mself
incapable of calm reflection, and there is no counsellor at hand to
assist him; none, whose sympathy might assuage his miseries, whose
wisdom might teach him to remedy or to endure them. He is stung by
fury into action, and his activity is at once blind and tremendous.
Since the world is not the abode of unmixed integrity, he looks upon
it as a den of thieves; since its institutions may obstruct the
advancement of worth, and screen delinquency from punishment, he
regards the social union as a pestilent nuisance, the mischiefs of
which it is fitting that he in his degree should do his best to
repair, by means however violent. Revenge is the mainspring of his
conduct; but he ennobles it in his own eyes, by giving it the colour
of a disinterested concern for the maintenance of justice,--the
abasement of vice from its high places, and the exaltation of
suffering virtue. Single against the universe, to appeal to the
primary law of the stronger, to 'grasp the scales of Providence in a
mortal's hand,' is frantic and wicked; but Moor has a force of soul
which makes it likewise awful. The interest lies in the conflict of
this gigantic soul against the fearful odds which at length overwhelm
it, and hurry it down to the darkest depths of ruin.

The original conception of such a work as this betrays the
inexperience no less than the vigour of youth: its execution gives a
similar testimony. The characters of the piece, though traced in
glowing colours, are outlines more than pictures: the few features we
discover in them are drawn with elaborate minuteness; but the rest are
wanting. Every thing indicates the condition of a keen and powerful
intellect, which had studied men in books only; had, by
self-examination and the perusal of history, detected and strongly
seized some of the leading peculiarities of human nature; but was yet
ignorant of all the minute and more complex principles which regulate
men's conduct in actual life, and which only a knowledge of living men
can unfold. If the hero of the play forms something like an exception
to this remark, he is the sole exception, and for reasons alluded to
above: his character resembles the author's own. Even with Karl, the
success is incomplete: with the other personages it is far more so.
Franz von Moor, the villain of the Piece, is an amplified copy of Iago
and Richard; but the copy is distorted as well as amplified. There is
no air of reality in Franz: he is a villain of th