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the Jews, but the followers of Christ and Mabommed should regard the ruin of God's peculiar city and temple as one of the most remarkable epochs in the religious history of mankind, and as one of the events to which the mind recurs with the deepest wonder and veneration.

Thus reverenced, and thus remarkable, we have sometimes thought it strange, that the Fall of Jerusalem has been a subject hitherto so little attempted either by painters or poets. None of the more eminent names among the former have exerted their talents on a theme which—if not too multifarious and extensive, (and who that has seen Le Brun's Battles can make this objection?)-would seem to combine in itself more richness and variety of natural and architectural scenery, of costume, of grouping, of attitude, and of interest, than any other which history offers. No considerable poet has taken more than a transient and incidental notice of scenes so strange, so terrible, and, to Christians of every sect and country, so important nor has the subject been so much as alluded to any where else except in some of the Oxford and Cambridge Prize Poems.

It is not, however, to be overlooked that, as the subject of a poem of any length, the Fall of Jerusalem was atten led with many difficulties, difficulties so numerous and so great, as hardly to be surmounted by a share of genius and good taste less remarkable than the present author has brought forward to subdue them. It had, in the first place, the misfortune of being too well known, both in its event and its more conspicuous details, to leave any room for that suspended and anxious interest which (however some modern critics may affect to despise a plot) was well observed by Aristotle to be the most essential, because the most popular requisite of a narrative or dramatic poem. It is easy indeed for a poet, and it is one of the poet's most ancient and acknowledged prerogatives, to warp and mould historical events according to his fancy and to serve his airy purposes:' but if this is not done with a very gentle and judicious hand, the reader is more apt to be disgusted with the departure from a known truth than delighted with the ingenuity of the fiction. This displeasure is felt even when the liberty in question has been taken, not with sober historic truth, but with an old and familiar fable. It has been one main cause of the total and signal failure of the different epics which have been

* There is a forgotten rhyming tragedy in two parts, called The Destruction of Jerusalem.' It was written by Crowne, (the ridiculous rival of Dryden,) and is said to have been acted with applause about the year 1677. It does not appear that it ever fell into Mr. Milman's hands; nor, indeed, if it had, could he have turned it to any advantage. Both parts are taken, in some measure, from the narrative of Josephus, but absurdly mixed up in the fashion of the day with court intrigue and party politics. They are however among the best of Crowne's dramas; and the first part is not without merit. attempted

attempted on the subject of Arthur, that they have given us a hero formed on a classical model, instead of that 'good king Arthur' of the romances and ballads, the favourite of our childhood, and the subject even now of innumerable popular tales among our peasantry. It is the same dilemma of being trite on the one hand, or of violating preconceived notions on the other, which constitutes the principal difficulty of those dramatic subjects which are taken from classical antiquity. But in the Fall of Jerusalem this difficulty is greatly increased by the degree of religious importance which attaches to its leading circumstances. Alteration here becomes misrepresentation; and we resent, as a sort of heresy, any poetical license on topics of which, whatever may be the incidental beauty or singularity, the main interest and importance depend on their truth alone.

Nor is that a trifling embarrassment which arises from the overpowering interest and sublimity of the scenes or events to be described, a sublimity, in many instances, not only above the aid of poetical embellishment, but which makes it as much out of place as a collar of pearls round the neck of the Farnese Hercules. The fifth chapter of the sixth book of Josephus is not poetry, but it is something more,—and the opening of the temple gate without hands, and the MΕΤΑΒΑΙΝΩΜΕΝ ΕΝΤΕΥΘΕΝ which resounded through the Holy of Holies, must be rather injured than ornamented by any attempt to describe the crash of the brazen hinges, and the thunders of the departing Deity.

The circumstance, however, which might seem to present the greatest difficulty of all, is the pervading and unqualified horror of the history and its details. There is, from the beginning of the siege to its conclusion, no turn in the tide of affairs, no point on which the eye can, even for a moment, repose with comfort. One deed of brutal and bloody cruelty, one instance of dismal and intolerable suffering succeeds its fellow, without respite or remission. We can feel no interest for the Romans, who are unjust and brutal oppressors, and whose leader Titus, with his long speeches and loaded gibbets, is, in spite of Suetonius and the praises of some Christian divines, more odious than a less philosophic ruffian would have been; and even the desperate courage and lofty enthusiasm of the Jews which, under other circumstances, would have been sublime, become, when exerted without any reasonable hope or motive, hideous and maniacal. In prose, these things are read with interest, because they are true as well as terrible and extraordinary: but, in poetry, which is professedly not the truth but its imitation, we require that the objects imitated should not be altogether frightful,— and Mr. Shelley alone, since the days of Titus Andronicus and the

tragic

tragic schoolmaster in Gil Blas, has expected to afford mankind delight by a fac-simile of unmingled wickedness and horror.

In avoiding these difficulties, Mr. Milman has derived considerable advantages from the form in which he has cast his work, which has given him the greatest possible scope in the selection and concentration of his historical facts, while it has dispensed with that continuous detail of events and description of characters, which would have been required in a poem purely narrative. The present is neither of this description, nor is it a regular drama; but, properly speaking, a story told in dialogue, a manner of writing, of which we may trace the first approach in some of the works of Mr. Southey, and which may be classed among those other innovations of the same writer which, in their day, were stigmatized as little less than barbarous, but which are insensibly producing a marked and beneficial effect on the greater part of our contemporary poets. With the same judgment and good taste, which we have already noticed, Mr. Milman, without binding himself with needless servi lity to the narrative of Josephus,--has related all those facts, and described all those characters which he has thought fit to introduce from history in sufficiently close agreement with its tenour; while even his fictitious incidents are such as might really have occurred during some part or other of the siege. Titus was ready drawn, and he has made him act and speak pretty much as he is represented in Josephus and Suetonius. Of the Jewish tyrants, John and Simon, so little is known beyond the common attributes of pride, cruelty, and desperate courage, that he was at liberty to make them adopt almost any sentiments consistent with these leading traits. As the followers of John, however, are branded by Josephus as peculiarly impious and profligate, Mr. Milman has chosen to put into his mouth the tenets and usual sophisms of the Sadducees; while Simon, for the sake of contrast, is represented as a rigid and enthusiastic Pharisee. We could have wished, we own, that his pious effusions had been assigned, in preference, to the Zealot chief Eleazar, who might as well have been made the father of Mr. Milman's heroine as Simon; inasmuch as, though in some measure constrained to an alliance with John, he appears to have been by no means a cypher in the anarchy of his country, and to have been really (what Simon the Edomite hardly was) a resident in Jerusalem and the head of the puritan party there. Still, however, both John and Simon are such characters as might well have been found among the Jews at that time, and of the first, at least, the discourses and actions are throughout in unison with the character given him.

But the story must have failed in interest if Mr. Milman had confined himself to historical personages only. It would have been

absurd

absurd to convert either Titus, Simon, or the historian Josephus, into that necessary ingredient of a poem,‚—an enamoured swain.* His readers could have felt little curiosity as to the probable fate of men, of whom they knew the history even before they opened his book: and the poet has, therefore, rested his plot on the distresses and dangers of an imaginary character, whom he was at liberty to make as gentle, as beautiful, and as pious, as suited his purpose, and to whom the terrific accompaniments of the siege and destruction are in fact no more than the back-ground and appropriate ornaments of the picture. Throughout the drama, indeed, it is not for Jerusalem but for Miriam that we are anxious; and the dark-haired and enthusiastic Salone, however interesting in her own person, is never allowed to withdraw our attention from the superior attractions of her sister. Yet of Miriam the character and fortunes are strictly in unison with the scenes around her; and even the incident which seems most improbable,—her unperceived descent from the walls,-is not only accounted for by the supposition of a secret staircase, but is really mentioned by Josephus as an expedient sometimes resorted to by the starving inhabitants of Jerusalem. But we are unwilling to forestall the story, any further than to observe that its events are supposed to have taken place during the last thirty-six hours of the siege, which Mr. Milman brings to a conclusion with the destruction of the Temple; disregarding, by a very allowable poetical license, the languid defence maintained for some weeks longer by the seditious on Mount Zion.

The poem opens with one of the least advantageous specimens of Mr. Milman's power. The scene is the Mount of Olives, and we have a long conversation between Titus and his officers, who are made to advance their eagles,' and marvel, and moralize, and menace, in good set terms, and according to all the precedents in such cases furnished. We know not how it happens that, of all our dramatic writers, Shakspeare alone has been able to make his Roman characters speak, move, and act like men of other nations similarly circumstanced; to fold the toga in less formal plaits, and to divest his consular persons of the constrained gestures and unnatural tones of a great school-boy at his annual speeches. Shakspeare, indeed, is sometimes blameable on the other side, for a too great neglect of appropriate costume, and that uniformity of national character by which this extraordinary people was distinguished from all others; and which, surely, might be sufficiently preserved without sinking the statesman in the rhetorician, or bury

Crowne has moulded a lover for Clarona, the daughter of Mathias; (Mr. Milman's Simon,) out of a Parthian king, whom, for that purpose, he has brought to Jerusalem and detained there during the siege.

ing

ing the whole human being, with all his natural passions and principles of action, under the fasces, laurels, and paludamentum of the Cæsar. But, notwithstanding this common and customary heaviness of Mr. Milman's Romans, he has afforded us, even here, some powerful writing and harmonious versification; and the following description of the City and Temple is not the worse for almost literally following the eloquent encomium of Josephus:-As on our olive-crowned hill we stand,

Where Kedron at our feet its scanty waters
'Distils from stone to stone with gentle motion,
As through a valley sacred to sweet peace,
How boldly doth it front us! how majestically!
Like a luxurious vineyard, the hill side

Is hung with marble fabrics, line o'er line,
Terrace o'er terrace, nearer still, and nearer

To the blue heavens. Here bright and sumptuous palaces,

With cool and verdant gardens interspersed ;

Here towers of war that frown in massy strength.

While over all hangs the rich purple eve,

As conscious of its being her last farewell

Of light and glory to that faded city.

And, as our clouds of battle-dust and smoke
Are melted into air, behold the Temple,
In undisturb'd and lone serenity

Finding itself a solemn sanctuary

In the profound of heaven! It stands before us
A mount of snow fretted with golden pinnacles!
The very sun, as though he worshipp'd there,
Lingers upon the gilded cedar roofs;
And down the long and branching porticoes,
On every flowery-sculptured capital,
Glitters the homage of his parting beams.

By Hercules! the sight might almost win

The offended majesty of Rome to mercy.'-p. 7, 8.

This scene, however, is merely introductory. The business of the drama opens with the second, which is laid by moonlight, at the fountain of Siloam, or, as Mr. Milman calls it, Siloe. Hither the lovely Miriam, daughter of the fanatic assassin Simon, but herself a concealed Christian, is accustomed to steal down by a private and ruinous staircase, conducting from her father's house into the valley, to obtain for his support supplies of food and wine, which the rugged enthusiast believes to be brought to his house by an angel, but which are, in truth, received by the fair proselyte from the hands of her lover Javan, a Christian, who, having with the rest of the faithful, left the city before the siege, is now at large without its walls, and, to meet her at the appointed place, defies the difficulties opposed by the blockading army. Javan is first introduced,

alone,

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