attempted on the subject of Arthur, that they have given us a hero formed on a classical model, instead of that 'good king Arthur' of the romances and ballads, the favourite of our childhood, and the 1 subject even now of innumerable popular tales among our peasantry. It is the same dilemma of being trite on the one hand, or of violating preconceived notions on the other, which constitutes the principal difficulty of those dramatic subjects which are taken from classical antiquity. But in the Fall of Jerusalem, this difficulty is greatly increased by the degree of religious importance which attaches to its leading circumstances. Alteration here becomes misrepresentation; and we resent, as a sort of heresy, any poetical license on topics, of which, whatever may be the incidental beauty or singularity, the main interest and importance depend on their truth alone. Nor is that a trifling embarrassment which arises from the overpowering interest and sublimity of the scenes or events to be described, a sublimity, in many instances, not only above the aid of poetical embellishment, but which makes it as much out of place as a collar of pearls round the neck of the Farnese Hercules. The fifth chapter of the sixth book of Josephus is not poetry, but it is something more,-and the opening of the temple gate without hands, and the ΜΕΤΑΒΑΙΝΩΜΕΝ ΕΝΤΕΥΘΕΝ which resounded through the Holy of Holies, must be rather injured than ornamented, by any attempt to describe the crash of the brazen hinges, and the thunders of the departing Deity. The circumstance, however, which might seem to present the greatest difficulty of all, is the pervading and unqualified horror of the history and its details. There is, from the beginning of the siege to its conclusion, no turn in the tide of affairs, no point on which the eye can, even for a moment, repose with comfort. One deed of brutal and bloody cruelty, one instance of dismal and intolerable suffering succeeds its fellow, without respite or remission. We can feel no interest for the Romans, who are unjust and brutal oppressors, and whose leader, Titus, with his long speeches and loaded gibbets, is, in spite of Suetonius and the praises of some Christian divines, more odious than a less philosophic ruffian would have been; and even the desperate courage and lofty enthusiasm of the Jews which, under other circumstances, would have been sublime, become, when exerted without any reasonable hope or motive, hideous and maniacal. In prose, these things are read with interest, because they are true as well as terrible and extraordinary: but, in poetry, which is professedly not the truth but its imitation, we require that the objects imitated should not be altogether frightful,and Mr. Shelly alone, since the days of Titus Andronicus and the VOL. XXIII. NO. 45.-Q. R. 26 tragic tragic schoolmaster in Gil Blas, has expected to afford mankind delight by a fac-simile of unmingled wickedness and horror. In avoiding these difficulties, Mr. Milman has derived considerable advantages from the form in which he has cast his work, which has given him the greatest possible scope in the selection and concentration of his historical facts, while it has dispensed with that continuous detail of events and description of characters, which would have been required in a poem purely narrative. The present is neither of this description, nor is it a regular drama; but, properly speaking, a story told in dialogue, a manner of writing, of which we may trace the first approach in some of the works of Mr. Southey, and which may be classed among those other innovations of the same writer, which, in their day, were stigmatized as little less than barbarous, but which are insensibly producing a marked and beneficial effect on the greater part of our contemporary poets. With the same judgment and good taste, which we have already noticed, Mr. Milman, without binding himself with needless servility to the narrative of Josephus, has related all those facts, and described all those characters, which he has thought fit to introduce from history, in sufficiently close agreement with its tenour; while even his fictitious incidents are such as might really have occurred during some part or other of the siege. Titus was ready drawn, and he has made him act and speak pretty much as he is represented in Josephus and Suetonius. Of the Jewish tyrants, John and Simon, so little is known beyond the common attributes of pride, cruelty, and desperate courage, that he was at liberty to make them adopt almost any sentiments consistent with these leading traits. As the followers of John, however, are branded by Josephus as peculiarly impious and profligate, Mr. Milman has chosen to put into his mouth the tenets and usual sophisms of the Sadducees; while Simon, for the sake of contrast, is represented as a rigid and enthusiastic Pharisce. We could have wished, we own, that his pious effusions had been assigned, in preference, to the Zealot chief, Eleazar, who might as well have been made the father of Mr. Milman's heroine, as Simon; inasmuch as, though in some measure constrained to an alliance with John, he appears to have been by no means a cypher in the anarchy of his country, and to have been really (what Simon the Edomite hardly was) a resident in Jerusalem and the head of the puritan party there. Still, however, both John and Simon are such characters, as might well have been found among the Jews at that time, and of the first, at least, the discourses and actions are throughout in unison with the character given him. But the story must have failed in interest if Mr. Milman had confined himself to historical personages only. It would have been absurd absurd to convert either Titus, Simon, or the historian Josephus, into that necessary ingredient of a poem,-an enamoured swain.* His readers could have felt little curiosity as to the probable fate of men, of whom they knew the history even before they opened his book and the poet has, therefore, rested his plot on the distresses and dangers of an imaginary character, whom he was at liberty to make as gentle, as beautiful, and as pious, as suited his purpose, and to whom the terrific accompaniments of the siege and destruction, are in fact no more than the back-ground and appropriate ornaments of the picture. Throughout the drama, indeed, it is not for Jerusalem, but for Miriam, that we are anxious; and the dark-haired and enthusiastic Salone, however interesting in her own person, is never allowed to withdraw our attention from the superior attractions of her sister. Yet of Miriam the character and fortunes are strictly in union with the scenes around her; and even the incident which seems most improbable,--her unperceived descent from the walls,-is not only accounted for by the supposition of a secret staircase, but is really mentioned by Josephus as an expedient sometimes resorted to by the starving inhabitants of Jerusalem. But we are unwilling to forestall the story, any further than to observe that its events are supposed to have taken place during the last thirty-six hours of the siege, which Mr. Milman brings to a conclusion with the destruction of the Temple; disregarding, by a very allowable poetical license, the languid defence maintained for some weeks longer by the seditious on Mount Zion. 1 The poem opens with one of the least advantageous specimens of Mr. Milman's power. The scene is the Mount of Olives, and we have a long conversation between Titus and his officers, who are made to advance their eagles,' and marvel, and moralize, and menace, in good set terms, and according to all the precedents in such cases furnished. We know not how it happens that of all our dramatic writers, Shakspeare alone has been able to make his Roman characters speak, move, and act like men of other nations similarly circumstanced; to fold the toga in less formal plaits, and to divest his consular persons of the constrained gestures and unnatural tones of a great school-boy at his annual speeches. Shakspeare, indeed, is sometimes blameable on the other side, for a too great neglect of appropriate costume, and that uniformity of national character by which this extraordinary people was distinguished from all others; and which, surely, might be sufficiently preserved without sinking the statesman in the rhetorician, or bury Crowne has moulded a lover for Clarona, the daughter of Mathias, (Mr. Milman's Simon,) out of a Parthian king, whom, for that purpose, he has brought to Jerusalem and detained there during the siege. ing ing the whole human being, with all his natural passions and principles of action, under the fasces, laurels, and paludamentum of the Cæsar. But, notwithstanding this common and customary heaviness of Mr. Milman's Romans, he has afforded us, even here, some powerful writing and harmonious versification; and the following description of the City and Temple is not the worse for almost literally following the eloquent encomium of Josephus :As on our olive-crowned hill we stand, Where Kedron at our feet its scanty waters Is hung with marble fabrics, line o'er line, To the blue heavens.. Here bright and sumptuous palaces, With cool and verdant gardens interspersed ; Here towers of war that frown in massy strength. While over all hangs the rich purple eve, As conscious of its being her last farewell Of light and glory to that faded city. Finding itself a solemn sanctuary In the profound of heaven! It stands before us. And down the long and branching porticoes, The offended majesty of Rome to mercy.'-p. 7, 8. This scene, however, is merely introductory. The business of the drama opens with the second, which is laid by moonlight, at the fountain of Siloam, or, as Mr. Milman calls it, Siloe. Hither the lovely Miriam, daughter of the fanatic assassin Simon, but herself a concealed Christian, is accustomed to steal down by a private and ruinous staircase, conducting from her father's house into the valley, to obtain for his support, supplies of food and wine, which the rugged enthusiast believes to be brought to his house by an angel, but which are, in truth, received by the fair proselyte from the hands of her lover Javan, a Christian, who, having with the rest of the faithful, left the city before the siege, is now at large without its walls, and, to meet her at the appointed place, defies the difficulties opposed by the blockading army. Javan is first introduced, alone, alone, by the fountain, which as well as his absent mistress, he apostrophizes in some lines of exquisite tenderness and beauty. 'Sweet fountain, once again I visit thee! And thou art flowing on, and freshening still Wherewith thy soul embraces them! Thou prayest, While heaven seems smiling kind acceptance down On the associate of so pure a worshipper.'-p. 13, 14. Miriam, on her arrival, receives the fruit and wine; but her lover endeavours to dissuade her from returning to her father's roof, or to the present misery and approaching perils of Jerusalem. The latter are painted with terrible distinctness. "Even now our city trembles on the verge And the fierce stranger in our burning streets : Tell, if one living man, one innocent child, Yet wander o'er their cold and scattered ashes. They slew them, Miriam, the old gray man, Whose blood scarce tinged their swords-(nay, turn not from me, The |