Sorrow substracts, and multiplies, the spirits;
Care, and desire, do under anguish cease;
Doubt curious is, affecting piety;

Woe loves itself; fear from itself would fly.
Do not these trembling motions witness bear,
That all these protestations be of fear?

Calica. If aught be quick in me, move it with scorn: Nothing can come amiss to thoughts forlorn.

Alaham. Confess in time. Revenge is merciless. Calica. Reward and pain, fear and desire too, Are vain in things impossible to do.

Alaham. Tell yet where thou thy father last did see. Calica. Even where he by his loss of eyes hath won That he no more shall see his monstrous son. First in perpetual night thou mad'st him go; His flesh the grave; his life the stage, where sense Plays all the tragedies of pain and woe. And wouldst thou trait'rously thyself exceed, By seeking thus to make his ghost to bleed?

Alaham. Bear her away: devise; add to the rack Torments, that both call death and turn it back.

Calica. The flattering glass of power is others' pain. Perfect thy work; that heaven and hell may know, To worse I cannot, going from thee, go,

Eternal life, that ever liv'st above!

If sense there be with thee of hate, or love;
Revenge my king and father's overthrow.
O father! if that name reach up so high,
And be more than a proper word of art,
To teach respects in our humanity;
Accept these pains, whereof you feel no smart.

The King comes forth.

King. What sound is this of Calica's distress?
Alaham, wrong not a silly sister's faith.
"Tis plague enough that she is innocent;
My child, thy sister; born (by thee and me)
With shame and sin to have affinity.

Break

Break me; I am the prison of thy thought:
Crowns dear enough with fathers' blood are bought.
Alaham. Now feel thou shalt, thou ghost unnatural,
Those wounds which thou to my heart thou did'st give,
When, in despite of God, this state, and me,
Thou did'st from death mine elder brother free.
The smart of king's oppression doth not die:
Time rusteth malice; rust wounds cruelly.
King. Flatter thy wickedness; adorn thy rage;
To wear a crown, tear up thy father's age.
Kill not thy sister: it is lack of wit

To do an ill that brings no good with it.

Alaham. Go, lead them hence. Prepare the funeral. Hasten the sacrifice and pomp of woe.

Where she did hide him, thither let them go.

A Nuntius (or Messenger) relates to Alaham the manner of his Father's, Brother's, and Sister's deaths; and the popular discontents which followed. Alaham by the sudden working of Remorse is distracted, and imagines that he sees their Ghosts.

ALAHAM. Nuntius.

Nuntius. The first which burnt, as Cain85 his next of kin,

In blood your brother, and your prince in state,
Drew wonder from men's hearts, brought horror in.
This innocent, this soul too meek for sin,

Yet made for others to do harm withal,

With his self-pity tears drew tears from us;

His blood compassion had; his wrong stirr'd hate:
Deceit is odious in a king's estate.

Repiningly he goes unto his end:

Strange visions rise; strange furies haunt the flame;
People cry out, Echo repeats, his name.

85 The execution, to make it plausible to the people, is colored with the pretext, that the being burnt is a voluntary sacrifice of themselves by the victinis at the funeral of Cain a bashaw and relative.

These

These words he spake, even breathing out. his breath: "Unhappy weakness! never innocent!

"If in a crown, yet but an instrument.

People! observe; this fact may make you see, "Excess hath ruin'd what itself did build:

"But ah! the more opprest the more you yield."
The next was He whose age had reverence,
His gesture something more than privateness;
Guided by One, whose stately grace did move
Compassion, even in hearts that could not love.
As soon as these approached near the flame,
The wind, the steam, or furies, rais'd their veils;
And in their looks this image did appear:
Each unto other, life to neither, dear.

These words he spake. "Behold one that hath lost
"Himself within; and so the world without;
"A king, that brings authority in doubt:
"This is the fruit of power's misgovernment.
"People! my fall is just; yet strange your fate,
"That, under worst, will hope for better state."
Grief roars aloud. Your sister yet remain'd;
Helping in death to him in whom she died;
Then going to her own, as if she gain'd,
These mild words spake with looks to heaven bent.
"O God! 'Tis thou that suff'rest here, not we:
Wrong doth but like itself in working thus:

"At thy will, Lord! revenge thyself, not us."
The fire straight upward bears the souls in breath:
Visions of horror circle in the flame

With shapes and figures like to that of Death,
But lighter-tongued and nimbler wing'd than Fame :
Some to the church; some to the people fly:

A voice cries out;

66

revenge and liberty.

"Princes, take heed; your glory is your care;

"And power's foundations, strengths, not vices, are." Alaham. What change is this, that now I feel within? Is it disease that works this fall of spirits?

Or works this fall of spirits my disease?

Things

Things seem not as they did; horror appears.
What Sin embodied, what strange sight is this?
Doth sense bring back but what within me is?
Or do I see those shapes which haunt the flame?
What summons up remorse? Shall conscience rate
Kings' deeds, to make them less than their estate?
Ah silly ghost! is't you that swarm about?

Would'st thou, that art not now, a father be ?
These body laws do with the life go
out.

What thoughts be these that do my entrails tear?
You wand'ring spirits frame in me your hell;
I feel my brother and my sister there.

*

*

MUSTAPHA.

MUSTAPHA. A TRAGEDY. BY FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE.

Rossa, Wife to Solyman the Turkish Emperor, persuades her Husband, that Mustapha, his Son by a former Marriage, and Heir to his Crown, seeks his life: that she may make way, by the death of Mustapha, for the advancement of her own children, Zanger and Camena. Camena the virtuous Daughter of Rossa defends the Innocence of Mustapha in a Conference which she holds with the Emperor.

CAMENA. SOLYMAN.

Cam. They that from youth do suck at fortune's breast, And nurse their empty hearts with seeking higher, Like dropsy-fed, their thirst doth never rest; For still, by getting, they beget desire :

Till thoughts, like wood, while they maintain the flame Of high desires, grow ashes in the same.

But virtue! those that can behold thy beauties,

Those that suck, from their youth, thy milk of goodness,
Their minds grow strong against the storms of fortune,
And stand, like rocks in winter-gusts, unshaken;
Not with the blindness of desire mistaken.

O virtue therefore! whose thrall I think fortune,
Thou who despisest not the sex of women,
Help me out of these riddles of my fortune,
Wherein (methinks) you with yourself do pose me :
Let fates go on: sweet virtue! do not lose me.
My mother and my husband have conspired,
For brother's good, the ruin of
My father by my mother is inspired,
For one child to seek ruin of another.
I that to help by nature am required,
While I do help, must needs still hurt a brother.

my

brother:

While