that he had risen
or fallen, let my readers decide each for himself. It is a credit to
any man to feel for any human being; and Italy, as she is at this
moment, is certainly one of the most tragic spectacles which the world
has ever seen. Elsley need not be blamed for pitying her; only for
holding, with most of our poets, a vague notion that her woes were to
be cured by a hair of the dog who bit her; viz., by homoeopathic
doses of that same "art" which has been all along her morbid and
self-deceiving substitute for virtue and industry. So, as she had
sung herself down to the nether pit, Elsley would help to sing her up
again; and had already been throwing off, ever since 1848, a series
of sonnets which he entitled Eurydice, intimating, of course, that he
acted as the Orpheus. Whether he had hopes of drawing iron tears down
Pluto Radetzky's cheek, does not appear; but certainly the longer poem
which had sprung from his fancy, at the urgent call of Messrs. Brown
and Younger, would have been likely to draw nothing but iron balls
from Radetzky's cannon; or failing so vast an effect, an immediate
external application to the poet himself of that famous herb
Pantagruelion, cure for all public ills and private woes, which men
call hemp. Nevertheless, it was a noble subject; one which ought
surely to have been taken up by some of our poets, for if they do not
make a noble poem of it, it will be their own fault. I mean that
sad and fantastic tragedy of Fra Dolcino and Margaret, which Signor
Mariotti has lately given to the English public, in a book which, both
for its matter and its manner, should be better known than it is.
Elsley's soul had been filled (it would have been a dull one else)
with the conception of the handsome and gifted patriot-monk, his soul
delirious with, the dream of realising a perfect Church on earth;
battling with tongue and pen, and at last with sword, against the
villanies of pope and kaiser, and all the old devourers of the earth,
cheered only by the wild love of her who had given up wealth, fame,
friends, all which render life worth having, to die with him a death
too horrible for words. And he had conceived (and not altogether ill)
a vision, in which, wandering along some bright Italian bay, he met
Dolcino sitting, a spirit at rest but not yet glorified, waiting for
the revival of that dead land for which he had died; and Margaret
by him, dipping her scorched feet for ever in the cooling wave, and
loo