I.

The chroniclers of the last years of the fifteenth century have recorded

how the soldiery of Charles VIII. of France amused the tedious leisure

of their sullen and suspicious occupation of Rome, by erecting in the

camp a stage of planks, and performing thereon a rude mystery-play. The

play thus improvised by a handful of troopers before this motley

invading army: before the feudal cavalry of Burgundy, strange steel

monsters, half bird, half reptile, with steel beaked and winged helmets

and claw-like steel shoes, and jointed steel corselet and rustling steel

mail coat; before the infantry of Gascony, rapid and rapacious with

their tattered doublets and rag-bound feet; before the over-fed,

immensely plumed, and slashed and furbelowed giants of Switzerland, and

the starved, half-naked savages of Brittany and the Marches--before this

multifaced, many-speeched army, gathered from the rich cities of the

North and the devastated fields of the South, and the wilds and rocks of

the West and the East, alike in nothing save in its wonder and dread and

delight and horror at this strange invaded Italy--the play performed for

the entertainment of this encamped army was no ordinary play. No clerkly

allegorical morality; no mouthing and capering market-place farce; no

history of Joseph and his brethren, of the birth of the Saviour, or of

the temptations of St. Anthony. It was the half-allegorical,

half-dramatic representation of the reigning Borgia pope and his

children; it was the rude and hesitating moulding into dramatic shape of

those terrible rumours of simony and poison, of lust and of violence, of

mysterious death and abominable love, which had met the invaders as they

had first set their feet in Italy; which had become louder and clearer

with every onward step through the peninsula, and now circulated around

them, with frightful distinctness, in the very capital of Christ's vicar

on earth. This blundering mystery-play of the French troopers is the

earliest imaginative fruit of that first terrified and fascinated

glimpse of the men of the barbarous North at the strange Italy of the

Renaissance; it is the first manifestation of that strong tragic impulse

due to the sudden sight, by rude and imaginative young nations, of the

splendid and triumphant wickedness of Italy.

The French saw, wondered, shuddered, and played upon their camp stage

the tragedy of the Borgias. But the French remained in Italy, became

familiar with its ways, and soon merely shrugged their shoulders and

smiled where they had once stared in horror. They served under the flags

of Sforzas, Borgias, Baglionis, and Vitellis, by the side of the bravos

of Naples and Umbria; they saw their princes wed the daughters of

evil-famed Italian sovereigns, and their princes' children, their own

Valois and Guises, develope into puny, ambiguous, and ominous Medicis

and Gonzagas, surrounded by Italian minions and poison distillers, and

buffoons and money-lenders. The French of the sixteenth century, during

their long Neapolitan and Lombard wars and negotiations, and time to

learn all that Italy could teach; to become refined, subtle,

indifferent, and cynical: bastard Italians, with the bastard Italian art

of Goujon and Philibert Delorme, and the bastard Italian poetry of Du

Bellay and Ronsard. The French of the sixteenth century therefore

translated Machiavel and Ariosto and Bandello; but they never again

attempted such another play as that which they had improvised while

listening to the tales of Alexander VI. and Caesar and Lucrezia, in their

camp in the meadows behind Sant' Angelo. The Spaniards then came to

Italy, and the Germans: strong mediaeval nations, like the French, with

the creative power of the Middle Ages still in them, refreshed by the

long rest of the dull fifteenth century. But Spaniards and Germans came

as mere greedy and besotten and savage mercenaries: the scum of their

countries, careless of Italian sights and deeds, thinking only of

torturing for hidden treasure, or swilling southern wines; and they

returned to Spain and to Germany, to persecutions of Moriscos and

plundering of abbeys, as savage and as dull as they had arrived. A

smattering of Italian literature, art, and manners was carried back to

Spain and Germany by Spanish and German princes and governors, to be

transmitted to a few courtiers and humanists; but the imagination of the

lower classes of Spain and of Germany, absorbed in the Quixotic

Catholicism of Loyola and the biblical contemplation of Luther, never

came into fertilizing contact with the decaying Italy of the

Renaissance.

The mystery-play of the soldiers of Charles VIII. seemed destined to

remain an isolated and abortive attempt. But it was not so. The

invasions had exhausted themselves; the political organization of Italy

was definitely broken up; its material wealth was exhausted; the French,

Germans, and Spaniards had come and gone, and returned and gone again;

they had left nothing to annex or to pillage; when, about the middle of

the sixteenth century, the country began to be overrun by a new horde of

barbarians: the English. The English came neither as invaders nor as

marauders; they were peaceable students and rich noblemen, who, so far

from trying to extort money or annex territory, rather profited the

ruined Italians by the work which they did and the money which they

squandered. Yet these quiet and profitable travellers, before whom the

Italians might safely display their remaining wealth, were in reality as

covetous of the possessions of Italy and as resolute to return home

enriched as any tattered Gascon men-at-arms or gluttonous Swiss or

grinding Spaniards. They were, one and all, consciously and

unconsciously, dragged to Italy by the irresistible instinct that Italy

possessed that which they required; by the greed of intellectual gain.

That which they thus instinctively knew that Italy possessed, that which

they must obtain, was a mode of thought, a habit of form; philosophy,

art, civilization: all the materials for intellectual manipulation. For,

in the sixteenth century, on awakening from its long evil sleep, haunted

by the nightmare of civil war, of the fifteenth century, the English

mind had started up in the vigour of well-nigh mature youth, fed up and

rested by the long inactivity in which it had slept through its period

of assimilation and growth. It had awakened at the first touch of

foreign influence, and had grown with every fresh contact with the outer

world: with the first glance at Plato and Xenophon suddenly opened by

Erasmus and Colet, at the Bible suddenly opened by Cranmer; it had grown

with its sob of indignation at the sight of the burning faggots

surrounding the martyrs, with its joyous heart-throbs at the sight of

the seas and islands of the New World; it had grown with the sudden

passionate strain of every nerve and every muscle when the galleys of

Philip had been sighted in the Channel. And when it had paused, taken

breath, and looked calmly around it, after the tumult of all these

sights and sounds and actions, the English mind, in the time of

Elizabeth, had found itself of a sudden full-grown and blossomed out

into superb manhood, with burning activities and indefatigable powers.

But it had found itself without materials for work. Of the scholastic

philosophy and the chivalric poetry of the Middle Ages there remained

but little that could be utilized: the few bungled formulae, the few

half-obsolete rhymes still remaining, were as unintelligible, in their

spirit of feudalism and monasticism and mysticism, as were the Angevin

English and the monkish Latin in which they were written to these men of

the sixteenth century. All the intellectual wealth of England remained

to be created; but it could not be created out of nothing. Spenser,

Shakespeare, and Bacon could not be produced out of the half-effete

and scattered fragments of Chaucer, of Scotus, and of Wycliffe. The

materials on which English genius was to work must be sought abroad, and

abroad they could be found only in Italy. For in the demolished Italy of

the sixteenth century lay the whole intellectual wealth of the world:

the great legacy of Antiquity, the great work of the Middle Ages had

been stored up, and had been increased threefold, and sorted and

classified by the Renaissance; and now that the national edifice had

been dismantled and dilapidated, and the national activity was

languishing, it all lay in confusion, awaiting only the hand of those

who would carry it away and use it once more. To Italy therefore

Englishmen of thought and fancy were dragged by an impulse of adventure

and greed as irresistible as that which dragged to Antwerp and the Hanse

ports, to India and America, the seekers for gold and for soil. To Italy

they flocked and through Italy they rambled, prying greedily into each

cranny and mound of the half-broken civilization, upturning with avid

curiosity all the rubbish and filth; seeking with aching eyes and

itching fingers for the precious fragments of intellectual splendour;

lingering with fascinated glance over the broken remnants and deep,

mysterious gulfs of a crumbling and devastated civilization. And then,

impatient of their intoxicating and tantalizing search, suddenly grown

desperate, they clutched and stored away everything, and returned home

tattered, soiled, bedecked with gold and with tinsel, laden with an

immense uncouth burden of jewels, and broken wealth, and refuse and

ordure, with pseudo-antique philosophy, with half-mediaeval Dantesque and

Petrarchesque poetry, with Renaissance science, with humanistic pedantry

and obscenity, with euphuistic conceits and casuistic quibble, with art,

politics, metaphysics--civilization embedded in all manner of rubbish

and abomination, soiled with all manner of ominous stains. All this did

they carry home and throw helter-skelter into the new-kindled fire of

English intellectual life, mingling with it many a humble-seeming

Northern alloy; cleaning and compounding, casting into shapes, mediaeval

and English, this strange Corinthian brass made of all these

heterogeneous remnants, classical, Italian, Saxon, and Christian. A

strange Corinthian brass indeed; and as various in tint, in weight, and

in tone, in manifold varieties of mixture, as were the moulds into which

it was cast: the white and delicate silver settling down in the gracious

poetic moulds of Sidney and Spenser; the glittering gold, which can buy

and increase, in the splendid, heavy mould of Bacon's prose; and the

copper, the iron, the silver and gold in wondrous mixture, with wondrous

iridescences of colour and wondrous scale of tone, all poured into the

manifold moulds, fantastic and beautiful and grand, of Shakespeare. And

as long as all this dross and ore and filth brought from the ruins of

Italy was thus mingling in the heat of English genius, while it was yet

but imperfectly fused, while already its purest and best compounded

portion was being poured in Shakespeare's mould, and when already there

remained only a seething residue; as long as there remained aught of the

glowing fire and the molten mass, some of it all, of the pure metal

bubbling up, of the scum frothing round, nay, of the very used-up dregs,

was ever and anon being ladled out--gold, dross, filth, all

indiscriminately--and cast into shapes severe, graceful, or uncouth. And

this somewhat, thus pilfered from what was to make, or was making, or

had made, the works of Shakespeare; this base and noble, still unfused

or already exhausted alloy, became the strange heterogeneous works of

the Elizabethan dramatists: of Webster, of Ford, of Tourneur, of Ben

Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of their minor brethren; from the

splendid ore of Marlowe, only half molten and half freed from dross,

down to the shining metal, smooth and silvery as only tinsel can be, of

Massinger.

In all the works of our Elizabethans, we see not only the assimilated

intellectual wealth of Italy, but we see the deep impression, the

indelible picture in the memory, of Italy itself; the positive,

unallegorical, essentially secular mode of thought; the unascetic,

aesthetic, eminently human mode of feeling; the artistic desire of clear

and harmonious form; the innumerable tendencies and habits which sever

the Elizabethans so completely from the Middle Ages, and bring them so

near at once to ourselves and to the ancients, making them at once

antique and modern, in opposition to mediaeval; these essential

characters and the vast bulk of absolute scientific fact and formula, of

philosophic opinion, of artistic shape, of humanistic learning, are only

one-half of the debt of our sixteenth century to the Italy of the

Renaissance. The delicate form of the Italian sonnet, as copied by

Sidney from Bembo and Molza and Costanzo, contained within it the exotic

and exquisite ideal passion of the "Vita Nuova" and Petrarch. With the

bright, undulating stanza Spenser received from Ariosto and Tasso the

richly coloured spirit of the Italian descriptive epic. With the

splendid involutions of Machiavelli's and Guicciardini's prose Bacon

learned their cool and disimpassioned philosophy. From the reading of

Politian and Lorenzo dei Medici, from the sight of the Psyche of

Raphael, the Europa of Veronese, the Ariadne of Tintoret, men like

Greene and Dorset learned that revival of a more luscious and pictorial

antique which was brought to perfection in Shakespeare's "Venus and

Adonis" and Marlowe's "Sestiad." From the Platonists and Epicureans of

Renaissance Italy our greatest dramatists learned that cheerful and

serious love of life, that solemn and manly facing of death, that sense

of the finiteness of man, the inexhaustibleness of nature, which shines

out in such grand, paganism, with such Olympian serenity, as of the bent

brows and smiling lips of an antique Zeus, in Shakespeare, in Marlowe,

in Beaumont and Fletcher, even in the sad and savage Webster. But with

the abstract, with the imbibed modes of thought and feeling, with the

imitated forms, the Elizabethans brought back from Italy the concrete,

the individual, the personal. They filled their works with Italian

things: from the whole plot of a play borrowed from an Italian novel, to

the mere passing allusion to an Italian habit, or the mere quotation of

an Italian word; from the full-length picture of the actions of Italian

men and women, down to the mere sketch, in two or three words, of a bit

of Italian garden or a group of Italian figures; nay, to the innumerable

scraps of tiny detail, grotesque, graceful, or richly coloured, which

they stuffed into all their works: allusions to the buffoons of the mask

comedy, to the high-voiced singers, to the dress of the Venetian

merchants, to the step of a dance; to the pomegranate in the garden or

the cypress on the hillside; mere names of Italian things: the _lavolta_

and _corranto_ dances, the _Traglietto_ ferry, the Rialto bridge;

countless little touches, trifling to us, but which brought home to the

audience at the Globe or at Blackfriars that wonderful Italy which every

man of the day had travelled through at least in spirit, and had loved

at least in imagination. And of this wonderful Italy the Englishmen of

the days of Elizabeth and of James knew yet another side; were familiar,

whether travelled or untravelled, with yet other things besides the

buffoons and singers and dancers, the scholars and learned ladies, the

pomegranates, and cypresses and roses and nightingales; were fascinated

by something besides the green lagoons, the clear summer nights, the

soft spring evenings of which we feel as it were the fascination in the

words of Jessica and Portia and Juliet. The English knew and were

haunted by the crimes of Italy: the terrible and brilliant, the

mysterious and shadowy crimes of lust and of blood which, in their most

gigantic union and monstrous enthronement on the throne of the vicar of

Christ, had in the first terrified glimpse awakened the tragic impulse

in the soldiers of Charles VIII.

We can imagine the innumerable English travellers who went to Italy

greedy for life and knowledge or merely obeying a fashion of the

day--travellers forced into far closer contact with the natives than the

men of the time of Walpole and of Beckford, who were met by

French-speaking hosts and lacqueys and officials--travellers also

thirsting to imbibe the very spirit of the country as the travellers of

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries never thirsted; we can imagine

these Englishmen possessed by the morbid passion for the stories of

abominable and unpunished crime--crime of the learned, the refined, the

splendid parts of society--with which the Italy of the deeply corrupted

sixteenth century was permeated. We can imagine how the prosaic

merchants' clerks from London; the perfumed dandies, trying on Italian

clothes, rehearsing Italian steps and collecting Italian oaths, the

Faulcon-bridges of Shakespeare and Mr. Gingleboys of Beaumont and

Fletcher, sent to Italy to be able gracefully to

Kiss the hand and cry, "sweet lady!"

Say they had been at Rome and seen the relics,

Drunk your Verdea wine, and rid at Naples--

how all these privileged creatures ferreted about for monstrous crimes

with which to horrify their stay-at-home countrymen; how the rich young

lords, returning home with mincing steps and high-pitched lisp,

surrounded by a train of parti-coloured, dialect-jabbering Venetian

clowns, deft and sinister Neapolitan fencing masters, silver-voiced

singing boys decoyed from some church, and cynical humanists escaped

from the faggot or the gallows, were expected to bring home, together

with the newest pastoral dramas, lewd novels, Platonic philosophy and

madrigals set in complicated counterpoint; stories of hideous

wickedness, of the murders and rapes and poisonings committed by the

dukes and duchesses, the nobles and senators, in whose palaces they had

so lately supped and danced. The crimes of Italy fascinated Englishmen

of genius with a fascination even more potent than that which they

exercised over the vulgar imagination of mere foppish and swashbuckler

lovers of the scandalous and the sensational: they fascinated with the

attraction of tragic grandeur, of psychological strangeness, of moral

monstrosity, a generation in whom the passionate imagination of the

playwright was curiously blent with the metaphysical analysis of the

philosopher and the ethical judgment of the Puritan. To these men, ardent

and serious even in their profligacy; imaginative and passionate even in

their Puritanism, all sucking avidly at this newly found Italian

civilization; the wickedness of Italy was more than morbidly attractive

or morbidly appalling: it was imaginatively and psychologically

fascinating. Whether they were as part of the action or as allusions, as

in Webster's two great plays, in which there occurs poisoning by means

of the leaves of a book, poisoning by the poisoned lips of a picture,

poisoning by a helmet, poisoning by the pommel of a saddle; crimes were

multiplied by means of subordinate plots and unnecessary incidents, like

the double vengeance of Richardetto and of Hippolita in Ford's "Giovanni

and Annabella," where both characters are absolutely unnecessary to the

main story of the horrible love of the hero and heroine; like the

murders of Levidulcia and Sebastian in Tourneur's "Atheist's Tragedy,"

and the completely unnecessary though extremely pathetic death of young

Marcello in Webster's "White Devil;" until the plays were brought to a

close by the gradual extermination of all the principal performers, and

only a few confidants and dummies remained to bury the corpses which

strewed the stage. Imaginary monsters were fashioned out of half-a-dozen

Neapolitan and Milanese princes, by Ford, by Beaumont and Fletcher, by

Middleton, by Marston, even by the light and graceful Philip Massinger:

mythical villains, Ferdinands, Lodowicks, and Fernezes, who yet fell

short of the frightful realities of men like Sigismondo Malatesta,

Alexander VI., and Pier Luigi Farnese; nay, more typical monsters, with

no name save their vices, Lussuriosos, Gelosos, Ambitiosos, and

Vindicis, like those drawn by the strong and savage hand of Cyril

Tourneur.

Nothing which the English stage could display seemed to the minds of

English playwrights and the public to give an adequate picture of the

abominations of Italy; much as they heaped up horrors and combined them

with artistic skill, much as they forced into sight, there yet remained

an abyss of evil which the English tongue refused to mention, but which

weighed upon the English mind; and which, unspoken, nay (and it is the

glory of the Elizabethan dramatists excepting Ford), unhinted, yet

remained as an incubus in the consciousness of the playwrights and the

public, was in their thoughts when they wrote and heard such savage

misanthropic outbursts as those of Tourneur and of Marston. The sense of

the rottenness of the country whence they were obtaining their

intellectual nourishment, haunted with a sort of sickening fascination

the imaginative and psychological minds of the late sixteenth century,

of the men who had had time to outgrow the first cynical plunge of the

rebellious immature intellects of the contemporaries of Greene, Peele,

and Marlowe into that dissolved civilization. And of the great men who

were thus enthralled by Italy and Italian evil, only Shakespeare and

Massinger maintain or regain their serenity and hopefulness of spirit,

resist the incubus of horror: Shakespeare from the immense scope of his

vision, which permitted him to pass over the base and frightful parts of

human nature and see its purer and higher sides; Massinger from the very

superficiality of his insight and the narrowness of his sympathies,

which prevented his ever thoroughly realizing the very horrors he had

himself invented. But on the minds less elastic than that of

Shakespeare, and less superficial than that of Massinger, the Italian

evil weighed like a nightmare. With an infinitely powerful and

passionate imagination, and an exquisitely subtle faculty of mental

analysis; only lately freed from the dogma of the Middle Ages; unsettled

in their philosophy; inclined by wholesale classical reading to a sort

of negative atheism, a fatalistic and half-melancholy mixture of

epicurism and stoicism; yet keenly alive, from study of the Bible and of

religious controversies, to all questions of right and wrong; thus

highly wrought and deeply perplexed, the minds of the Elizabethan poets

were impressed by the wickedness of Italy as by the horrible deeds of

one whom we are accustomed to venerate as our guide, whom we cannot but

love as our benefactor, whom we cannot but admire as our superior: it

was a sense of frightful anomaly, of putrescence in beauty and

splendour, of death in life and life in death, which made the English

psychologist-poets savage and sombre, cynical and wrathful and hopeless.

The influence is the same on all, and the difference of attitude is

slight, and due to individual characters; but the gloom is the same in

each of them. In Webster--no mere grisly inventor of Radcliffian

horrors, as we are apt to think of the greatest of our dramatists--after

Shakespeare--in the noble and tender nature of Webster the sense is one

of ineffable sadness, unmarred by cynicism, but unbrightened by hope.

The villains, even if successful till death overtake them, are mere

hideous phantoms--

these wretched eminent things

Leave no more fame behind 'em, than should one

Fall in a frost, and leave his print in snow--

the victims of tortured conscience, or, worse still, the owners of

petrified hearts; there is nothing to envy in them. But none the better

is it for the good: if Ferdinands, Bosolas, Brachianos, and Flaminios

perish miserably, it is only after having done to death the tender and

brave Duchess, the gentle Antonio, the chivalric Marcello; there is

virtue on earth, but there is no justice in heaven. The half-pagan,

half-puritanic feeling of Webster bursts out in the dying speech of the

villain Bosola--

O, this gloomy world!

In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness,

Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!

Let worthy minds ne'er stagger in distrust

To suffer death or shame for what is just.

Of real justice in this life or compensation in another, there is no

thought: Webster, though a Puritan in spirit, is no Christian in faith.

On Ford the influence is different; although equal, perhaps, in genius

to Webster, surpassing him even in intense tragic passion, he was far

below Webster, and, indeed, far below all his generation, in moral

fibre. The sight of evil fascinates him; his conscience staggers, his

sympathies are bedraggled in foulness; in the chaos of good and evil he

loses his reckoning, and recognizes the superiority only of strength of

passion, of passion for good or evil: the incestuous Giovanni, daring

his enemies like a wild beast at bay and cheating them of their revenge

by himself murdering the object of his horrible passion, is as heroic in

the eyes of Ford as the magnanimous Princess of Sparta, bearing with

unflinching spirit the succession of misfortunes poured down upon her,

and leading off the dance while messenger succeeds messenger of evil;

till, free from her duties as a queen, she sinks down dead. Cyril

Tourneur and John Marston are far more incomplete in genius than either

Webster or Ford, although Tourneur sometimes obtains a lurid and ghastly

tragic intensity which more than equals Ford when at his best; and

Marston, in the midst of crabbedness and dulness, sometimes has touches

of pathos and Michelangelesque foreshortenings of metaphor worthy of

Webster. But Tourneur and Marston have neither the constant sympathy

with oppressed virtue of the author of the "Duchess of Malfy," nor the

blind fury of passion of the poet of "Giovanni and Annabella;" they look

on grim and hopeless spectators at the world of fatalistic and insane

wickedness which they have created, in which their heroes and heroines

and villains are slowly entangled in inextricable evil. The men and

women of Tourneur and Marston are scarcely men and women at all: they

are mere vague spectres, showing their grisly wounds and moaning out

their miserable fate. There is around them a thick and clammy moral

darkness, dispelled only by the ghastly flashes of lurid virtue of

maniacs like Tourneur's Vindici and Hippolito; a crypt-like moral

stillness, haunted by strange evil murmurs, broken only by the

hysterical sobs and laughs of Marston's Antonios and Pandulphos. At the

most there issues out of the blood-reeking depth a mighty yell of pain,

a tremendous imprecation not only at sinful man but at unsympathizing

nature, like that of Marston's old Doge, dethroned, hunted down, crying

aloud into the grey dawn-mists of the desolate marsh by the lagoon--

O thou all-bearing earth

Which men do gape for till thou cram'st their mouths

And choak'st their throats for dust: O charme thy breast

And let me sinke into thee. Look who knocks;

Andrugio calls. But O, she's deafe and blinde.

A wretch but leane relief on earth can finde.

The tragic sense, the sense of utter blank evil, is stronger in all

these Elizabethan painters of Italian crime than perhaps in any other

tragic writers. There is, in the great and sinister pictures of Webster,

of Ford, of Tourneur, and of Marston, no spot of light, no distant

bright horizon. There is no loving suffering, resigned to suffer and to

pardon, like that of Desdemona, whose dying lips forgive the beloved who

kills from too great love; no consoling affection like Cordelia's, in

whose gentle embrace the poor bruised soul may sink into rest; no

passionate union in death with the beloved, like the union of Romeo and

Juliet; nothing but implacable cruelty, violent death received with

agonized protest, or at best as the only release from unmitigated misery

with which the wretch has become familiar,

As the tann'd galley slave is with his oar.

Neither is there in these plays that solemn sense of heavenly justice,

of the fatality hanging over a house which will be broken when guilt

shall have been expiated, which lends a sort of serene background of

eternal justice to the terrible tales of Thebes and Argos. There is for

these men no fatality save the evil nature of man, no justice save the

doubling of crime, no compensation save revenge: there is for Webster

and Ford and Tourneur and Marston no heaven above, wrathful but

placable; there are no Gods revengeful but just: there is nothing but

this blood-stained and corpse-strewn earth, defiled by lust-burnt and

death-hungering men, felling each other down and trampling on one

another blindly in the eternal darkness which surrounds them. The world

of these great poets is not the open world with its light and its air,

its purifying storms and lightnings: it is the darkened Italian palace,

with its wrought-iron bars preventing escape; its embroidered carpets

muffling the foot steps; its hidden, suddenly yawning trapdoors; its

arras-hangings concealing masked ruffians; its garlands of poisoned

flowers; its long suites of untenanted darkened rooms, through which the

wretch is pursued by the half-crazed murderer; while below, in the

cloistered court, the clanking armour and stamping horses, and above, in

the carved and gilded hall, the viols and lutes and cornets make a

cheery triumphant concert, and drown the cries of the victim.