the
last in the king's life. Act first is devoted to explanation, conveyed
in warnings to David, by Jonathan, his friend, and Michel, his wife. Act
second presents the distracted monarch, who knows that God has forsaken
him and that death is at hand. In a speech of terrible intensity he
relates to Abner the story of the apparition of Samuel and the doom that
the ghost has spoken. His children humour and soothe the broken old man,
and finally succeed in softening his mind toward David--whom he at once
loves, dreads, and hates, as the appointed instrument of his destruction
and the successor to his crown. Act third shows David playing upon the
harp before Saul, and chanting Saul's deeds in the service and defence
of Israel--so that he calms the agonised delirium of the haunted king
and wins his blessing; but at last a boastful word makes discord in the
music's charm, and Saul is suddenly roused into a ghastly fury. Acts
fourth and fifth deal with the wild caprices and maddening agonies of
the frenzied father; the ever-varying phenomena of his mental disease;
the onslaught of the Philistines; the killing of his sons; the frequent
recurrence, before his mind's eye, of the shade of the dead prophet; and
finally his suicidal death. It is, in form, a classical tragedy,
massive, grand, and majestically simple; and it blazes from end to end
with the fire of a sublime imagination.

Ardent lovers of Italian literature are fond of ranking _Saul_ with
_Lear_. The claim is natural but it is not valid. In _Lear_--not to
speak of its profound revelations of universal human nature and its vast
philosophy of human life--there is a tremendous scope of action, through
which mental condition and experience are dramatically revealed; and
there is the deepest deep of pathos, because the highest height of
afflicted goodness. In _Saul_ there is simply--upon a limited canvas,
without adjuncts, without the suggestion of resources, without the
relief of even mournful humour, and with a narrative rather than a
dramatic background--the portraiture of a condition; and, because the
man displayed is neither so noble nor so human, the pathos surcharging
the work is neither so harrowing nor so tender. Yet the two works are
akin in majesty of ideal, in the terrible topic of mental disease that
shatters a king, and in the atmosphere of desolation that trails after
them like a funeral pall; and it is not a wonder that Alfieri's Saul
should be deemed the gr