“Blow it about, ye opposite winds of heaven,
Till the loud chorus of derision shake
The world with laughter!”
When he feels uncomfortable at something he is told in the first act, the Cardinal complains thus:—
“Ha! earthquakes quiver in my flesh!”
which the Britannia is so good as to tell us is superior to Byron; while the Morning Herald kindly remarks, that “a more vigorous and expressive line was never penned. In five words it illustrates the fiercest passions of humanity by the direst convulsion of nature:” (Opinions, p. 7) a criticism which illustrates the fiercest throes of nonsense, by the direst convulsions of ignorance.
Castaldo, being anxious to murder the Cardinal with, we suppose, all “means and appliances to boot,” asks of heaven a trifling favour:—
“Heaven, that look’st on,
Rain thy broad deluge first! All-teeming earth
Disgorge thy poisons, till the attainted air