After all, there is nothing like a conviction of foreordination to some great enterprise, to nerve the soul to its encounter. This may run into fanaticism and madness; but rationally held, it is both polar star and life-preserver to the battler against huge obstacles. Artevelde has this inward preparation for his work.

"My course hath been appointed;
For I feel that within me which accords
With what I have to do. The field is fair,
And I have no perplexity or cloud
Upon my vision. Everything is clear.
And take this with thee for thy comfort, too -
That man is not the most in tribulation
Who, resolute of mind, walks his own way,
With answerable skill to plant his steps.

Men in their places are the men that stand."

The foil which the poet uses to set forth sharply the good qualities of his hero is the demagogue and fighting captain, Peter Van den Bosch. This man is Van Artevelde's compatriot, necessary to him as a subordinate, brave as a panther, but destitute of every finer, manlier sense-a Burley of Balfour disgracing a worthy cause by the excesses of unrestrained vengeance. Several of the situations in which he confronts his superior are managed with consummate art to bring out the contrasts of character, and the supremacy of a nature like Artevelde's over the fierce energy of the other. The unsleeping governor of Ghent has gone up, at daybreak, to the top of the steeple of St. Nicholas, to ponder the condition of his besieged and starving city. Van den Bosch seeks him there on business of the hour. The tramp of a horse's hoof from Bruges arrests their ear. He is bringing a flag of truce and a summons of surrender from the Earl of Flanders who lies a few miles off with his army. Van Artevelde orders his captain to send some one to turn the envoy back, so as not to tempt the famishing citizens to an ignominious submission. Van den Bosch is of a different mind.

"Send him to hell- and that's a better place."

"Nay, softly, Van den Bosch; let war be war,

But let us keep its ordinances."

The dispute waxes warm, at least on the stout captain's side.

He is defiant in his menaces, and all the more as by his means Van Artevelde was raised to the power which he now wields. But the wave beats no more uselessly against the cliff than this unscrupulous man puts his passion in conflict with his associate's calm and philosophic courage. He tells the ruffian that, ready himself at any moment to die for his country, as ever school-boy was to leap a garden-wall, he is just as ready, then or at any time, to sacrifice him on the same altar.

"And if for that same service it seem good,

I will expose thy life to equal hazard."

Van Artevelde descends to meet the herald, and passing a strong door, locks the incensed Fleming behind for safe keeping. Some hours after he returns, finds the prisoner heavily sleeping worn out by paroxysms of demoniac rage, wakens him, but only to face a perfect storm of wrath and revenge. The scene is quite indescribable. Van Artevelde, failing to pacify the infuriate man by persuasive words, quietly throws away his weapon, and tells him to carry out his threat of murder at his leisure. For a few breathless moments you are sure the foul deed will be done. But it is not, and gradually the mastery of the brute is completed by the imperturbable self-control of the immeasurably braver spirit of the two.

There is no selfish ambition in Van Artevelde's soul. A lofty self-abnegation clarifies and sublimes his purposes. You see him, towards the end of his unsuccessful struggles, standing forth in solitary grandeur against the power of tyranny all ready to stamp out the expiring spark of freedom from the earth. He is crushed by force, but not subdued; ostracized from the fellowship of the rulers of the age, but the true heart of humanity beats with his, and owns his untitled nobility.

66

Lo! with the chivalry of Christendom

I wage my war- no nation for my friend,

Yet in each nation having hosts of friends!
The bondsmen of the world, that to their lords
Are bound with chains of iron, unto me

Are knit by their affections. Be it so.
From kings and nobles will I seek no more
Aid, friendship, nor alliance. With the poor
I make my treaty, and the heart of man
Sets the broad seal of its allegiance there,
And ratifies the compact."

With these fine traits of character, however, the poet has not sought to make a faultless man. A less assured artist might have shrunk from marring his own beautiful creation with a great blemish. But the natural is the artistic; truth to the conditions of the work which he may have in hand shows the master of his craft. And the point where he has allowed the weakness, or if the word be demanded, the wickedness, of human nature to come through, is just where we do not greatly wonder at, much as we may condemn, the falling off from virture. Van Artevelde does not justify his offence. His idolized Adriana had died after a brief union. In the second part of the drama, a beautiful Italian lady, Elena della Toree, comes upon the stage. Her life had been unhappy; her rich and passionate tropical youth had been sacrificed to unlawful pleasure ; and she is now a fugitive from the hated gallantry of a French noble, in Van Artevelde's camp, and under his protection. He finds a soothing balm in her refined and intelligent society, amidst his perplexing cares the only one within his reach who can at all fathom the depths of his nature. Their innermost dispositions have much in common. Heavy sorrows have knit a tie of sympathy between them, where such oneness of experience and feeling is most perilous. They seek in each other a solace and a relief from heart aches of which they mutually know the wasting, fainting pressure-and they seek that solace too far. The poet is true to his duty as a moral educator in not throwing the slightest extenuation over this intimacy. We do not care to dwell on this part of the drama. There is sin in it, flagrant and confessed; one hopes that there was a genuine repentance, at least in these last words of perhaps the chief offender. Heaven's grace sought sooner would have saved its need.

"And is it thus we part?
Full hearts, few words.

Enough, enough;

But there is yet another
I would not leave unsaid. If time be short
To seek for pardon of my sins from heaven,
To thee, and for my sins against thyself,

I shall not, in the shortest, sue in vain.

For reparation of one fatal fault

I would that I might be preserved to-day;
If not, I know that I shall fall forgiven."

A charm of this drama is the pure and elevated conception it expresses of woman's character, in its true development. Mr. Taylor has studied rightly this much misapprehended subject. How simply and sweetly real is this unpremeditated thought of the light hearted, impulsive Clara--Van Artevelde's sister:

"The woman could not be of nature's making

Whom, being kind, her misery made not kinder."

So when her affianced D'Arlon would send this sprightly singing bird of a summer's day to some safe covert from thickly pressing dangers, she will not listen to the suggestion an instant.

"I tell thee, never. I a fugitive!

Whilst Philip lives and holds the city out,
Nor pestilence, nor famine, fire nor sword,

Nor evil here, nor good elsewhere, divides us.
Much may he lose, and much that's far more worth,
But never this reliance."

This is only surpassed in unselfish devotion by the vow of Adriana to Van Artevelde when, amidst perils enough to affright a heart of steel itself, she gives him her wifely pledge, for better or for worse. As it should, the wife's devotion of herself to the husband takes on a deeper meaning and a stronger bond than the sister's attachment to the brother, however absorbing this may be.

O Artevelde, my choice is free no more.
Be mine, all mine, let good or ill betide.
In war or peace, in sickness or in health,
In trouble and in danger and distress,

Through time and through eternity I'll love thee;
In youth, and age, in life and death, I'll love thee,
Here and hereafter, with all my soul and strength.
So God accept me as I never cease

From loving and adoring thee next him;
And O, may he pardon me if so betrayed

By mortal frailty as to love thee more."

It would serve no purpose of truth to claim for Mr. Taylor the loftiest grade of dramatic power. He would be the first to repudiate such a pretension. One defect is obvious the lack or the disuse of that sense of the humorous, and of the faculty to excite the pleasurable emotions to which it appeals, which

opens such an exhaustless fount of smiles and tears in the unapproachable creations of the prince of dramatists. Mr. Taylor has selected his own niche in the temple of poetic art, a high, if not the highest position; and he has proved himself thoroughly able to retain it, amidst the shifting fashions of the literary republic. He has the gratification of seeing that his chaster work has outlived the more gorgeously colored productions of some who led and vitiated the public taste in years gone by. This must be to him a very sure and pleasing pledge that his fame, as a man of letters, will suffer no serious loss from the future achievements of English poetry.

ARTICLE VI.

JOHN CALVIN.

ALL through that gloomy period in the history of the church, whose shadows began to darken around her soon after the age of Augustine, a great change had, as is well known, been gradually taking place in the character and teachings of those whose position made them the responsible leaders of her faith. The result appeared in a practical reversal of those solemn conclusions touching the relations in which man, the finite and guilty creature, stands toward his infinite and holy Creator, which had been reached at the close of the preceding period. This reversal was not the result of deliberate and earnest inquiry. It was rather the necessary accompaniment of that slothful and self-indulgent spirit which began to creep in as the church, emerging from her fiery baptism of persecution, put on suddenly the robes of an earthly glory, and shining in the reflection of imperial patronage, became all at once attractive to those base and cowardly spirits, for whom no cause is so noble that they will willingly suffer to uphold it, none so worthless that they will not for the sake of ease and fortune enroll themselves among its adherents. A church, that includes the world within its visible limits, must necessarily become corrupt, and a cor