“I see my tragedy written in thy brows;
Yet stay awhile, forbear thy bloody hand,
And let me see the stroke before it comes,
That even then, when I shall lose my life,
My mind may be more steadfast on my God.”
Frequent in historical narrative are instances like that of Labedoyère, who when brought out to be shot, refused to have his eyes bandaged, and looking straight at the levelled muskets, exclaimed in a loud voice, “Fire, my friends!” Marshal Ney, a week or two later, also refused to have his eyes bandaged. “For five-and-twenty years,” he said, “I have been accustomed to face the balls of the enemy.” Then taking off his hat with his left hand, and placing his right upon his heart, he too said in a loud voice, fronting the soldiers, “My comrades, fire on me.” Murat fell in a like manner, after a like request,—but gazing to the last on a medallion which contained portraits of his wife and four children.
What mainly tends to pile up the agony of Goisvintha, in the historical romance of “Antonina,” when alone in the vaults with the madman Ulpius, is the distracting absence of light. “Bewildered and daunted by the darkness and mystery around her, she vainly strained her eyes to look through the obscurity, as Ulpius drew her on into the recess.... Suddenly he heard her pause, as if panic-stricken in the darkness, and her voice ascended to him, groaning, ‘Light, light! oh, where is the light?’” She is held forth at this crisis, as a terrible evidence of the debasing power of crime, as she now stands, enfeebled by the weight of her own avenging guilt, and “by the agency of darkness, whose perils the innocent and the weak have been known to brave.” It is only your melodramatic villain that flings forth his flourish in the style of Velasquez in “Braganza,”—addressing the duke, his judge:—
“Yes, in your gloomiest dungeons plunge me down.
Welcome, congenial darkness! horrors, hail!
No more these loathing eyes shall see that sun