"My slave, whom I
Could tread to clay, dares utter bloody threats."
The climax of temper was in every transition marked by Mr. Cooper with a natural propriety which, though a vigorous and accurate critical judgment might suggest, nothing but a high dramatic genius, seconded by correspondent organs, could possibly have executed.
Several steps higher still in merit criticism must place the whole of the banquet scene. The intoxicated vanity of Alexander—his soft and puerile susceptibility of gross and fulsome adulation, his idle contest with the blunt old Clytus, his fury and cruel murder of that brave old soldier, and his outrageous grief and self reproach for that murder, in all of which the fiery brain of the poet has urged the passions to the utmost verge of nature, Mr. Cooper was all for which the most sanguine admirer could wish, or a reasonable critic hope. But as, in the best drawn portraits, one or more limbs or features will be found superior to the rest, so in this scene of aggregate excellence, there were three successive speeches of such preeminent excellence and superiority that they ought to be commemorated. They all turn upon the provoking insinuation of Clytus:
Philip fought men—but Alexander women.
In the jealousy, the astonishment, the wrath of the insulted hero, the expression of the actor kept equal flight with the bold wing of the poet. Accustomed as we have been to the prodigious exertions of the greatest actors in the world we have not witnessed nor can we conceive any thing superior to Mr. Cooper in the following speeches——
Alex. Envy by the gods!
Is then my glory come to this at last,
To conquer women!—Nay, he said the stoutest
Here would tremble at the dangers he had seen!
In all the sickness, all the wounds I bore,
When from my reins the Javelin's head was cut.
Lysimachus! Hephestion! speak Perdicas!
Did I once tremble? Oh, the cursed falsehood!
Did I once shake or groan, or act beneath
The dauntless resolution of a king?
Lysim. Wine has transported him.
Alex. No, 'tis mere malice.
I was a woman too at Oxydrace,
When planting on the walls a scaling ladder;
I mounted spite of showers of stones, bars, arrows,
And all the lumber which they thunder'd down.
When you beneath cry'd and out spread your arms,
That I should leap among you—did I so?
Lysim. Dread sir, the old man knows not what he says.
Alex. Was I woman when like Mercury,
I leaped the walls and flew amidst the foe,
And like a baited Lion dyed myself
All over in the blood of those bold hunters;
'Till spent with toil I battled on my knees,
Plucked forth the darts that made my shield a forest,
And hurl'd them back with the most unconquer'd fury,
Then shining in my arms, I sunned the field,
Moved, spoke and fought, and was myself a war.