* * * * *
O cease, blest spirit! from thy fierce pursuit."
The other lover, who hears this grotesque invocation, thinks it a mere trick of his rival to escape a duel, and overwhelms him with every epithet of abuse.
The play ends by the marriage of Don Gil with her fickle suitor. We are almost ashamed to add, that this was the favourite play of Ferdinand VII., and was ordered for him on all solemn occasions by the municipality of Madrid. Without the refinement of Calderon or Lope de Vega, Molina surpasses both in his verve and gaiety. His satire is unlimited; it spares neither the authorities of earth, nor the ministers of heaven—nay, it does not even spare the great national amusement. Epigram after epigram is poured out upon every object that attracts his notice; his brilliant and sparkling wit is inexhaustible; and his "malice" as boundless as it is subtle. Of all French writers, it has been said, by a very competent judge, that he resembles Beaumarchais most closely; and however strange it may seem, that the Spanish monk of the seventeenth century should bear so close an analogy to the Parisian bel esprit of the eighteenth, the remark is undoubtedly correct. We have dwelt more especially on this writer, because he is not well known in Europe, and because even Mr Ticknor, in his accurate and valuable work on Spanish literature—a work we hail both for what it proves, and for what it makes us expect, with the greatest delight—has failed to do him complete justice. Shack seems to us to have appreciated him more justly in his excellent and useful dissertation. But our limits are exhausted for the present.
MODERN STATE TRIALS.[2]
PART II.
Impelled by motives which we own to be with difficulty effectively justifiable, and which we must resolve into an overmastering anxiety to behold how doomed human nature can confront terror-inspiring circumstances, felt sufficient to palsy one's own soul, we found ourselves, on Sunday morning, the 5th of July 1840, in the front seat of the stranger's gallery in the Chapel of Newgate, in order to hear the condemned sermon preached to Benjamin Courvoisier, and witness the demeanour of one who was to be publicly strangled on the ensuing morning, and in the ensuing evening buried within the precincts of the prison. Callous must he have been who could witness the scene of that morning without being profoundly affected. It was the house of God; and yet, (with reverence be the allusion made,) in one sense, alas! a den of thieves—of outcasts from society; whose laws they had, or were charged with having, disregarded and openly violated. Some were there under the pressure of violent suspicion—amounting to a moral, soon to pass into a legal, certainty—of various kinds and degrees of guilt: others bore the blighting brand of established crime, and were suffering, or about to suffer, its penalty. With what feelings would they enter the house of Him who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity—to Whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from Whom no secrets are hid! Would any of that guilty throng take their places there, brutally ignorant, indifferent, reckless, or desperate? Would their polluted souls be swelling with ill-suppressed feelings of impiety and blasphemy? Would any approach with broken and contrite spirits, having been shaken, by the stern hand of offended human law alone, out of a life's lethargy and insensibility? How would the holy accents of warning, of expostulation, of mercy, of dread denunciation, sound in the ears of those who were presently to fill that dismal chapel—dismal, only from its locality, and the character of its occupants? With what feelings would one enter—the death-doomed—for whom, and for whom alone, was reserved that solitary, central, ominous black bench? who was so terribly far advanced in his passage from a human tribunal to that of the dread Eternal!—on whose brow already faintly glistened the dread twilight between here and hereafter,—the black night of time breaking before the dawning of an eternal day!
They come! Yonder gallery, curtained off, is filling with the female prisoners; no sounds audible but their rustling dresses, and perhaps a half-choked sigh or sob. It is well, poor souls! that you are hidden from the public gaze—from the rude eye of your male comrades in crime! They are now entering below, silent and orderly, the eye of the governor upon them, as they are led by burly turnkeys and inspectors to their appropriate places, classed as untried and convicted—the latter according to their respective kinds and degree of punishment. All, at length, are seated. What an assemblage! Almost all clad in prison costume; many with sullen, determined countenances—others with harassed features and downcast look—one or two exhibiting unequivocally an air of insolent and reckless defiance—but all conscious of the stern surveillance under which they sate. Alas, those boys! some already, others about to be, condemned—all gazing, terror-struck, at the black seat in the centre!