelde, father of Philip. To speak properly,' says Froissart, there never was in Flanders, nor in any other country, prince, duke, or other, that ruled a country so peaceably or so long, as this James d'Arteville ruled Flanders.' And he had been in every respect a worthy and faithful ally. His very downfall was brought Tatterdemalions, lodgers in the hedge, about by his proposal that the Black Prince Lean beggars with raw backs and rumbling should be elected governor of Flanders, on the understanding that the country should be made by Edward a sovereign duchy. By the time, however, that the younger Artevelde had taken Bruges, and had established a position as formidable to Count Louis de Môle of Flanders as that of Jacques had been to his predecessor Lewis I., the old understanding between Ghent and England was materially altered. Philip was on the point of becoming a very dangerous young potentate, whose power might possibly be employed to encumber the French, but from whose advancement there was on the whole much more to be feared than to be hoped.

England was by slow degrees learning
the diplomatic lesson of non-intervention:
No open answer from the English king
Could we procure, no honest yea or nay;
But only grave denotements of good-will,
With mention of the perils of the seas,
The much tempestuous ocean, and the loss
Unspeakable that England suffered late

maws,

Whose poverty was whipped for starving you,—
I hail you my auxiliars and allies.

The heroic steps by which he advances from a life of meditative privacy to leadership in this great military and political struggle, the shocks of circumstance, not unconnected with revolutions in his own great nature, which pave the way for the fatal day at Rosebecque, these are the lofty subjects of this double tragedy.

Philip was but four years old when his father Jacques fell a victim to the Ghentese jealousy of an English succession. For the first forty years of his life he continued in strict retirement, the richest and the least active citizen of Ghent. He was an oak that stood apart,

far down the vale of life, Growing retired beneath a quiet sky. He was known as 'mild Master Philip.' He used to saunter his days out on the banks of the Lis, and had singular skill in

In her sea-strengths: but not the less, they said, catching river-fish. When Van den Bosch, By reason of good love and amity,

The king should order reckonings to be made
By two sufficient scholars, of the charge
Of what we sought his Parliament then sitting
He would take council of, and send you word
What might be done.

The tidings of this leisurely resolve' Mr. Taylor uses to call forth the noble speech in which Artevelde recognizes and

the turbulent leader of the disaffected
Whitehoods, perceiving how much capital
may be made of the Artevelde name, pro-
poses him as captain of the town, the citi-
zens are thus made to canvass his claims:
1st Burgher. Nay, Provost, nay;
He is a worthy and a mild good man,
And we have need of such.
Chaplain.

He's what you say:

But 'tis not mildness of the man that rules

Makes the mild regimen.

Provost.

Who's to rule the fierce?

"I prithee, Van den Bosch, cut not that throat;
Roast not this man alive, or for my sake,
If roast he must, not at so slow a fire;
Nor yet so hastily impale the other,

But give him time to ruminate and foretaste
So terrible an end.' Mild Philip thus
Shall read his lecture of humanity.

No stain has come upon them since that time;
They have done nothing violent;

Of a calm will untroubled servants they,
And went about their offices, if here
I must not say in purity, in peace.

But he they served, he is not what he was.
That cry again!

Sir knights, ye drive me close upon the rocks,
And of my cargo you're the vilest bales,
So overboard with you! What, men of blood!

Chaplain. Truly the tender mercies of the Can the son better auspicate his arms

weak,

6

Than by the slaying of who slew the father?
Some blood may flow because that it needs must,
But yours by choice: I'll slay you and thank
God.

He carries out this resolution, taking his own stand by one of the emissaries, and posting Van den Bosch by the other; and

astounds his lieutenant - still doubtful of 'mild Master Philip'-by the simple but ominous order to keep eye on him, and to copy every act. This blow makes him, in deed as well as in name, Captain of Ghent.' He is master of the burghers' hearts no less than of the city gates, and is able shortly afterwards to execute the bold design of marching in person to Bruges, and thus surprising the chief centre of the earl's

power.

Your vessel, Van den Bosch, hath felt the storm; She rolls dismasted in an ugly swell, And you would make a jury-mast of me. It is the memory of his father's life and death - a yearning to emulate the one, and to avenge the other-which rules his speedy decision; and that decision taken, For a considerable time before the acceshe passes at once from the recluse to the sion of Philip supplies of provisions had leader of men. There is nothing violent been almost entirely cut off from Ghent, or unnatural in the transition. The Flem- and the attack on Bruges was a measure ish Cromwell had always been, unknown to suggested by the arguments of despair. others and in part unconsciously even to But it was directed by the clear sagacity himself, ready for action, one of those and strong will of Artevelde, and proved a greatest men of whom the world knows great success. One of the finest scenes in nothing;' one of the very fewthe drama is that which describes Artevelde and Van den Bosch in consultation, on the Who, gifted with predominating powers, Bear yet a temperate will, and keep the peace. platform of St. Nicholas's steeple, at the time when the earl's herald from Bruges is The insight and judgment with which Mr. seen approaching the city. With the inTaylor has worked out the cautious but stinct of an old and not very popular demadecisive handling by Artevelde of his new gogue, the lieutenant is mutinously resolved command are such as nothing but intense on taking the herald's life before he enters industry, supplementing (to use his own the town, as the only chance of escaping phrase) a working and moulding spirit' a change in the popular breeze, and of of a very high order, could have furnished. avoiding a journey, bound hand and foot, Shortly after his election a formidable move to the dungeons of the earl. Philip, takon behalf of the earl is made by Sir Guise-ing the start, is the first to reach the bottom bert Grutt and Sir Simon Bette, two of the tower, and locks Van den Bosch wealthy citizens, who had had to do with within it. He then, having received the the death of the elder Artevelde, and were now active agents on the court side. A special assembly of all the guilds and deans of crafts is convened outside the Stadthaus; and Philip thus muses on the newborn thought of taking the ringleaders' lives:

These hands are spotless yet;

Yea, white as when in infancy they strayed
Unconscious o'er my mother's face, or closed
With that small grasp which mothers love to feel.

herald, proceeds alone to the market-place, and wins the consent of the people to make the attack on Bruges; after which he repairs single-handed to the locked steeple, and releases his lieutenant.

One of the most remarkable strokes of genius displayed in Philip van Artevelde consists in the subtle skill by which, in the second part, the change that has passed over the hero is portrayed. The whole