play once more.

It is clear, as was said before, that this method of 'transcript'in the form of recitation gives great advantages. It enables Mr. Browning to throw in a commentary, to connect rhesis with stasimon or stasimon with dialogue, by means of an interpretative colouring, which, however it may overflow the original design of Euripides, is everywhere forcible, dignified, and full of life-like suggestion. This super-imposed comment is nowhere allowed to interfere with a translation which-though not embracing every line of the play-is in the main as close and accurate as it is vivid and powerful. It makes Balaustion's Adventure a different thing from all mere translations, and also from all original poems merely modelled on the antique; and it operates with this double effect, that it causes the reader of the Greek to look through the translator's eyes as no unaided translation could do, and it gives his own conceptions with greater clearness and force than any original work of his own on the same subject would possess. But the superstructure requires some apology; and a plea for it is put into Balaustion's mouth, too full of genuine poetry to be left out:

You will expect, no one of all the words O' the play but is grown part now of my soul,

Since the adventure. 'Tis the poet speaks; But if I, too, should try and speak at times, Leading your love to where my love, perchance,

Climbed earlier, found a nest before you knew

Why, bear with the poor climber, for love's sake!

Look at Baccheion's beauty opposite,
The temple with the pillars at the porch!
See you not something beside masonry?
What if my words wind in and out the

stone

As yonder ivy, the God's parasite?
Though they leap all the way the pillar
leads,

Festoon about the marble, foot to frieze,
And serpentiningly enrich the roof,

Let us look at some few examples of these expository additions-the ivy climbing in and out the stoneand we shall see more and more clearly how ill content Mr. Browning would be to accept the tragi comedy theory as the only and sufficient key to the Alcestis, and to the bearings of its characters upon each other. When Alcestis has been carried out to look her last upon the sun, and before he translates her first words ("Adiɛ kai páos àμépas), Sun, and thou light of day,' the interpreter thus suggests the clue to the whole of her sad and tranquil utterances :

Now that the sorrow, he had called for,

came,

He sorrowed to the height: none heard

him say,

However, what would seem so pertinent, To keep this pact, I find surpass my power; Rescind it, Moirai! Give me back her life, And take the life I kept by base exchange.

She dies; and then he, who had used himself to practise with the terms of the bargain, felt the pressure of fact, not fancy, and began to taste the truth. The truth, at first, of his loss; the truth of his own selfishness is not fully revealed to his eyes until the arrival of his old father, Pheres, who comes with the commonplaces of sorrow,

Bringing the decent praise, the due regret, And each banality prescribed of old,

and thus holding a veil that was all too thin over his son's spiritless cravenhood, and his own. The son, as in a mirror, saw himself. He,

--full i' the face Of Pheres, his true father, outward shape And inward fashion, body matching soul-Saw just himself when years should do their work

And reinforce the selfishness inside
Until it pushed the last disguise away;
As when the liquid metal cools i' the mould,
Stands forth a statue, bloodless, hard, cold
bronze;

So, in old Pheres, young Admetos showed,
Pushed to completion.

That is the kind of interpretation which Mr. Browning has been bold enough to put upon what, in its bare outlines, is so revolting a scene

in the play. There is more besides, more that should be read in full, not quoted in brief; for he detects in the bickering and wrangling Admetus, and describes in clearcutting verse, the man who was on his way to see the naked truth, both about his loss and about him. self, but who was baffled and interrupted and thrown back upon the little mind' by the advent of that very one who had seemed, in emergency, the likeliest to help, and might even now lie open to argu

VOL. IV.-NO. XXIII. NEW SERIES.

ment, yet who speaks-when his lips move-with the tormenting echo of his own selfishness.

At length the sorrow works its gradual work to completion. Admetus begins to be like his wife;' he leaves behind the littleness of tears;' and when, in the last dialogue, Herakles is testing the king, and enabling the veiled wife to overhear the words which tell of her husband's truth-for that is what Mr. Browning makes of the passage which even so able a critic as K. O. Müller could call a 'farcical scene'-the hero divines the accomplished change:

Oh, he knew

The signs of battle hard fought and well

won,

This queller of the monsters!-knew his friend

Planted firm foot, now, on the loathly thing

That was Admetos late! would die,' he knew,

Ere let the reptile raise its crest again. This being the reading given to Admetus' part in the action, we shall not be surprised at finding that Herakles is, in Mr. Browning's version, raised to something higher than a 'toper's' level. He is the impersonation of sound, wholesome, energetic life, based upon energetic truth and courage, clearing the close atmosphere of gloom and sorrow and imbecility and untruth. When, on his inopportune arrival, the king persuades him that, though death funeral that they are preparing, he is in the house, it is an alien's funeral that they are preparing, he takes Admetus at his word, and

goes in to enjoy his hospitality : This trouble must not hinder any more A true heart from good will and pleasant ways.

[He] flung into the presence, frank and free, Out from the labour into the repose, Ere out again and over head and ears

I' the heart of labour, all for love of men.

These passages will give no unfair idea of the expository portions of

SS

Mr. Browning's reproduction of the Alcestis. Of the translation itself this is scarcely the place to compare the details with the Greek; but, after a tolerably close comparison, it may well be said that, full as the translated work is of beauty and vigour, it is no less remarkable for constant and pains-taking care. A single example may illustrate the kind of double merit which abounds through the play. Herakles, when trying to rally his friend from drooping despondency, asks him (v. 1079)

Τί δ' ἂν προκόπτοις, εἰ θέλεις ἀεὶ στένειν ;

and that line is rendered by the couplet

But how carve way i' the life that lies before,

If bent on groaning ever for the past?

That is just the expansion which Dryden, in his best mood, would have approved, nor Porson disapproved.

Detached passages of arresting merit or beauty occur too often to admit of any complete notion in quotations; but there are two or three that must not be omitted. When the chorus of Pheræans, wondering at the boldness of Admetus in daring to play the host amidst his sorrows, put their trust at last in his insight, and were persuaded of his pious wisdom, they sang the fine and finely-rendered stasimon, Harbour of many a stranger,'

And they admired: nobility of soul

Was self-impelled to reverence, they saw: The best men ever prove the wisest too:

Something instinctive guides them still aright.

When Herakles has at length learned from the much-scandalised serving-man that the house is mourning for none other than its Queen, his jovial merriment dies out like a quenched beacon-brand, but

When the play of Euripides is finished, Balaustion-while talking of Sophocles, who 'means to make a new piece' and model a new Admetus, and while claiming honour for him no less than for Euripides, the human' ('All cannot love two great names: yet some do ')-proposes to try her own hand at a story of Alcestis. And on this thread Mr. Browning hangs that version of the story which makes Persephonè, not Herakles, the restorer. After the vigorous and vital drama, this episode falls a little flat. Here, as in The Earthly Paradise, the will of Admetus is freed from blame; and the ethical aim of the piece-especially in a long speech of Apollo's-seems to point at the small importance to the general sum of the gods' purposes whether a man dies in the middle of his work or lives out his working day. The feebleness and futility of human work at best are brought into prominence in the concluding lines.

Just at the end of all, there are some words of 'In Memoriam' to her who translated the Prometheus, and who loved the Greek poets and Greek literature so well.

Enough has already been said to explain what is here held: that, though Mr. Browning has, in his treatment of the Euripidean play, gone beyond the meaning and design of its author, yet that in some degree-a degree decidedly beyond the reach of the average Athenian spectators-Euripides may have been no stranger to the subtle suggestions inwoven with the text. Between an intention to treat the legend fully, and the necessity to sustain the attention of his audience, Euripides, perhaps, was hard

6

both on the legend and on himself, and thus to some extent justified the tragi-comedy hypothesis. But the most tragic of the poets,' the first favourite of Milton, was certainly a man of consummate genius and insight. Why should I write anything from myself," Porson used to ask, while anything remains to be done for such an author as Euripides?' Mr. Browning may have done much by his transcript' from the Alcestis to reawaken the capacity for gauging Greek literature at its true value; and he knows and loves Euripides too well not to rejoice if such a result should really follow the achievement of his May-month task. HORACE M. MOULE.

THE LAST DAY.

HE Court met this day at 10 THE o'clock, when the ProcuratorGeneral resumed his speech for the prosecution. He said:

When the Court rose last night I had concluded my detailed analysis of the evidence which has been adduced by my learned friend and by myself, and it now only remains for me to sum up the general results at which we have arrived. Well, then, gentlemen, we find that Mary Stuart returned to Scotland in 1560, resolved to reverse the Reformation. She had been selected by the great Catholic Confederacy to bring Scotland and England back to the Church, and she had zealously accepted the mission, for she was by education and habit a bitter and intolerant Romanist, who would have drunk greedily the blood of the saints. This purpose fired almost into genius a really supreme intellect-an intellect of the finest and rarest fibre. Yet, like the Catholic society of the age, her nature was two-fold-she was a devotee and a rake. She had been educated in a sort of moral Hell-the atmosphere of the French Court, with its devilish vices and graces, had been breathed by her from her earliest girlhood, and her temper was vehement and unregulated. For years after her return she was forced to dissemble. The Reformation could not with fair hopes of success be directly assailed-it needed to be undermined. To carry out her object more securely, Mary put herself into the hands of the Reformers,

and did not attempt to restrain the hour arrived when, having planted violence of their zeal. At length the herself firmly on her throne, having won the love of her subjects by her really great qualities-her wit, her gaiety, her courage-she could venture to remove the mask. She joined that Catholic alliance from which a brood of furies sprang, and she married her cousin, Lord Darnley, whom she did not love, with the intention of uniting and consolidating the Catholicism of Eng land and Scotland.

Elizabeth and Murray had been lulled into a dangerous security by Mary's docility and candour. Their eyes were opened by this unmis takeable declaration of war, and they were unwillingly forced to take up arms in defence of their common faith. But Mary's stealthy arts had not been wasted, and Mur ray soon found to his cost that the Queen had both the power and the will to crush him. She drove him and his friends across the Border, and for a time Protestantism appeared to be in imminent peril.

But, on the brink of victory, the weak point in Mary's character as serted itself. With her own hand she shattered the edifice she had raised. She took a passionate uncontrollable aversion to her hus band, and she fell in love with another man.

Darnley, perhaps, in spite of his sins, might have been allowed to live on, but for his share in David Rizzio's murder. The Protestant lords had induced the foolish lad to join the conspiracy against the