Strafford. [The Statesman and the Historical Period of the Poem.] It is so important that the reader of the tragedy of Strafford should start with a clear idea of the historical facts with which it deals, that I have included in my article the following extract from Professor Gardiner’s Life of Strafford in the Encyclopædia Britannica. For the benefit of such of my readers as may have forgotten the fact, I may state that, before the earldom was conferred on Strafford, he was Sir Thomas Wentworth:—“High-handed as Wentworth was by nature, his rule in Ireland made him more high-handed than ever. As yet he had never been consulted on English affairs, and it was only in February 1637 that Charles asked his opinion on a proposed interference in the affairs of the Continent. In reply, he assured Charles that it would be unwise to undertake even naval operations till he had secured absolute power at home. The opinion of the judges had given the King the right to levy ship-money; but, unless his Majesty had ‘the like power declared to raise a land army, the crown’ seemed ‘to stand upon one leg at home, to be considerable but by halves to foreign princes abroad.’ The power so gained, indeed, must be shown to be beneficent by the maintenance of good government; but it ought to exist. A beneficent despotism supported by popular gratitude was now Wentworth’s ideal. In his own case Wentworth had cause to discover that Charles’ absolutism was marred by human imperfections. Charles gave ear to courtiers far too often, and frequently wanted to do them a good turn by promoting incompetent persons to Irish offices. To a request from Wentworth to strengthen the position of the deputy by raising him to an earldom he turned a deaf ear. Yet, to make Charles more absolute continued to be the dominant note of his policy; and, when the Scottish Puritans rebelled, he advocated the most decided measures of repression, and in February 1639 he offered the king £2000 as his contribution to the expenses of the coming war. He was, however, too clear-sighted to do otherwise than deprecate an invasion of Scotland before the English army was trained. In September 1639, after Charles’ failure in the first Bishops’ War, Wentworth arrived in England, to conduct in the Star Chamber a case in which the Irish chancellor was being prosecuted for resisting the deputy. From that moment he stepped into the place of Charles’ principal adviser. Ignorant of the extent to which opposition had developed in England during his absence, he recommended the calling of a parliament to support a renewal of the war, hoping that by the offer of a loan from the privy councillors, to which he himself contributed £20,000, he would place Charles above the necessity of submitting to the new parliament if it should prove restive. In January 1640 he was created Earl of Strafford, and in March he went to Ireland to hold a parliament, where the Catholic vote secured a grant of subsidies to be used against the Presbyterian Scots. An Irish army was to be levied to assist in the coming war. When, in April, Strafford returned to England, he found the Commons holding back from a grant of supply, and tried to enlist the peers on the side of resistance. On the other hand, he attempted to induce Charles to be content with a smaller grant than he had originally asked for. The Commons, however, insisted on peace with the Scots; and on May 9th, at the Privy Council, Strafford, though reluctantly, voted for a dissolution. After this Strafford supported the harshest measures. He urged the King to invade Scotland; and, in meeting the objection that England might resist, he uttered the words which cost him dear: ‘You have an army in Ireland’—the army which, in the regular course of affairs, was to have been employed to operate in the west of Scotland—‘you may employ here to reduce this kingdom.’ He tried to force the citizens of London to lend money. He supported a project for debasing the coinage, and for seizing bullion in the Tower, the property of foreign merchants. He also advocated the purchasing a loan from Spain by the offer of a future alliance. He was ultimately appointed to command the English army, but he was seized with illness, and the rout of Newburn made the position hopeless. In the great council at York he showed his hope that, if Charles maintained the defensive, the country would still rally round him; whilst he proposed, in order to secure Ireland, that the Scots of Ulster should be ruthlessly driven from their homes. When the Long Parliament met, it was preparing to impeach Strafford, when tidings reached its leaders that Strafford, now Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, had come to London, and had advised the King to take the initiative by accusing his chief opponents of treason. On this the impeachment was hurried on, and the Lords committed Strafford to the Tower. At his trial in Westminster Hall he stood on the ground that each charge against him, even if true, did not amount to treason; whilst Pym urged that, taken as a whole, they showed an intention to change the government, which in itself was treason. Undoubtedly the project of bringing over the Irish army—probably never seriously entertained—did the prisoner most damage; and, when the Lords showed reluctance to condemn him, the Commons dropped the impeachment, and brought in a bill of attainder. The Lords would probably have refused to pass it if they could have relied on Charles’s assurance to relegate Strafford to private life if the bill were rejected. Charles unwisely took part in projects for effecting Strafford’s escape, and even for raising a military force to accomplish that end. The Lords took alarm and passed the bill. On May 9th, 1641, the King, frightened by popular tumults, reluctantly signed a commission for the purpose of giving to it the royal assent, and on the 12th Strafford was executed on Tower Hill.”

[The Tragedy.] (Published 1837, and dedicated to William C. Macready.) Strafford, a tragedy in five acts (written for the stage at Macready’s request), has for its plot the impeachment of the Earl of Strafford and his condemnation and execution. It tells the story of the faithful statesman who loved his sovereign, and sacrificed his life from an almost insane devotion to an utterly unworthy man. The tragedy deals with a period of English history which was richer than any other in the assertion of the rights of the people against the tyranny of their rulers. We are introduced to the band of patriots who secured for us the rights which are to-day the most precious heritage of every Englishman—the brave men who, like Hampden and Pym, resisted the system of forced loans, and the obnoxious tax called “ship-money.” Strafford has been carrying fire and sword through Ireland, and Charles is proposing to persecute the Scotch with similar severity. Wentworth has answered the summons of the king, and has yielded to his request to undertake the Scotch war. He now begins to see how treacherous his sovereign is. Charles, by bribes and promises, has detached him from the people’s cause only to use him as a catspaw, to bear the hatred and fury of the people in his stead. Pym tries to win back “the apostate” to the cause of liberty. They loved each other as David and Jonathan; and the efforts of Pym to touch the heart of his friend, and win him from his chivalrous devotion to Charles to his duty to his country, are finely described in the play. But neither duty, danger, nor the imminent approach of death itself, can divert for a single moment the nobleman who is devoted body and soul to the wretchedest semblance of a “king by right divine” who ever secured such devoted service. Strafford, deaf alike to the calls of friendship and patriotism, serves one man only—Charles,—and leaves the patriots to fight for England as best they may. Lady Carlisle interposes her influence, warns Strafford of his danger, and begs him to secure his retreat while he may; but he is as little moved by the appeals of a woman’s love as by those more powerful and legitimate motives which he has refused to entertain. Such blind devotion to an ideal founded on so insecure a base could have only ruin for its end. Strafford leads the army to the north, is ignominiously defeated, finds that Charles has treacherously listened to proposals of reconciliation with the Scotch, and that the patriots are in league with them; returns to London, and determines to impeach the patriots, but finds his move anticipated. He is himself impeached, a bill of attainder against him is passed, and he is arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. Charles, who had promised that Strafford should not suffer in life, liberty, or estate for his devotion to his cause, makes no effort to save him, though nothing could have been easier than to have done so; and actually, after a little show of hesitation, signs his death warrant at the request of Pym. Passionately and entirely devoted to Strafford, Lady Carlisle has conceived a plan by which, with the King’s connivance, he may escape from the Tower. A boat has been brought to the river entrance of the fortress, and arrangements made for his escape to France; but Strafford refuses to run away from the country which demands his life, and will not let it be said to his children in after years that their father broke prison to save his head; and so, while he delays the acceptance of Lady Carlisle’s assistance, he is led to execution. He sees that not he alone, but the master who has betrayed him, must incur the vengeance of the outraged people of England; and his last words addressed to Pym are to implore him (on his knees) to spare the King’s life. He feels that nothing will move the stern patriot from his sense of duty, and thanks God that it is himself who dies first. He expresses no word of ill-feeling against Pym, and goes bravely to death, the victim of a misplaced affection almost without parallel in our history. Strafford is a presentation of “naked souls,” as Dr. J. Todhunter called it. “They are almost like Hugo’s personages, monomaniacs of ideas—Strafford of loyalty to Charles; Lady Carlisle of loyalty to Strafford’s infatuation; Pym of loyalty to an ideal England.... Browning has not left the King even a rag of conventional royalty to cover his nakedness. He has stript him with a vengeance.” How far Browning’s representation of the circumstances attendant on the impeachment and condemnation of Strafford is true to the actual facts must be left to the decision of the greatest authority on the history of the period—Professor Gardiner. In his introduction to Miss E. H. Hickey’s Strafford, he says: “We may be sure that it was not by accident that Mr. Browning, in writing this play, decisively abandoned all attempt to be historically accurate. Only here and there does anything in the course of the drama take place as it could have taken place at the actual court of Charles I. Not merely are there frequent minor inaccuracies, but the very roots of the situation are untrue to fact. The real Strafford was far from opposing the war with the Scots at the time when the Short Parliament was summoned. Pym never had such a friendship for Strafford as he is represented as having; and, to any one who knows anything of the habits of Charles, the idea of Pym or his friends entering into colloquies with Strafford, and even bursting unannounced into Charles’s presence, is, from the historical point of view, simply ridiculous. So completely does the drama proceed irrespectively of historical truth, that the critic may dispense with the thankless task of pointing out discrepancies. He will be better employed in asking what ends those discrepancies were intended to serve, and whether the neglect of truth of fact has resulted in the highest truth of character.—For myself I can only say that, every time I read the play, I feel more certain that Mr. Browning has seized the real Strafford, the man of critical brain, of rapid decision, and tender heart, who strove for the good of his nation without sympathy for the generation in which he lived. Charles I., too, with his faults perhaps exaggerated, is the real Charles. Of Lady Carlisle we know too little to speak with anything like certainty; but, in spite of Mr. Browning’s statement that his character of her is purely imaginary, there is a wonderful parallelism between the Lady Carlisle which history conjectures rather than describes. There is the same tendency to fix the heart upon the truly great man, and to labour for him without the requital of human affection; though in the play no part is played by that vanity which seems to have been the main motive with the real personage.” It has frequently been said that Browning, in this play, has closely followed the story as given in the Life of Strafford by the late John Forster. The reason for this undoubted fact has recently been given to the world. In the Pall Mall Gazette, in the month of April 1890, Dr. F. J. Furnivall published the following letter, which asserts the late poet’s right to almost the whole of the Life of Strafford that has hitherto gone under the name of the late John Forster, in the second volume of the Lives of Eminent British Statesmen in Lardner’s “Cabinet Cyclopædia,” pp. 178-411, with the Strafford Appendix, pp. 412-21: “This volume was published in 1836. John Forster wrote the life of Eliot, the first in the volume, and began that of Strafford. He then fell ill; and as he was anxious to produce the book in the time agreed on, Browning offered to finish Strafford for him, on his handing over all the material he had accumulated for it. Forster was greatly relieved by Browning’s kindness. The poet set to work, completed Strafford’s life on his own lines, in accordance with his own conception of Strafford’s character, but generously said nothing about it till after Forster’s death. Then he told a few of his friends—me among them—of how he had helped Forster. On my telling Prof. Gardiner of this, I found that he knew it; and had been long convinced that the conception of Strafford in this Lardner Life was not John Forster’s, but was Robert Browning’s. The other day Prof. Gardiner urged me to make the fact of Browning’s authorship public; and I do so now, though I have frequently mentioned it to friends in private; and at the Browning Society, when a member has said, ‘It is curious how closely Browning has followed his authority, Forster’s Life of Strafford,’ I have answered, ‘Yes, because he wrote it himself.’ We thus understand why, when Macready asked Browning, on May 26th, 1836, to write him a play, the poet suggested Strafford as its subject; and why, the Life being finished in 1836, the play was printed and played in 1837. The internal evidence will satisfy any intelligent reader that almost all the prose Life is the poet’s. It is not only little touches like these on pp. 182-3, describing James I., which reveal Browning,—‘He was not an absolute fool, and little more can be said of him ... whenever an obvious or judicious truth seemed likely to fall in his way, his pen infallibly waddled off from it’; on p. 227, ‘divers ill-spelt and solemn sillinesses from the King,’ the reference to the ‘Sordello’ Ezzelin[8] on p. 229, etc.,—but it is the conception and working-out of the character of Strafford, ‘that he was consistent to himself throughout,’ p. 228, etc., and that his one object was to make Charles ‘the most absolute lord in Christendom,’ and that this explains all apparent inconsistencies and vanities in his conduct. Let any one read the following last paragraph of the Life, and ask himself if it is not the poet’s hand. Page 411: ‘A great lesson is written in the life of this truly extraordinary person. In the career of Strafford is to be sought the justification of the world’s “appeal from tyranny to God.” In him Despotism had at length obtained an instrument with mind to comprehend, and resolution to act upon, her principles in their length and breadth; and enough of her purposes were effected by him to enable mankind to see “as from a tower the end of all.” I cannot discern one false step in Strafford’s public conduct, one glimpse of a recognition of an alien principle, one instance of a dereliction of the law of his being, which can come in to dispute the decisive result of the experiment, or explain away its failure. The least vivid fancy will have no difficulty in taking up the interrupted design, and by wholly enfeebling, or materially emboldening, the insignificant nature of Charles, and by according some half-dozen years of immunity to the “fretted tenement” of Strafford’s “fiery soul,”—contemplate then, for itself, the perfect realisation of the scheme of “making the prince the most absolute lord in Christendom.” That done,—let it pursue the same course with respect to Eliot’s noble imaginings, or to young Vane’s dreamy aspirings, and apply in like manner a fit machinery to the working out the project which made the dungeon of the one a holy place, and sustained the other in his self-imposed exile. The result is great and decisive! It establishes, in renewed force, those principles of political conduct which have endured, and must continue to endure, “like truth from age to age.”’ Take again a couple of passages of two and a half lines each on Strafford’s illnesses, on page 369, and recollect that Browning owed much to Donne:—‘The soul of the Earl of Strafford was indeed lodged, to use the expression of his favourite Donne, within a “low and fatal room” ... But even by the side of the body’s weakness we find a witness of the spirit’s triumph,—a vindication of the mightiness of will!’ And on page 370—‘Then, when every energy was to be taxed to the uttermost, the question of his fiery spirit’s supremacy was indeed put to the issue, by a complication of ghastly diseases.’ Are these and like passages by John Forster? No! They are Robert Browning’s Plenty of others have his mark, especially those passages analysing and philosophising on character. I have appealed to Messrs. Smith & Elder to reprint this Life of Strafford, with an Introduction by Prof. Gardiner; but I suppose that there is no copyright in it, as it has always gone under John Forster’s name. Assuredly all students of Browning should have this Life on their shelves. I should say that Forster did not write more than the first four pages of it, and that Browning began with ‘James I. ... came to this country in an ecstasy of infinite relief,’ on page 182.” In this Life of Strafford there is a striking passage on the question of that statesman’s “apostacy.” “In one word, what it is desired to impress upon the reader, before the delineation of Wentworth in his after years, is this—that he was consistent to himself throughout. I have always considered that much good wrath is thrown away upon what is usually called ‘apostacy.’ In the majority of cases, if the circumstances are thoroughly examined, it will be found that there has been ‘no such thing.’ The position on which the acute Roman thought fit to base his whole theory of æsthetics—

“Humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam
Jungere si velit, et varias inducere plumas,
Undique collatis membris, ut turpiter atram
Desinat in piscem mulier formosa supernè,
Spectatum admissi risum teneatis, amici?” etc.

is of far wider application than to the exigencies of an art of poetry; and those who carry their researches into the moral nature of mankind cannot do better than impress upon their minds, at the outset, that in the regions they explore they are to expect no monsters—no essentially discordant termination to any ‘Mulier formosa supernè.’ Infinitely and distinctly various as appear the shifting hues of our common nature when subjected to the prism of CIRCUMSTANCE, each ray into which it is broken is no less in itself a primitive colour, susceptible, indeed, of vast modification, but incapable of further division.[9] Indolence, however, in its delight for broad classifications, finds its account in overlooking this; and among the results none is more conspicuous than the long list of apostates with which history furnishes us. It is very true, it may be admitted, that when we are informed by an old chronicler that ‘at this time Ezzelin changed totally his disposition,’—or by a modern biographer that ‘at such a period Tiberius first became a wicked prince,’—we examine too curiously if we consider such information as in reality regarding other than the act done and the popular inference recorded; beyond which it was no part of the writer to inquire.—Against all such conclusions I earnestly protest in the case of the remarkable personage whose ill-fated career we are now retracing. Let him be judged sternly, but in no unphilosophic spirit. In turning from the bright band of patriot brothers to the solitary Strafford—‘a star which dwelt apart’—we have to contemplate no extinguished splendour, razed and blotted from the book of life. Lustrous, indeed, as was the gathering of the lights in the political heaven of this great time, even that radiant cluster might have exulted in the accession of the ‘comet beautiful and fierce,’ which tarried a while within its limits ere it ‘darted athwart with train of flame.’ But it was governed by other laws than were owned by its golden associates, and impelled by a contrary, yet no less irresistible force, than that which restrained them within their eternal orbits,—it left them, never to ‘float into that azure heaven again.’”—John Forster’s Life of Strafford, in the “Cabinet Cyclopædia” (conducted by Dr. Lardner), pp. 228-9.

Notes.—Act I., Scene i. Pym, the great and learned champion of English liberty, was an intimate friend of Wentworth, and deeply felt his desertion of the popular cause. Sir Benjamin Rudyard was a prominent member of the Long Parliament. When the quarrel broke out between Charles and the Parliament, Rudyard quitted his parliamentary pursuits and joined Hampden and Pym’s party. He opposed the attainder of Strafford. He ultimately became anxious for a compromise between the King and the Commons; he acted, however, to the last with the patriots. Henry Vane, Sir, the younger, was a disciple of Pym, and was of considerable talents and equal fanaticism. He purloined from his father’s cabinet a very important document, which was used against Strafford on his trial. After the Restoration he was brought to trial and executed. Hampden, John, a gentleman of Buckinghamshire, quiet, courteous, and submissive; but with a correct judgment, an invincible spirit, and the most consummate address. In 1626 he was imprisoned for refusing to contribute towards the forced loan; he resisted the payment of ship-money. He threw himself heartily into the work of the Long Parliament, and commanded a troop in the parliamentary army. He was a great patriot and defender of the rights of the people. Denzil Hollis, Lord: “In 1629, when the Speaker refused to put to the vote Sir John Eliot’s remonstrance against the illegal levying of tonnage and poundage, and against Catholic and Arminian innovations, Hollis read the resolutions, and was one of two members who forcibly held the Speaker in the chair till they were passed. He was in consequence committed to the Tower. He was one of the ‘five members,’ as they were called, whom Charles accused of high treason in January 1642. He took no part in the proceedings against Strafford, who was his brother-in-law” (Imp. Dict. Biog.). The Bill of Rights: the third great charter of English liberties must not be confounded with “the Petition of Right.” “The Bill of Rights” was passed in the reign of William and Mary, in 1689. “much worn Cottington”: he was ambassador to Madrid. “maniac Laud”: Archbishop Laud was detested by the Puritans because he endeavoured to assimilate the doctrines and ritual of the Church of England to those of Rome. He was charged by Holles with high treason, and executed. Runnymead: the place where Magna Charta was signed. renegade: one faithless to principle or party; a deserter of a cause. Haman: see the Book of Esther. Haman resolved to extirpate the Jews out of the Persian empire, but Haman fell and Mordecai was advanced to his place. Ahitophel was a conspirator with Absalom against David, who prayed the Lord to turn the counsel of Ahitophel into foolishness (2 Sam. xv. 31); whence the term “Ahitophel’s counsel.” League and Covenant: the “Solemn League and Covenant” was designed by the Scotch to carry out in their integrity the principles of the Reformation and to establish the Presbyterian in lieu of the Episcopal Church. Eliot: Sir John Eliot compared Buckingham to Sejanus in lust, rapacity and ambition, in the House of Commons, and seconded the motion for his impeachment. Eliot was sent to the Tower. “The Philistine”: the giant slain by David. “Exalting Dagon where the ark should be” (1 Sam. v.). Dagon was an idol, half man and half fish. He was worshipped by the Philistines. When they captured the “ark” from the Jews, it was placed in his temple, the idol fell, and the palms of his hands were broken off. scourge and gag: instruments of torture well understood in those days. “The Midianite drove Israel into dens” (Judges vi. 2): the Israelites for their sins were oppressed by Midian, and were compelled to hide from them in dens and caves of the mountains. Gideon: the Israelites prayed to God for deliverance from their enemies, and an angel sent Gideon, who destroyed Baal’s altar and delivered Israel (Judges vi.). Loudon: Scottish lord and covenanter; committed to the Tower for soliciting the aid of the king of France: he was sent to Scotland by Charles. Hamilton, Marquess of: sent by Charles to Scotland as commissioner to suppress the Covenant, he dared not land; was suspected of treason, and fled; was restored to the King’s favour, and became a leader of the royalists; was defeated by the parliamentary troops; fined £100,000, and executed. Joab: David, when dying, gave charge to Solomon to put his enemy Joab to death, which was done (1 Kings ii. 28-34). “No Feltons”: J. Felton assassinated Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and was executed. Gracchus: Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, the celebrated Roman tribunes, were after their death worshipped as gods, and their mother esteemed herself the happiest of Roman matrons in having given birth to such illustrious sons. The Petition of Right, the second great charter of English liberties, was directed against those grievances which Wentworth thus described in his speech in the third parliament: “the raising of money by loans, strengthened by commission, with unheard-of instruction; the billeting of soldiers by the lieutenants.... Our persons have been injured both by imprisonment without law (the King exercised an absolute right to imprison any one without legal proceedings), and by being designed to some office, charge, and employment, foreign or domestic, as a brand of infamy and mark of disgrace” (Prof. Gardiner). Aceldama: “a field said to have lain south of Jerusalem, purchased with the bribe which Judas took for betraying his Master, and therefore called the field of blood;—sometimes used in figurative sense” (Webster’s Dict.). Nathaniel Fiennes was the second son of William Fiennes; he was a lawyer, and in 1640 sat in the House of Commons for Banbury. He was a rigid Presbyterian, and a member of nearly all Cromwell’s parliaments. Ship money: “An imposition formerly charged on the ports, towns, cities, boroughs and counties of England, for providing and furnishing certain ships for the king’s service. The attempt made by Charles I. to revive and enforce this imposition was resisted by John Hampden, and was one of the causes which led to the death of Charles. It was finally abolished” (Webster’s Dict.). “Wentworth’s influence in the North”: Wentworth represented Yorkshire in parliament, and had great influence in the north of England.—Scene ii. “Old Vane” was secretary of state and comptroller of the household under Charles I. Savill: George Savill, Marquis of Halifax (?). Holland, Earl of: raised forces against the parliament after espousing its cause against Charles; he was tried after the King’s death and executed. “Lady Carlisle was the daughter of the ninth Earl of Northumberland. In 1639 she had been for three years a widow. Her husband was James, Lord Hay, created successively Viscount Doncaster and Earl of Carlisle” (from Miss Hickey’s Strafford). Weston, Sir Richard, Chancellor of the Exchequer, made Earl of Portland; denounced by Sir J. Eliot as an enemy of the Commonwealth. “This frightful Scots affair”: Professor Gardiner shows that Strafford opposed peace with the Scots, supported the harshest measures, and urged the King to invade Scotland (Encyc. Brit., vol xxii., p. 586). “In this Ezekiel chamber”: in the eighth chapter of Ezekiel the prophet has a vision of the chambers of imagery where he saw “wicked abominations.” “The Faction,” a party acting in opposition to the constituted authority.—Act II., Scene i. “Subsidies,” says Blackstone, were taxes, not immediately on property, but on persons in respect of their reputed estates, after the nominal rate of 4s. in the pound for lands and 2s. 8d. for goods. cockatrice: “The basilisk; a fabulous serpent, said to be produced from a cock’s egg brooded by a serpent. Its breath, and even its look, is fabled to be fatal” (Webster’s Dict.). Star Chamber: “The origin of this court is derived from the most remote antiquity. Its title was derived from the Camera Stellata or Star Chamber, an apartment in the king’s palace at Westminster, in which it held its sittings; it exercised an illegal control over the ordinary courts of justice, and in the reign of Charles I. became very tyrannical and offensive as a means of asserting the royal prerogative. It was abolished by the Long Parliament” (Student’s Hume, p. 358).—Scene ii. The George: a figure of St. George on horseback, worn by knights of the Garter. A masque, a species of dramatic entertainment. Fletcher and Ben Jonson wrote many masques which were acted at Court. The most beautiful work of this kind is the Comus of Milton. Act III., Scene i.—The new Parliament: “The Long Parliament,” which met Nov. 3rd, 1640; it voted the House of Lords as useless. The Great Duke: Buckingham.—Scene ii. Windebank, one of the secretaries of state, was impeached by the Commons for treason, and escaped to France. “sly, pitiful intriguing with the Scots”: “Charles, in his eagerness to conclude the negotiation, was induced to concede many points which he would otherwise have refused” (Lingard, Hist. Eng., vol. vii., p. 232). “The Crew and the Cabal”: the “crew” was a number of people associated together; the “cabal” a number of persons united to promote their private views in church or state by intrigue. What is usually understood by the “cabal” was a name given to a ministry under Charles II., the initial letters of the names of its members forming the word cabal. Mainwaring, Dr., a clergyman who preached in favour of the general loan. He was impeached by the Commons. Goring, Colonel: he was Governor of Portsmouth, was an officer of distinguished merit, and devoted to the King.—Scene iii., rufflers, bullies, swaggerers. “Are we in Geneva?”: Calvin’s city, where all sorts of puritanical restrictions were enforced against harmless amusements as well as breaches of morality. St. John, Oliver: St. John was Solicitor-General; he was one of the leaders of the Independents. stockishness, hardness, stupidity, blockishness (rare). Maxwell, Usher of the Black Rod. He received Strafford as his prisoner, after his impeachment, and required him to deliver his sword.—Act IV., Scene i. Hollis: Strafford was his brother-in-law, and so he took no part in the proceedings against him. “A blind moth-eaten law”: Strafford said on his trial that “it was two hundred and forty years since any man was touched for this crime.”—Scene ii. “Prophet’s rod”: “Moses took the rod of God in his hand” (Exod. iv. 20). Haselrig, Sir Arthur: was one of the five members of the House of Commons whom Charles tried to impeach. Laud, Archbishop: had been impeached by Sir Harry Vane, and was a prisoner in the Tower. Bill of attainder: The Student’s Hume says (p. 399): “The student should bear in mind the difference between an Impeachment and a Bill of Attainder. In an impeachment the Commons are the accusers, and the Lords alone the judges. In a bill of attainder the Commons are the judges as well as the Lords; it may be introduced in either House; it passes through the same stages as any other bill; and when agreed to by both Houses it receives the assent of the Crown.”—Act V., Scene ii. “O bell’ andare”: “The Italian boat-song is from Redi’s Bacco, long since naturalised in the joyous and delicate version of Leigh Hunt” (R. B.) Term, or Terminus: the Roman god of bounds, under whose protection were the stones which marked boundaries. Genius: the Italian peoples regarded the Genius as a higher power which creates and maintains life, assists at the begetting and birth of every individual man, determines his character, tries to influence his destiny for good, accompanies him through life as his tutelary spirit, and lives on in the Lares after his death. (Seyffert’s Dict. Class. Ant.) “Garrard—my newsman”: was a clergyman who, when Wentworth went to Ireland as Lord Deputy, in 1633, was instructed to furnish him with news and gossip. (Miss Hickey.) Tribune: in ancient Rome, a magistrate chosen by the people to protect them from the oppression of the patricians or nobles. Sejanus, Ælius: distinguished himself at the court of Tiberius, who made a confidant of this fawning favourite, who made himself the darling of the senate, and the army. He was commander of the prætorian guards, and used every artifice to make himself important. He became practically head of the empire. He ridiculed the Emperor by introducing him on the stage; Tiberius then ordered him to be accused before the senate; he was subsequently imprisoned and strangled, A.D. 31. Richelieu, Cardinal: fomented the first commotions in Scotland, and secretly supplied the Covenanters with money and arms. He was prime minister to Louis XIII. of France. “A mask at Theobald’s”: Theobald’s, in Hertfordshire, was a beautiful house, inherited by Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, from his father, William Cecil, Lord Burleigh. King James liked this house so much that, in 1607, he offered Robert Cecil the Queen’s dower-house at Hatfield in exchange for it. Several of Ben Jonson’s masques were written for performance at Theobald’s. (Prof. Morley.) Prynne: William Prynne was a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, of a morose and gloomy disposition, and a thorough-going Puritan; he particularly hated theatres, dancing, hunting, card playing, and Christmas festivities. He wrote a great book against all these things, which he called Histrio-Mastix. He was indicted as a libeller of the Queen, condemned to stand in the pillory, to lose both his ears, to pay £5000 fine to the King, and to be imprisoned for life. “Strafford shall take no hurt”: Charles had said to Strafford, “Upon the word of a king you shall not suffer in life, honour, or fortune.” “Put not your trust in princes”: Psalm cxlvi. 3. Wandesford: Sir Christopher Wandesford was Master of the Rolls, and Privy Councillor in Ireland, and had been deputy there during Strafford’s absence. He was an intimate friend of Strafford’s, and is said to have died of grief at hearing of Strafford’s arrest. (Miss Hickey’s Strafford.) Radcliffe, Sir George: was appointed by Strafford guardian of his children; he was charged by Pym with treason. Balfour: Lieutenant of the Tower. “Too late for sermon at St. Antholin’s”: the Government had appropriated the Church of St. Antholin to the use of the Scotch commission. (Miss Hickey.) Billingsley: Balfour was desired by the King to admit Captain Billingsley and one hundred men to the Tower to effect Strafford’s escape. (Miss Hickey’s notes.) “I fought her to the utterance”: the last or utmost extremity—the same as Fr. à outrance. “David not more Jonathan”: were inseparable friends. The allusion is to David the psalmist and Jonathan the son of Saul. David’s lamentation at the death of Jonathan was never surpassed in pathos and beauty. (2 Sam. i. 19-27.) “His dream—of a perfect church.” Laud wished to make the Church of England “Catholic”; he endeavoured to assimilate its doctrines and ceremonies to those of the Catholic Church, ignoring the fact that “the Tudor settlement” was Protestant. Laud desired to appropriate all that to him appeared valuable in the Roman Catholic system, and to reject all that to him seemed objectionable. His “perfect church” was, as Browning puts it, “a dream.”

Summum Bonum. (Asolando, 1889.) A Latin phrase meaning the chief or ultimate good. “In ethics it was a phrase employed by ancient philosophers to denote that end in the following and attainment of which the progress, perfection and happiness of human beings consist. Cicero treated of the subject very fully in his De Finibus.” (Encyc. Dict.) Concentration is the key-note of the poem: in the honey-bag of one bee there is the breath and bloom of a year; in a single gem is represented all the chemistry of nature, from the condensation of the gases which went to form the earth; in the beauty of a single pearl is all the wonder of the sea, just as in a lump of coal are the imprisoned sun-rays of prehistoric forests. But truth and trust are brighter and purer than gems and pearls; in the love of a young girl Mr. Browning sees the concentration of the brightest truth and purest trust in the universe, so holy a thing to him is love. The Summum Bonum of St. Augustine is, of course, the true, ultimate good of man—the Love of God—of which the love of the purest of mankind is but a dim reflection.

Sun, The. (Ferishtah’s Fancies, 5.) Some one told one of Ferishtah’s pupils that it had been reported that “God once assumed on earth a human shape,” and he desired to know how the strange idea arose. Ferishtah replied that in days of ignorance men took the sun for God. “Let it be considered as the symbol of the Supreme,” said the Dervish. “There must be such an Author of life and light somewhere: let us suppose the sun to be that Author. This ball of fire gives us all we enjoy on earth, and so inspires us with love and praise. If we eat a fig we praise the planter; and so on up to the sun, which gathers to himself all love and praise. The sun is fire, and more beside. Does the force know that it gives us what it does? Must our love go forth to fire? If we must thank it, there must be purpose with the power—a humanity like our own. Power has no need of will or purpose; and no occasion for beneficence when all that is, so is and so must be. As these qualities imply imperfection, let us ‘eject the man, retain the orb,’ and then ‘what remains to love and praise?’ We cannot be expected to thank insentient things. No! man’s soul can only be moved by what is kindred soul: man’s way it receives good; man’s way it must make acknowledgment. If man were an angel, his love and praise, right and fit enough now, would go forth idly. Man’s part is to send love forth, even if it go astray.” “But,” says the objector, “man is bound by man’s conditions, can only judge as good and right what his faculty adjudges such: how can we then accept in this one case falsehood for truth? We lack an union of fire with flesh; but lacking is not gaining: is there any trace of such an union recorded?” Ferishtah replies, “Perhaps there may be; perhaps the greatly yearned-for once befell; perhaps the sun was flesh once.” The pupil demands “An union inconceivable once was fact?” The Dervish replies, “There is something pervading the sun which it does not consume: is it not fitter to stand appalled before a conception unattainable by man’s intelligence?” Firdausí, in the Sháh Námeh, records that Húsheng was the first who brought out fire from stone; and from that circumstance he founded the religion of the fire-worshippers, calling the flame which was produced the light of the Divinity. Húsheng was the second king of the Peshadian dynasty; from his time the fire faith seems to have slept till the appearance of Zerdusht, in the reign of Gushtasp, many centuries afterwards, when Isfendiyár propagated it by the sword. After Húsheng had discovered fire by hurling a stone against a rock, thereby producing a spark, which set light to the herbage, he made an immense fire, and gave a royal entertainment, calling it the Feast of Siddeh. The lyric explains that the divine element of fire is enshrined in the earthly flint when the spark escapes; the relationship is difficult to remember. So God was once incarnate in the form of man; and this some find it as hard to believe.

Tab. (Ned Bratts.) Tabitha Bratts, who was converted by John Bunyan, and who went with her husband to the Chief Justice at the assizes, asking to be hanged, and whose request was favourably entertained.

Tale, A. The Epilogue to the Two Poets of Croisic is included in the second series of Selections under this title.

Taurello Salinguerra. (Sordello.) His name, says Mr. W. M. Rossetti, may be translated as “Bullock Sally-in-war,” or “Dash-into-fight.” He belonged to the family of the Torelli, one of the two leading families of Ferrara. He married Sofia, a daughter of Eccelin the Monk, and he became the ruler of his native city. He was the right-hand man of Eccelin, and also of his son. The great authority on this character is Muratori (Annali d’ Italia, compilati da Lodovico Antonio Muratori). Mr. W. M. Rossetti read a paper to the Browning Society in November 1889 on “Taurello Salinguerra,” and I am indebted to this valuable essay for the following dates and particulars concerning this interesting character. He was born about the year 1160. In 1200, when he was head of the Ghibelline faction in Ferrara, he suddenly assailed the town of Argenta with the Ferrarese army, and having taken it, sacked it. In 1205 the head of the Guelf faction, both in Ferrara and the March of Verona, was Azzo VI., Marquis of Este. Naturally they quarrelled, and Azzo took the castle of La Fratta from Salinguerra and dismantled it. This was the beginning of the many dissensions between them. In 1207 Azzo VI. was compelled by Eccelino da Onara and others to retire from Verona. Then it was that Salinguerra, head of the Ghibellines in Ferrara, declaring himself the intimate friend of Eccelino, expelled from that city all the adherents of Marquis Azzo; and, leaving no room for him, began to act as Lord of Ferrara. In 1208 Marquis Azzo VI. re-established himself in Verona. Reaching Ferrara with an army, he expelled Salinguerra. In 1209 Salinguerra re-entered Ferrara, stripped Azzo VI. of Este of its dominion, and sent his partisans into exile. In 1210, the Emperor Otho IV. professing that the March of Ancona belonged to the empire, Azzo obtained the investiture of it from the Emperor. Probably at this time peace was re-established between Azzo VI. and Salinguerra, the competitors for the lordship of Ferrara. In 1213 Aldrovandino, Marquis of Este and Ancona, succeeded his father Azzo VI. and continued to hold, along with Count Richard of San Bonifazio, the dominion of Verona, where he was created Podestà in this year. He had contests with Salinguerra in Ferrara. In 1215 Aldrovandino, Marquis of Este, died, and was succeeded by Azzo VII., a minor. In 1221 Azzo VII. and his adherents assailed Salinguerra at Ferrara, and forced him to abandon the city, and consigned the palace of Salinguerra to the flames. After mediation, the expelled men returned to their homes. In 1222 the Ghibelline cause prevailed at Ferrara: Azzo and the Guelfs had to leave the city. He collected an army at Rovigo, and returned to Ferrara. Salinguerra, a crafty fox, made peace, for fear the people should turn against him. The peace was only a trap, however, by which to catch Azzo. In 1224 Azzo VII. returned to lay siege to Ferrara. The astute Salinguerra sent embassies to Count Richard of San Bonifazio, to induce him, with a number of horsemen, to enter Ferrara under pretext of concluding a friendly pact. But on entering he was at once made prisoner, with all his company; and therefore the Marquis of Este, disappointed, retired from the siege. Enraged at this result, Marquis Azzo proceeded to the siege of the castle of La Fratta, a favourite stronghold of Salinguerra, and starved it into submission. Salinguerra complained of this to Eccelino da Romana, his brother-in-law, and they both studied more assiduously than ever how best to crush the Guelfs, of which the Marquis of Este was chief. In 1225 the Lombard League procured the release of Count Richard, who returned to Verona; but he was expelled, when he took refuge in Mantua. He ultimately returned to Verona. In 1227 Eccelino the younger was established in Verona, and Count Richard again expelled. In 1228 Eccelino da Onara, father of Eccelino da Romana and of Alberic, had become a monk, and led the life of a hypocrite, finally showing himself to be a Paterine heretic. In 1230 Verona was in trouble: the Ghibellines raised a riot and imprisoned Count Richard; Salinguerra was made Podestà. In 1240 Pope Gregory IX. incited the Lombards and the Marquis of Este to besiege Ferrara. The Doge of Venice attended in person; the Mantuans concurred, as also did Alberico da Romana. After some months peace was proposed, and Salinguerra came to the camp of the confederates to ratify them. Salinguerra was entrapped, and was transferred as a prisoner to Venice; where, treated courteously, he ended his days in holy peace; and the House of Este, after so many years, re-entered Ferrara.

Templars. The poem The Heretic’s Tragedy deals with the suppression of the order of the Knights Templars.

Theocrite. (The Boy and the Angel.) The boy who wishes to praise God “the Pope’s great way,” and who leaves his common task, and is replaced by the angel Gabriel. As neither boy nor angel please God in their changed positions, each returns to his appropriate sphere.

“The Poets pour us wine.” (Epilogue to Pacchiarotto.) These words are the beginning of the Epilogue named, and are quoted from a poem of Mr. Browning’s entitled Wine of Cyprus, the last verse but one, the last line of which is “And the poets poured us wine.”

“There’s a Woman like a Dewdrop.” (A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.) The song in Act I., Scene iii., begins with this line. It is sung by Earl Mertoun as he climbs to Mildred Tresham’s chamber.

“The Year’s at the Spring.” (Pippa Passes.) The song which Pippa sings as she passes the house of Ottima, and thereby brings conviction to her lover Sebald.

Thorold, Earl Tresham. (A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.) The brother of Mildred Tresham, who challenges Mertoun, her lover, on his way to a stolen interview with his sister, and kills him, thinking he has disgraced the family.

Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kader. (1842.) The Metidja is an extensive plain near the coast of Algeria, “commencing on the eastern side of the Bay of Algiers, and stretching thence inland to the south and west. It is about sixty miles in length by ten or twelve in breadth” (Encyc. Brit.). Algiers was conquered by the French in 1830; but, after the conquest, constant outbreaks of hostilities on the part of the natives occurred, and in 1831 General Bertherene was despatched to chastise the rebels. Later in the same year General Savary was sent with an additional force of 16,000 men for the same purpose. He attempted to suppress the outbreaks of hostilities with the greatest cruelty and treachery. These acts so exasperated the people against their new ruler that such tribes as had acquiesced in the new order of things now armed themselves against the French. It was at this time that the world first heard of Abd-el-Kader. He was born in 1807, and was a learned and pious man, greatly distinguished amongst his people for his skill in horsemanship and athletic sports. He now rapidly collected an army of ten thousand men, marched to Oran and attacked the French, who had taken possession of the town; but was repulsed with great loss. He was so popular with his people that he had little difficulty in recruiting his forces, and he made himself so dangerous to the French that they found it expedient to offer him terms of peace, and he was recognised as emir of the province of Mascara. The peace did not last long, and hostilities broke out, leading to a defeat of the French in 1835. Constant troubles were caused the French by the opposition of Abd-el-Kader, and reinforcements on a large scale were sent against him from France. After varying fortunes, Abd-el-Kader was at last reduced to extremities, and was compelled to hide in the mountains with a few followers; at length he gave himself up to the French, and was imprisoned at Pau, and afterwards at Amboise. He afterwards obtained permission to remove to Constantinople, and from thence to remove to Damascus. The poem describes an incident of the war which took place in 1842, when the Duke d’Aumale fell upon the emir’s camp and took several thousand prisoners, Abd-el-Kader escaping with difficulty.

“Thus the Mayne glideth.” (Paracelsus.) The song which Festus sings to Paracelsus in the closing scene in his cell in the Hospital of St. Sebastian.

Tiburzio. (Luria.) The general of the army of the Pisans, who exposes to Luria the treachery of the Florentines, and whose letter the Moor destroys without reading it.

Time’s Revenges. A Soliloquy. (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, VII., 1845; Romances, 1863; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) “Love begets love,” they say: probably this is not much truer than proverbs usually are. The speaker in the poem has a friend who would do anything in the world for him; in return, he barely likes him. As a compensation, inasmuch as “human love is not the growth of human will,” the lady to whom the soliloquiser is passionately devoted, the woman for whom he is prepared to sacrifice body, soul, everything he holds dear, cares nothing at all for him; she would roast him before a slow fire for a coveted ball-ticket. And why not? if love be what the poet says it is—the merging by affinity of one soul in another—where no affinity exists no union can result. Lovers should study the elements of chemistry, and the laws which govern the affinities of the elementary bodies; or, if they are not inclined to so serious a task, let them take to heart the Spanish proverb, “Love one that does not love you, answer one that does not call you, and you will run a fruitless race.”

Toccata of Galuppi’s, A. (Men and Women, 1855.) Baldassare Galuppi (1706-85) was a celebrated Italian composer, who was born in 1706 near Venice. His father was a barber with a taste for music, and he taught his son sufficient of the elements of music to enable him to enter the Conservatorio degli Incurabile, where Lotti was a teacher. He produced an opera at the age of sixteen, but it was a failure; seven years after, however, he produced a comic opera Dorinda, which was a great success. The young composer’s great abilities were now everywhere recognised, and his fame assured. He was a most industrious writer, and left no less than seventy operas; which, however, have not survived to our time. Galuppi resided and worked in London from 1741 to 1744. He went to Russia, where he lived at the court of the Empress Catherine II. (at whose invitation he went) in great honour, and did much for the improvement of musical taste in that country. In 1768 he left Russia, and became organist of St. Mark’s, Venice. He died in 1785, and left fifty thousand lire to the poor of that city. His best comic opera is his Il Mondo della Luna. A Toccata is a “Touch-piece,” a prelude or overture. “It does but touch its theme rapidly, even superficially, for the most part; so that the interpolation of solemn chords and emotional phrases, inconsistent with its traditional character, may naturally, by force of contrast, lead to some suggestion or recognition of the many irregularities of life” (Mrs. Alexander Ireland). In the admirable paper on this poem written by Mrs. Alexander Ireland for the Browning Society, she continues: “A Toccata of Galuppi’s touches on deep subjects with a mere feather-touch of light and capricious suggestiveness, interwoven with the graver mood, with the heart-searching questionings of man’s deep nature and mysterious spirit. The Toccata as a form of composition is not the measured, deliberate working-out of some central musical thought, as is the Sonata or sound-piece, where the trained ear can follow out the whole process to its delightful and orderly consummation, where the student marks the introduction and development of the subject, its extension, through various forms, and its whole sequence of movement and meaning, to its glorious rounding-off and culmination, spiritually noting each stage of the climbing structure and acknowledging its perfection with the inward silent verdict, ‘It is well.’ The Toccata, in its early and pure form, possessed no decided subject, made such by repetition, but bore rather the form of a capricious Improvisation or “Impromptu.” It was a very flowing movement, in notes of equal length, and a homophonous character, the earliest examples of any importance being those by Gabrieli (1557-1613), and those by Merulo (1533-1604); while Galuppi, who was born in 1706 and died in 1785, produced a further advanced development of this particular form of musical composition, with chords freely introduced and other important innovations.” Vernon Lee, in her Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (III. “The Musical Life”) says of the Venetian, Baldassare Galuppi, surnamed Buranello, that he was “an immensely prolific composer, and abounded in melody, tender, pathetic and brilliant, which in its extreme simplicity and slightness occasionally rose to the highest beauty.... He defined the requisites of his art to Burney in very moderate terms: ‘Chiarezza, vaghezza, e buona modulazione’—clearness, beauty, and good modulation, without troubling himself much about any others.... Galuppi was a model of the respectable, modest artist, living quietly on a moderate fortune, busy with his art and the education of his numerous children, beloved and revered by his fellow-artists; and when some fifteen years later [than 1770] he died, honoured by them with a splendid funeral, at which all the Venetian musicians performed; the great Pacchiarotti writing to Burney that he had sung with much devotion to obtain a rest for Buranello’s (Galuppi’s) soul” (p. 101). In a note Vernon Lee adds: “Mr. Browning’s fine poem, ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s,’ has made at least his name familiar to many English readers.” Ritter, in his History of Music (p. 245), has a concise but expressive notice of Galuppi. “Balthasar Galuppi, called Buranello (1706-85), a pupil of Lotti, also composed many comic operas. The main features of his operas are melodic elegance and lively and spirited comic forms; but they are rather thin and weak in their execution. He was a great favourite during his lifetime.” The poem deals with two classes of human beings—the mere pleasure-takers with their balls and masks (Stanza iv.), and the scientists (Stanza xiii.) with their research and their ’ologies. The Venetians—who seemed to the poet merely born to blow and droop, who lived frivolous lives of gaiety and love-making—lived lives which came to nothing, and did deeds better left undone—heard the music which dreamily told them they must die, but went on with their kissing and their dancing till death took them where they never see the sun. The other class, immersed in the passion for knowledge, the class which despises the vanities and frivolities of the butterfly’s life, and consecrates itself to science, not the less surely dissipates its energies and misses the true end of life if it has nothing higher to live for than “physics and geology.”

Notes.—ii., St. Mark’s. The great cathedral of Venice, named after St. Mark, because it is said that the body of that Evangelist was brought to Venice and enshrined there. “where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings”: the Doge was the chief magistrate of Venice when it was a republic. “The ceremony of wedding the Adriatic was instituted in 1174 by Pope Alexander III., who gave the Doge a gold ring from off his own finger in token of the victory achieved by the Venetian fleet at Istria over Frederick Barbarossa, in defence of the Pope’s quarrel. When his Holiness gave the ring, he desired the Doge to throw a similar ring into the sea annually, in commemoration of the event” (Dr. Brewer). iii., “the sea’s the street there”: there are neither horses nor carriages in Venice; you go everywhere by gondola—to church, to theatre, to market; your gondola meets you at the railway station; in a word, the sea is the street. Shylock’s Bridge: they show you Shylock’s house in the old market place by the Rialto Bridge. vi., clavichord, a keyed and stringed instrument, not now in use, being superseded by the pianoforte. viii., dominant’s persistence. The dominant in music is the name given to the fifth note of the scale of any key, counting upwards. The dominant plays a most important part in cadences, in which it is indispensable that the key should be strongly marked (Grove). “dear dead women”: the ladies of Venice are celebrated for their beauty. An article in Poet Lore, October 1890, p. 546, thus explains the technical musical allusions in A Toccata of Galuppi’s. These are all to be found in the seventh, eighth, and ninth verses. “The lesser thirds are, of course, minor thirds, and are of common occurrence; but the diminished sixth is an interval rarely used. So rare is it, that I have seen it stated by good authorities that it is never used harmonically. Ordinarily a diminished sixth (seven semitones), exactly the same interval as a perfect fifth, instead of giving a plaintive, mournful, or minor impression, would suggest a feeling of rest and satisfaction. As I have said, however, there is one way in which it can be used—as a suspension, in which the root of the chord on the lowered super-tonic of the scale is suspended from above into the chord with added seventh on the super-tonic, making a diminished sixth between the root of the first and the third of the second chord. The effect of this progression is most dismal, and possibly Browning had it in mind, though it is doubtful almost to certainty if Galuppi knew anything of it. Whether it be an anachronism or not, or whether it is used in a scientifically accurate way or not, the figure is true enough poetically, for a diminished interval—namely, something less than normal—would naturally suggest an effect of sadness. Suspensions, as may already have been guessed by the preceding example, are notes which are held over from one chord into another, and must be made according to certain musical rules as strict as the laws of the Medes and Persians. This holding over of a note always produces a dissonance, and must be followed by a concord,—in other words, a solution. Sevenths are very important dissonances in music, and a commiserating seventh is most likely the variety called a minor seventh. Being a somewhat less mournful interval than the lesser thirds and the diminished sixths, whether real or imaginary, yet not so final as ‘those solutions’ which seem to put an end to all uncertainty, and therefore to life, they arouse in the listeners to Galuppi’s playing a hope that life may last, although in a sort of dissonantal, Wagnerian fashion. The ‘commiserating sevenths’ are closely connected with the ‘dominant’s persistence’ in the next verse:—

‘Hark! the dominant’s persistence till it must be answered to:
So an octave struck the answer.’

The dominant chord in music is the chord written on the fifth degree of the scale, and it almost always has a seventh added to it, and in a large percentage of cases is followed by the tonic, the chord on the first degree of the scale. Now, in fugue form a theme is repeated in the dominant key, the latter being called the answer. After further contrapuntal wanderings of the theme, the fugue comes to what is called an episode, after which the theme is presented first, in the dominant. ‘Hark! the dominant’s persistence’ alludes to this musical fact; but, according to rule, this dominant must be answered in the tonic an octave above the first presentation of the theme; and ‘so an octave struck the answer.’ Thus the inexorable solution comes in after the dominant’s persistence. Although life seemed possible with commiserating sevenths, the tonic, a resistless fate, strikes the answer that all must end—an answer which the frivolous people of Venice failed to perceive, and went on with their kissing. The notion of the tonic key as a relentless fate seems to suit well with the formal music of the days of Galuppi: while the more hopeful tonic key of Abt Vogler, the C major of this life, indicates that fate and the tonic key have both fallen more under man’s control.”—Miss Helen Ormerod’s paper, read before the Browning Society, May 27th, 1887, throws additional light on some of the difficulties of this poem. “That the minor predominated in this quaint old piece (Toccata, by the way, means a touch piece, and probably was written to display the delicacy of the composer’s touch) is evident from the mention of—

“Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions,—‘Must we die?’
Those commiserating sevenths—‘Life might last! we can but try!’”

The interval of the third is one of the most important; the signature of a piece may mislead one, the same signature standing for a major key and its relative minor; but the third of the opening chord decides the question, a lesser ‘plaintive’ third (composed of a tone and a semitone) showing the key to be minor; the greater third (composed of two whole tones) showing the key to be major. Pauer tells us that ‘the minor third gives the idea of tenderness, grief and romantic feeling.’ Next come the ‘diminished sixths’: these are sixths possessing a semitone less than a minor sixth,—for instance, from C sharp to A flat: this interval in a different key would stand as a perfect fifth. ‘Those suspensions, those solutions’—a suspension is the stoppage of one or more parts for a moment, while the others move on; this produces a dissonance, which is only resolved by the parts which produced it moving on to the position which would have been theirs had the parts moved simultaneously. We can understand that ‘those suspensions, those solutions’ might teach the Venetians, as they teach us, lessons of experience and hope; light after darkness, joy after sorrow, smiles after tears. ‘Those commiserating sevenths,’ of all dissonances, none is so pleasing to the ear, or so attractive to musicians, as that of minor and diminished sevenths, that of the major seventh being crude and harsh; in fact, the minor seventh is so charming in its discord as to suggest concord. Again, to quote from Pauer: ‘It is the antithesis of discord and concord which fascinates and charms the ear; it is the necessary solution and return to unity which delights us.’ After all this, the love-making begins again; but kisses are interrupted by the ‘dominant’s persistence till it must be answered to.’ This seems to indicate the close of the piece, the dominant being answered by an octave which suggests the perfect authentic cadence, in which the chord of the dominant is followed by that of the tonic. The Toccata is ended, and the gay gathering dispersed. I cannot help the thought that this old music of Galuppi’s was more of the head than the heart—more formal than fiery, suggestive rather of the chill of death than the heat of passion. The temporary silence into which the dancers were surprised by the playing of the Maestro is over, and the impressions caused by it are passed away, just as the silence of death was to follow the warmth and brightness of the glad Venetian life.”

To Edward Fitzgerald. In the Athenæum of July 13th, 1889, appeared this sonnet:—