To heaven—and pray! Lift up your hands to God!
Lift up your voice-your heart! Pray, sinner, pray!
[The curtain falls.”
So ends the first part of this masterly drama, and, we think, the far finer of the two plays—certainly the less painful to a Catholic reader. We have given it unqualified praise, because we have dealt with it purely as a drama. We are afraid that the real Jane Grey was a much less lovely character than the poet’s, and are thankful to know that the real Mary Tudor was a very different compound indeed. But we give the poet credit for perfect sincerity in his delineation of either character. We believe that if he was consciously partial at all, it was rather to the Catholic side—from a wish to do Catholics all the justice in his power. And this but makes us regret the more that, together with the genius he manifests, he had not the faith of the gifted son to whom he has left his mantle.
[189] Mary Tudor: An Historical Drama. By Sir Aubrey De Vere, Bart. London: William Pickering. 1875.
A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF TOLEDO.
“Behold,” said the owl to Prince Ahmed, “the ancient and renowned city of Toledo—a city famous for its antiquities. Behold those venerable domes and towers, hoary with time, and clothed with legendary grandeur, in which so many of my ancestors have meditated.”
We had arrived at the foot of the rocky promontory on which stands imperial Toledo. The first sight of it is exceedingly impressive. Its aspect is grave and majestic, and the thousand grand memories that hover over it add to the fascination. It is the royal city, the capital of the Gothic kings. For four hundred years it was in possession of the Moors, and in the middle ages it was so renowned for its learning as to attract numerous students from foreign parts. It is, too, par excellence, the ecclesiastical city of Spain, and stands proudly on its seven hills like Rome. The long line of its bishops comprises many saints, as well as mighty prelates who not only held spiritual primacy over the land, but took a prominent part in the political affairs of the nation. It looks just as a city of the middle ages, with a due sense of the fitness of things, ought to look—antique, picturesque, and romantic—surrounded by its ancient walls, from which rise, as if hewn out of the rock, the massive gray towers that still bear the impress of the Goth and the Moor. Around its base winds the golden Tagus over its rocky bed, foaming and wildly raving, in a grand, solemn kind of a way, as if sensible of its high functions and knowing the secrets of the magic caves that extend beneath its very bed—caves wrought out of the live rock by the cunning hand of Tubal, the grandson of Noe, and where Hercules the Mighty taught the dark mysteries of Egyptian art, handed down to posterity, and long after known as the Arte Toledana. For this ancient city claims as its founder Tubal, the son of Japhet, who, as the Spanish chroniclers say, with the memory of the Deluge still fresh in his mind, naturally built it on an eminence, and hewed out caverns as places of refuge from the watery
element. So remote an origin might reasonably be supposed enough to satisfy the most owlish of antiquarians; but some hoary old birds have gone so far as to whisper that Adam himself was the first king of Toledo; that the sun, at its creation, first shone over this the true centre of the world; and that its very name is derived from two Oriental words signifying the Mother of Cities. However this may be, it was Hercules, the Libyan, who, versed in the supernatural arts, achieved labors no mere human arm could have accomplished, who gave the finishing touches to the city, and set up the necromantic tower of legendary fame, in after-years so rashly entered by Roderick, the last of the Goths, letting out a flood of evils that spread over all the land. This was “one of those Egyptian or Chaldaic piles, storied with hidden wisdom and mystic prophecy, which were devised in past ages when man yet enjoyed intercourse with high and spiritual natures, and when human foresight partook of divination,” and its mysterious fate was worthy of its origin.