"Black, swarthy demons hold a hollow cloud,
And with long thunderbolts they drum aloud."

We feel much as if standing on the verge of a cliff, when Caligula's ghost tells where he comes from.

"The infernal cave-the wide, the low
Abyss-the direful pit of endless woe,

On which each god that looks scarce keeps his state,
But, giddy grown, turns, and takes hold of Fate."

The metaphor is as ferocious as the slaughter, when Hannibal tells us of

tred:

"direful Cannæ,

Where the dire sisters bit the Roman looms,

As if their hands were tired with cutting dooms."

Although this is tame to the distilled venom of Guise's ha

"Were I in heaven, and saw him scorch'd in flames,

I would not spit my indignation down,

Lest I should cool his tongue."

Brutus, in his wrath with the traitorous and insolent priests who conducted the conspiracy for restoring Tarquin, has made a very proper instrument of them:

"You deeper fiends than any of the Furies,
That scorn to whisper envy, hate, sedition,
But with a blast of privilege proclaim it;

Priests, that are instruments design'd to damn us,
Fit speaking-trumpets for the mouth of hell."

In Grillon's expression of his momentary hope that his niece had retained her innocence, and his speedy abandonment of that hope, there may be a little oddity, but it is, in our minds, completely absorbed by the beauty :

"There's heaven still in thy voice; but that's a sign
Virtue's departing, for thy better angel

Still makes the woman's tongue his rising ground,
Wags there awhile, and takes his flight for ever."

In the following description of Pope Alexander the Sixth,

we would not part with what some may deem extravagance; for where does a flower more charm than at the foot of such a frowning cliff?

"A master of his breast,

The occasion gives new life, fresh vigour, to him;
Even at the very verge of bottomless death

He stands, and smiles as careless and undaunted
As wanton swimmers on a river's brink

Laugh at the rapid stream."

This is beauty sleeping on the lap of horror. We think these quotations sufficient for our present purpose, of shewing that Lee's worst passages are frequently not altogether bad; that when his muse is most unfortunate, she has yet some conceit in her misery, which is not always a miserable conceit. Through the clouds which he raises we have frequent and bright glimpses of genius, which make his scenes (to borrow one of his own expressions)

"Like Night's black locks all powder'd o'er with stars."

Lee's dramatic works consist of Sophonisba, or Hannibal's Overthrow; Nero; Gloriana, or the Court of Augustus Casar; Alexander; Mithridates; Theodosius; Cæsar Borgia; Lucius Junius Brutus; Constantine; Edipus; Duke of Guise; Massacre of Paris; and the Princess of Cleves. We shall pass over the four last mentioned, of which the first two were written in conjunction with Dryden, and have been noticed, and so noticed, we trust, as to do something towards disposing the reader to a favourable attention to the present article, in the critique on Dryden's Plays in our first Number. The last two were produced towards the close of the unfortunate author's irregular and unhappy life, and after he had been more decidedly the victim of that malady to which he had always perhaps a strong tendency, and from which they scarcely allow us to consider his recovery as more than an imperfect one. They bear evident marks of a shattered mind. Much of the Massacre of Paris is copied from the Duke of Guise; and the parts thus taken are ill-jointed with the original composition. The comic parts of the Princess of Cleves are offensively gross, even to loathsomeness. Considering the time of their production, these pieces call for pity rather than criticism. Yet even here the character of the Princess herself is not unworthy of his better days; she sojourns undefiled in the tabernacles of corruption," and presents a singular picture of purity and delicacy in the midst of all that is foul and revolting.

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Sophonisba, or Hannibal's Overthrow, was, according to the printers, (R. Wellington, at the Lute in St. Paul's Church-yard, and E. Rumball, at the Post-house in Covent-garden,) the first of Lee's dramatic efforts. To play it with effect, and with due observance of the directions, would require "a kingdom for a stage." The following must have made the painters and machinists toil after him in vain. "The scene draws, and discovers a heaven of blood, two suns, spirits in battle, arrows shot to and fro in the air; cries of yielding persons, &c.; cries of Carthage is fallen! &c." The hero, Hannibal, and his illustrious antagonist, Scipio, have the sort of grandeur in their speeches which becomes characters appearing in such scenes. The words are suited to the scenes, and the scenes to the words. But the humbler trees of the play yield better fruit. Massina, the youthful nephew of Massinissa, the king of Numidia, is a beautiful and delicate sketch. How eagerly he listens to Massinissa's tale of his successful wooing:

"Now, as I love bright arms, the story's fine!
Tell it all night, my lord, the stars will shine."

And how sadly the falsehood of Sophonisba drives him to the conclusion, that

"Beauty's breast is like a bank of flowers,

That fairly hides a foul and ugly snake."

In Scipio's camp he meets with Rosalinda, the mistress of Hannibal, detained there as a prisoner, and feels the resistless sensations at which he before wondered. The haughty beauty threatens to leave him; he replies,

"You cannot if you would;

You may as easily forego your blood;

Like that, I'll blushing creep about you still,
And my sick thoughts with secret pleasures fill."

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She boasts her attachment to Hannibal. He is unmoved, and would, without hope or guerdon, "through all the world attend her as her page. When liberated by Scipio, he is allowed to conduct her in safety to Hannibal. Their approach is thus described:

"Rosalinda's beauty did appear

Bright as noon-day, all piercing, sprightly clear;
But he who led her seemed so soft and young,
As if that Pity handed Love along;

And tears his blushing cheeks did so adorn,

Methought the Sun came usher'd by the Morn."

At length he falls, a self-immolated victim to the jealousy of Hannibal and continued coldness of Rosalinda:

"Love, when he shot me, sure, mistook his dart;

Or chang'd with death, whose quick-destroying shaft
Thus drinks my blood-thus with a full, deep draught.”

The best scene is the reconciliation of Massinissa with Sophonisba, who, after having been wooed and won by him, had given her hand to Syphax, and by the chance of war becomes at once a widow, and the prisoner of her first lover. She at first anticipates being led in triumph, and resolves on death. One attendant refuses to aid her design; another, who consents, is thus thanked:

"Thy voice like sad but pleasing music flew ;

Like dying swans', 'twas sweet and fatal too."

Both, however, advise her to try the effect of an interview with the conqueror, whose trumpets are announcing his approach, and who has magnanimously resolved to see her, merely to prove his indifference, and upbraid her with her falsehood. We had intended to quote the whole of this scene, but must sacrifice it for the sake of other extracts. The complete triumph of the gentleness of the false one over her boisterous but self-betrayed accuser is excellently managed, and he gradually becomes his own judge:

“None sure was e'er like thee,

Nor wild as I: storms borrow rage of me;
But thou art soft, and sweet, and silent all,

As births of roses, or as blossoms' fall."

Nero is a very "tragical tragedy," although not of that unmitigated horror which the subject and the genius of the author might have led us to expect. The tyrant is black enough :

"The darkness of his horrid vices has

Eclips'd the glimmering rays of his frail virtue.
His cruelties, like birds of prey, have pluck'd
All seeds of nobleness from his false heart,
And now it lies a sad dull lump of earth."

Yet we find, from the dedication, that he was not altogether

so bad as to satisfy the critics; and the author was compelled to plead, that it was "not impossible for a man to love and hate, to be brave and bad." The gem of the play, and a sweet relief to its atrocities, "like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear," is Cyara, a Parthian princess, romantically in love with Britannicus, who had clandestinely visited her in her father's court, and whom she follows, disguised as a page, to Rome, under pretence of ascertaining whether her brother who had disappeared during the last engagement with the Roman army was slain, or living in captivity. Some noble Romans are interested by her grief:

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Why dost thou droop, and hang thy pensive head,
As if there were no end of thy distress?

His sighs more frequent than the minutes are;
Tears hang upon his cheeks, like morning dew
On roses.

And, by assisting in her pretended object, they enable her to accomplish her real design of introducing herself in disguise to Britannicus, and proving his affection by a feigned account of her own death. Her story, told at the unhappy moment when he had just received the parting breath of his murdered sister Octavia, produces an unexpected and dreadful demonstration of her lover's fidelity: his reason is destroyed by the shock; and, in this state, having taxed Nero with the murder of Octavia, the irritated tyrant attempts his life, and Cyara interposes, and receives the fatal blow in her bosom.

Gloriana, or the Court of Augustus Cæsar, is in a fine jovial vein. We see the lords of the earth at their revels; or a carousal of the gods, with Olympus reeling under them. They are mischievous in their cups, indeed, but they "sinner it right royally." Augustus shews himself a veteran hero in a lady's bower:

"Love through my life an equal pace has run,
Swift near the goal as where it first begun :
I keep my course like the old lord of day;
On my red cheeks the silver tresses play,
I shout and drive, and never feel decay."

He well chides Agrippa and Mecenas for hinting that his "white age should beauty's gloss despise :"

"Ye apes of fame; ye sparks to my full day;
Ye gnats, that in my evening glory play!"