OR,
THE SCIENTIFIC CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL PROPOUNDED.
'Well, march we on
To give obedience where 'tis truly owed:
Meet we the medicine of the sickly weal,
And with him, pour we in our country's purge
Each drop of us.
Or so much as it needs
To dew the sovereign Flower, and drown the weeds'—Macbeth.
'Have you heard the argument?'
CHAPTER I.
THE ELIZABETHAN HEROISM.
'Mildly is the word.'
'In a better hour,
Let what is meet be said it must be meet,
And throw their power in the dust.'
It is the Military Chieftain of ancient Rome who pronounces here the words in which the argument of the Elizabethan revolutionist is so tersely comprehended.
It is the representative of an heroic aristocracy, not one of ancient privilege merely, not one armed with parchments only, claiming descent from heroes; but the yet living leaders of the rabble people to military conquest, and the only leaders who are understood to be able to marshal from their ranks an effective force for military defence.
But this is not all. The scope of the poetic design requires here, under the sheath which this dramatic exhibition of an ancient aristocracy offers it, the impersonation of another and more sovereign difference in men; and this poet has ends to serve, to which a mere historical accuracy in the reproduction of this ancient struggle of state-factions, in an extinct European common-wealth, is of little consequence; though he is not wanting in that either, or indifferent to it, when occasion serves.