strained by a sense of shame. But no: the whole machine of state might be in danger of standing still, or breaking up, for lack of the most needful funds; armies in the Netherlands, long unpaid, might be in actual revolt, threatening to turn, or indeed turning, their arms against their employers; but the magnificent and ruinous splendors of the court appear never to have known diminution or abatement. Now-and-then, too, in some of these courtly pieces, the poet glorifies his royal patron beyond the warrant of the truth. Yet here it will be only just to remember that in many accomplishments Philip IV. was eminent. What his merits as a poet were may be doubtful; but he certainly wrote his own language purely and well; he possessed considerable skill in painting; he was a graceful rider, was bold and fearless in the chase. Thus a very long and gorgeous passage occurs in The Scarf and the Flower, in which, after a magnificent description of the horse, the poet extols the horsemanship, of the king, and claims for him the foremost honors as the best and boldest rider of his time. This might seem a piece of egregious flattery; but when Calderon, anticipating this charge of adulation, puts it at the same time somewhat proudly from him, on the ground that in nothing he exceeded the truth,* he is quite borne out in this by contemporary *"Que como este afecto sea Verdad en mi, y no lisonja, authority. To appeal to the many equestrian pictures of Philip by Velasquez, in which he and his steed so well become one another, might not indeed of itself be sufficient, for the pencil of the painter might have flattered as well as the pen of the poet; but "we have it on the authority of the great master of equitation, the duke of Newcastle, that he was absolutely the best horseman in all Spain ;"* while his skill and daring in the chase are in like measure raised above all doubt. Calderon is, and probably will remain, the last | great poet of Romanism. Saying this, I would not imply that there have not been since his time poets of considerable mark, who have been serious and earnest in their allegiance to the church of Rome; Filijaca and Manzoni would refute me, if I made any assertion of the kind; nor yet that there may not be such again; but he is, I am persuaded, the last great poet who will have found in the Roman catholic as distinguished from, and, alas! sometimes as contrasted with, the universally Christian, any portion of the motive powers of his poetry; who will so firmly believe in and live by this, that he shall be able in return to shed around it the glories of his own art. There will be abundance of ostentatiously Romanist art, poetical * Stirling, Velasquez and his Works, p. 85, who refers to the treatise of the duke, A New Method to dress Horses, &c., p. 8. and other. There will be many a scornful challenge: "See what we can believe-how much more than you, poor, unbelieving protestants! what sources of inspiration are open to us, which are for ever closed to you!" But that which the challengers produce will not for a moment impose on the discerning; and the artist, at bottom as incredulous in respect of his legend or his miracle as those whom he affects to despise, will be rewarded with hearers or spectators as incredulous as himself. But while I say this of Calderon, it must not be understood as implying that his inspirations were predominantly Romanist as distinguished from Christian. Whatever is universally Christian in him or in any other is for all time; and this, I am persuaded, despite of all that Southey, Sismondi, and others, have affirmed to the contrary, so far in him exceeds the distinctively Romanist, that he will hold his ground and maintain his place in the august synod of the great "heirs of memory," whose reputation is for all time: nay, at each reconsideration of his claims he is likely on the whole to take a higher and not a lower place than that which he occupied before. If, on some points, the orb of his fame must decrease, it will increase on others. On some, it is true, it must decrease: he already suffers, and, as the great stream of faith and passion recedes farther from Rome, will suffer still more, from having committed himself so far to that which will every day be more plainly overlived; and will by more be abandoned. There will thus be the need, in reading him, of large abatements and allowances. There will be that in him wherein an ever larger number of readers will sympathize coldly; there will be that wherein they will sympathize not at all; there will be that against which their whole moral soul and being will protest and revolt. Thus to say a word on this last point. What were that "Pecca fortiter," even supposing it meant, which it does not in the least, "Sin strongly, that so grace may abound". what were that, as compared with Calderon's theology in his Devotion of the Cross-despite of all its perversity a wonderful and terrible drama, but the very sublime of antinomianism?* Its hero Eusebio, after various disorders, takes to the mountains, becomes in the end a robber, a murderer, and a ravisher. He has never, however, amid all his crimes, renounced his devotion to the cross, nor yet his confidence that on the ground of this he shall be ultimately saved, as accordingly in the end he is.† * With this Tirso de Molina's El Condenado por Desconfiado deserves to be compared. There is an interesting analysis of this very remarkable play in Schack's Gesch. d. Dramat. Literatur in Spanien, book ii., pp. 602-606. It must not be supposed that Eusebios belong merely to the region of imagination. Fowell Buxton (see his Memoirs, 1848, p. 488) visited, in the prisons of Civita Vecchia, a famous Italian bandit, Gasparoni, who, having committed two hundred murders, had never yet committed one upon a Friday. A thoughtful man must, I think, be often deeply struck with the immeasurable advantage for being the great poet of all humanity, of all ages and all people, which Shakespeare possessed in being a protestant. At the first blush of the matter there is a temptation to conclude otherwise; to think of him as at a disadvantage, shut out, as he thus was, from the rich mythology, the gorgeous symbolism, the manifold legend, and from many other sources of interest, which a poet of the Roman catholic church would command. But whatever losses might thereby be his, whatever springs and sources of poetry might be closed to him on this account, all this was countervailed by far greater gains. And if the loftiest poetry is not merely passion and imagination, but these moving in the sphere of highest truth, it could not have been otherwise. And these gains will every day be more evident. For thus nothing in him through the course of time becomes incredible, nothing is overlived. The tide of human faith and passion, which upbears so proudly the rich argosies that he has launched upon it, will never ebb, and leave them helplessly stranded on an abandoned shore, but will rather mount higher and higher still. Assuredly it is a weakness in Schiller, and one fitly rebuked in one of Mrs. Browning's noblest poems, that he should wail over the vanished "Gods of Hellas;" as though the extinction of faith in them had closed any springs of inspiration for the |