THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE.

A PERSON of cynical temper is likely to note with emphasis, and with the grim pleasure that testifies his perception of a fact his humour can assimilate and grow by, a peculiarity in the mode which poets have almost uniformly adopted in their treatment of love. These interpreters of life would by no means support the cynic in his estimate of that passion; they have, on the contrary, exhausted heaven and earth for similitudes by which to express their sense of the beauty and worth of women, of the woes of slighted and the raptures of successful lovers, of the agonies and ecstacies, the torments and the blisses, which women are capable of exciting in the hearts of men, and of the comparative poverty and worthlessness of all the delights of life weighed against one hour of the transports of requited passion, or the calm of satisfied affection. They may, moreover, be credited with a degree of sincerity in this appre

P

ciation, which it would be difficult to accord to their tuneful raptures on many of the other emotional elements of human life. Poets are unquestionably

born with fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters occasionally, and by chance aunts and uncles; but except the Eneid, King Lear, and Antigone, we remember no great poem in which the natural affections of kindred have been among the leading motives. Poets, too, have countries, with institutions and beliefs, unless Schiller's theory be true, which assigns them the clouds for dwelling-place and domain; but those who have tuned their harps to great national themes, to the foundation of empires, the formation of civil society, the triumphs of liberty and order, the origin of supernatural beliefs, and the growth of religious worship, belong, so far as they have been successful, to a remote past, and are the study of scholars rather than the delight of the people, while their modern imitators have made the very name of epic a bugbear to all moderately sensible and candid minds. In fact, success in the treatment of subjects disconnected with love has been most exceptional; and even the greatest poets, who have looked abroad upon human life, and have found it poetical throughout its whole extent and under every variety of circumstance, have felt the attraction

of love so irresistible, that they have shot its golden threads to illumine the darkest and enliven the dullest parts of their microcosmic web, and to bring down upon the whole surface the sheen of heaven's light; while this universal passion has alone by itself sufficed to make common men poets for the moment, to raise minor poets to unwonted richness of thought and imagery, and has brightened the faces of the great masters of song. By its light, when poetry and the world were young, blind Homer read the tale of Troy; and through a vista of three thousand years, amid myriads of armed warriors, the eye still follows Briseis as she leaves with reluctant feet and reverting gaze the tent where captivity had found a solace, and the stern master was softened into the lover; still above the din of battle, above the grave turmoil of debate, we listen to the fierce Achilles moaning for his lost mistress; the charms of Helen are more to us than the wisdom of Athene and the counsels of Nestor; and the sympathies of all but a few extremely right-minded people are throughout with the Trojans, and would be with Paris, but that he is a downright coward, and the world instinctively adopts the maxim,

None but the brave

Deserve the fair.

Society and poetry with it-had degenerated between the birth of the epic full-grown and full-armed, like its own Athene, from the head of Homer, and the time when Eschylus slaughtered Persians at Salamis, and exhibited their ghosts upon the stage at Athens. The forte of the Athenian drama certainly does not lie in the representation of love. But then it must be remembered that the Attic stage was eminently the domain of stateliness and conventionality, that waxen masks frozen into one unchanging no-expression, to which even Charles Kean can only feebly approach, would have been an inadequate instrument for rendering so eminently versatile and variable a passion as love, even reflected in the countenance of an ancient philosopher or a modern mathematician. Besides, the construction of the mouthpiece of these masks, to serve for a speakingtrumpet, could only have illustrated one rather curious scene, belonging more to comedy than tragedy—a gentleman proposing to a lady who is stone-deaf. Fancy Romeo, major humano by ten inches of cork sole, sweeping along the stage with a drawing-room train of dowager dimensions, and bawling, 'I would I were a glove upon that hand,' through the sort of instrument with which the captain of the Bellerophon speaks the Arrogant half a mile off. Or, still worse,

Juliet sighing through the same instrument, 'O, Romeo! O, gentle Romeo!' and all that wondrous play of passion not once flushing up in the cheek or kindling in the eye. But the ugliest old hag that ever rode a broomstick would be less repellent of the gentler emotions than an automaton Venus, made to speak through a vox humana organ pipe. In short, without insisting upon the social circumstances of Athenian women, and the peculiar notions that regulated Athenian tragedy, these mere mechanicál conditions under which the tragedians wrote, are sufficient to account for the insignificant part assigned to love in their compositions, though their choruses abound in passages of the highest lyrical beauty and fervour, which indicate that the passion was still as powerful as ever to sway the feelings and excite the imagination. When the stage became again a mirror of actual contemporaneous life without disguise, as in the later comedy of Menander and his Latin imitator Terence, we find that even the mechanical obstacles before mentioned were not so insuperable but that women play an important part in these dramas, and love becomes a prominent motive and a principal attraction. Pindar unfortunately gave himself up to the turf, the prize-ring, and a curious kind of Pagan high-church hagiology, much as if the editor of Bell's