ic
and genial to the man of thought. A Quarterly Reviewer observes, that
the blended dignity of thought, and a sedate moral habit, invests his
poetry with a stateliness in which the drama is generally deficient,
and makes his writings illustrate, in some degree, a new form of the
art. In all that he writes he stands revealed the true English
gentleman, 'that grand old name,' as Tennyson calls it,

Defamed by every charlatan,
And soiled with all ignoble use.'

_Isaac Comnenus_--in which a recent critic discovers much of that
Byronian vein upon which Mr Taylor is severe in his own
criticisms--being little remarkable in itself, as well as the least
remarkable of his dramatic performances, need not detain us. The
career of _Philip van Artevelde_ belongs to an era when, as Sir James
Stephen remarks, the whole of Europe, under the influence of some
strange sympathy, was agitated by the simultaneous discontents of all
her great civic populations--when the insurgent spirit, commencing in
the Italian republics, had spread from the south to the north of the
Alps, everywhere marking its advance by tumult, spoil, and bloodshed.
'Wat Tyler and his bands had menaced London; and the communes of
Flanders, under the command of Philip van Artevelde, had broken out
into open war with the counts, their seigneurs, and with their
suzerain lord, the Duke of Burgundy. On the issue of that attempt the
fate of the royal and baronial power seemed to hang in France, not
less than in Flanders.'[5] The drama composed by Mr Taylor to
represent the fortunes of the 'Chief Captain of the White Hoods and of
Ghent,' consists of two plays and an interlude--_The Lay of
Elena_--and being, as he says in his preface, equal in length to about
six such plays as are adapted to the stage, was not, of course,
intended to solicit the most sweet voices of pit and gallery,
although it has since been subjected to that ordeal at the instance of
Mr Macready. Historic truth is said to be preserved in it, as far as
the material events are concerned--with the usual exception of such
occasional dilatations and compressions of time as are required in
dramatic composition. And notwithstanding the limited imagination and
the too artificial passion which characterise it, _Philip van
Artevelde_ is in very many respects a noble work, as it certainly is
its author's chef-d'oeuvre. It has been pronounced by no mean
authority the superior of every dramatic composition of m