wn coronation, but he does not guess
the secret. Nay, he has just touchingly asked his foster-mother,
observed by him to be in tears:--

What pity touches you? Is it that in a holocaust to be this day
offered, I, like Jephtha's daughter in other times, must pacify by
my death the anger of the Lord? Alas, a son has nothing that does
not belong to his father!

The discreet foster-mother refers the lad to her husband, Jehoiada, now
approaching. Joash rushes into the arms of the high priest, exclaiming,
"My father!" "Well, my son?" the high-priest replies. "What
preparations, then, are these?" asks Joash. The high priest bids him
prepare himself to listen and learn, the time being now come for him to
pay his debt to God:--

JOASH. I feel myself ready, if he wishes it, to give to him my
life.

JEHOIADA. You have often heard read the history of our kings. Do
you remember, my son, what strict laws a king worthy of the crown
ought to impose upon himself?

JOASH. A wise and good king, so hath God himself declared, puts not
his reliance upon riches and gold; he fears the Lord his God, has
ever before him his precepts, his laws, his judgments severe, and
does not with unjust burdens overwhelm his brethren.

Fenelon had already been two years preceptor to the Duke of Burgundy
when this tragedy was written. It is impossible not to feel that Racine
must have had that prince in mind when he put into the mouth of young
Joash sentiments so likely to have been instilled into the heart of his
royal pupil, the great king's grandson, by such a preceptor as Fenelon.
How could the selfish old monarch of France contrive to avoid
recognizing his own portrait, suggested by contrast in that description
of the good king from the lips of little Joash? Racine was here treading
on treacherous ground. He will presently find his footing quite give way
under him, to let him down into the "horrible pit" of disgrace with his
king. This not, however, in the present play.

The tragedist has generously bestowed upon wicked Queen Athaliah a
certain loftiness of spirit which, in its display in the final
catastrophe, almost redeems her to admiration, if not to sympathy. There
is nothing in the play more nearly sublime in declamation than the final
speech in which Athaliah greets her own doom, and blasphemously
forecasts, for young King Joash, a future of apostasy from God. With
this admir