brain. Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young.' There is no place for repentance in his soul; he flies from the room a raving and incurable lunatic. Milder and more pathetic forms of distraction, resulting from loss, ill-treatment, slighted love, are handled no less skilfully. The settled melancholy of poor Penthea in Ford's Broken Heart' is not less touching than the sorrows of Ophelia. For realistic studies of madhouses we may go to Middleton and Dekker; for the lunacy of witchcraft to Rowley; for the ludicrous aspects of idiocy to Jonson's Troubleall. To taste the sublime of terror we must turn the pages of King Lear,' or watch Lady Macbeth in her somnambulism. It is clear that all the types of mental aberration, from the fixed conditions of dementia and monomania through temporary delirium to crack-brained imbecility, were familiar objects to our dramatists. They formed common and striking ingredients in the rough life of that epoch.

X.

Emerging from the Middle Ages, the men of the sixteenth century carried with them a heavy burden of still haunting spiritual horrors. As Queen Elizabeth's Prayer Book was illustrated upon the margin with a Danse Macabre, so these playwrights etched their scenes with sinister imaginings of death. They gazed with dread and fascination on the unfamiliar grave. The other world had for them intense reality; and they invested it with terrors of various and vivid kinds. Sometimes it is described as a place of solitude

MEDITATIONS ON DEATH.

Of endless parting

With all we can call ours, with all our sweetness,

With youth, strength, pleasure, people, time, nay reason!
For in the silent grave no conversation,

No joyful tread of friends, no voice of lovers,

No careful father's counsel; nothing's heard,
Nor nothing is, but all oblivion,

Dust, and an endless darkness.

49

Again, it is peopled with hideous shapes and fiends that plagued the wicked. "T is full of fearful shadows,' says the king in Thierry and Theodoret.' Claudio, in exclaims:

his

agony,

Ay, but to die and go we know not where ;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds.
And blown with restless violence about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling: 't is too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear of death.

Hamlet, meddling with the casuistry of suicide, is still more terror-striking by one simple word:

To die-to sleep ;

To sleep! perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause.

The medieval preoccupation with the world beyond this world, surviving in the Renaissance, led these

E

musicians to play upon the organ-stops of death in plangent minor keys. Instead of dread, they sometimes use the tone of weariness:

All life is but a wandering to find home;

When we are gone, we 're there.

Happy were man,

Could here his voyage end; he should not then
Answer, how well or ill he steered his soul

By heaven's or by hell's compass.

Milder contemplations, when death seems not merely acceptable as an escape from life, but in itself desirable, relieve the sternness of the picture:

"T is of all sleeps the sweetest :

Children begin it to us, strong men seek it,

And kings from height of all their painted glory
Fall like spent exhalations to this centre.

Why should the soul of man dread death?

These fears

Feeling but once the fires of noble thought

Fly like the shapes of clouds we form to nothing.

What, after all, is it to die?

"T is less than to be born; a lasting sleep;

A quiet resting from all jealousy ;

A thing we all pursue; I know, besides,
It is but giving over of a game

That must be lost.

Memnon, in the Mad Lover's Tragedy,' reasoning upon his hopeless passion for the princess, argues thus:

I do her wrong, much wrong she's young and blessed,
Sweet as the spring, and as his blossoms tender;

And I a nipping north-wind, my head hung
With hails and frosty icicles: are the souls so too
When we depart hence, lame, and old, and loveless?
No, sure 't is ever youth there; time and death
Follow our flesh no more; and that forced opinion
That spirits have no sexes, I believe not.

MEDITATIONS ON DEATH.

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Where, asks his friend, may pure iove hope for its

accomplishment?

Below, Siphax,

Below us, in the other world, Elysium,

Where's no more dying, no despairing, mourning,
Where all desires are full, deserts down-loaden,
There, Siphax, there, where loves are ever living.

In the same strain of exalted feeling, but with a touch of even sweeter pathos, Caratach comforts his little nephew Hengo, at the hour of death. The boy is shuddering on the brink of that dark river: Whither must we go when we are dead?'

Why, to the blessedest place, boy! Ever sweetness

And happiness dwells there.

No ill men,

That live by violence and strong oppression,

Come thither. 'Tis for those the gods love-good ones.

Webster, contrasting the death of those who die in peace with that of tyrants and bad livers, makes a prince exclaim :

O thou soft, natural death, that art joint twin

To sweetest slumber! No rough-bearded comet
Stares on thy mild departure: the dull owl
Beats not against thy casement; the hoarse wolf
Scents not thy carrion; pity winds thy corse,
Whilst horror waits on princes.

Dekker too, in his most melodious verse, has said :

An innocent to die; what is it less

But to add angels to heaven's happiness?

It will be observed that the purely theological note is never sounded in any of these lyrical outpourings on the theme of death. The pagan tone which marks them all, takes strongest pitch, where it is well in

keeping with dramatic character, in the last words of Petronius condemned to suicide by Nero:

It is indeed the last and end of ills!

The gods, before they would let us taste death's joys,
Placed us i' the toil and sorrows of this world,

Because we should perceive the amends and thank them.
Death, the grim knave, but leads you to the door
Where, entered once, all curious pleasures come
To meet and welcome you.

A troop of beauteous ladies, from whose eyes.
Love thousand arrows, thousand graces shoots,
Puts forth their fair hands to you and invites
To their green arbours and close-shadowed walks,
Whence banished is the roughness of our years!
Only the west wind blows; it's ever spring
And ever summer. There the laden boughs
Offer their tempting burdens to your hand,
Doubtful your eye or taste inviting more.
There every man his own desires enjoys;
Fair Lucrece lies by lusty Tarquin's side,
And woos him now again to ravish her.
Nor us, though Roman, Lais will refuse;
To Corinth any man may go. . . .
Mingled with that fair company, shall we
On banks of violets and of hyacinths
Of loves devising sit, and gently sport;
And all the while melodious music hear,
And poets' songs that music far exceed,
The old Anacreon crowned with smiling flowers,
And amorous Sapho on her Lesbian lute

Beauty's sweet scars and Cupid's godhead sing.

After this rapturous foretaste of Elysium, he turns to

his friend :

Hither you must, and leave your purchased houses,
Your new-made garden and your black-browed wife,

And of the trees thou hast so quaintly set,

Not one but the displeasant cypress shall
Go with thee.