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! No joyful tread of friends, no voice of lovers, No careful father's counsel; nothing's heard, 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 ; The weariest and most loathed worldly life 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; 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 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 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, 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, And I a nipping north-wind, my head hung MEDITATIONS ON DEATH. 51 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, 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 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, Because we should perceive the amends and thank them. A troop of beauteous ladies, from whose eyes. 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, And of the trees thou hast so quaintly set, Not one but the displeasant cypress shall |