need no comment to make them intelligible, as assuredly they need no eulogy to point out their power and beauty : 'Ion. What wouldst thou with me, lady? Clemanthe. Is it so? Nothing, my lord, save to implore thy pardon, That the departing gleams of a bright dream, From which I scarce had waken'd, made me bold To crave a word with thee ;--but all are fled lon. 'Twas indeed a goodly dream; But thou art right to think it was no more, And study to forget it. Clem. To forget it! Indeed, my lord, I will not wish to lose What, being past, is all my future hath, All I shall live for; do not grudge me this, The brief space I shall need it. Ion. Speak not, fair one, In tone so mournful, for it makes me feel Too sensibly the hapless wretch I am, That troubled the deep quiet of thy soul In that pure fountain which reflected heaven, For a brief taste of rapture. Clem. Dost thou yet Esteem it rapture, then? My foolish heart, Be still! Yet wherefore should a crown divide us? O, my dear lon!-let me call thee so This once at least-it could not in my thoughts Increase the distance that there was between us When, rich in spirit, thou to strangers' Though they destroy me. Shall we meet indeed? Think not I would intrude upon thy cares, Thy councils, or thy pomps;-to sit at distance, To weave, with the nice labour which preserves The rebel pulses even, from gay threads Faint records of thy deeds, and sometimes catch The falling music of a gracious word, Or the stray sunshine of a smile, will be Comfort enough:-do not deny me this ; Or if stern fate compel thee to deny, Kill me at once! Ion. No; thou must live, my fair one: There are a thousand joyous things in life, Which pass unheeded in a life of joy As thine hath been, till breezy sorrow comes Το The last scene is again in the Great Square: on one side is the throne on the other an altar. The people are assembled to witness the instalment of Ion in his royal diguity. The young king, attended by the High Priest Medon, the senators, Agenor, &c., advances in his robes. He is received with shouts-pauses in front of the throne, and speaks: Ion. I cannot mark thee, That wakest the memory of my father's weakness, But I will not forget that thou hast shared The light enjoyments of a noble spirit, And learn'd the need of luxury. I grant For thee and thy brave comrades ample share Of such rich treasure as my stores contain, To grace thy passage to some distant land, Where, if an honest cause engage thy sword, May glorious issues wait it. In our realm We shall not need it longer. Crythes. Dost intend To banish the firm troops before whose Our city naked to the first assault Ion. No, Crythes!-in ourselves, In our own honest hearts and chainless hands Will be our safeguard;-while we do not use Let the great interests of the state depend Upon the thousand chances that may sway A piece of human frailty; swear to me So happy in its smallness, so compact, By bonds of parchment, or by iron clasps, Of sympathy pervading, shall endow With vital beauty;-tint with roseate bloom In times of happy peace, and bid to flash With one brave impulse if ambitious MEDON and others. We swear it! powers! [He goes to the altar. In whose mild service my glad youth was Look on me now;-and if there is a As at this solemn time I feel there is, The spirit of the beautiful that lives End all her sorrows! [Stabs himself. Let me support him-stand away indeed We leave these specimens to vindicate our high praise of this performance. That ION will not only be published, but acted hereafter, we cannot permit ourselves to doubt; and if these results are in any degree forwarded by this notice, our purpose has been attained. It is now about a year since we introduced to our readers the noblest effort in the true old taste of our English historical drama that has been made for more than a century; and we have high gratification in seeing Philip van Artevelde followed, within so short a space, by this splendid attempt to recall into the power of life and sympathy the long-buried genius of the antique Tragedy of Fate. ART. ART. XI.-1. Mémoires authentiques de Maximilien Robespierre. 2 tomes. Paris, 1830. 2. Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux Frères. Paris, 1835. THE HE most prominent, yet the most mysterious, figure in the phantasmagoria of the French Revolution is MAXIMILIAN DE ROBESPIERRE. Of no one of whom so much has been said is so little known. He was at first too much despised, and at last too much feared, to be closely examined or justly appreciated. The blood-red halo by which his last years were enveloped magnified his form, but obscured his features. Like the Genius of the Arabian tale, he emerged suddenly from a petty space into enormous power and gigantic size, and as suddenly vanished, leaving behind him no trace but terror. We therefore received with curiosity the two publications whose titles are prefixed to this article, in the hope that they might afford some insight into the personal, and perhaps some explanation of the public conduct of this mysterious man, who, in the guilty whirl of his revolutionary career, amidst the blaze of the most enthusiastic popularity, in the supreme and despotic omnipotence of a dictator, contrived to bury his private life in a deep and apparently modest obscurity. We have been entirely disappointed. The first, which affects to be an autobiography of Robespierre down to the close of the Constituent Assembly, is a manifest fabrication, and almost avowed to be so in the editor's preface. It contains a few small particulars of his early life, which might have been gleaned from persons who knew him, but the bulk is compiled from the files of the Moniteur. We therefore did not consider it worthy a separate notice, and are now only reminded of it by the still more impudent fabrication of the Memoirs of Charlotte Robespierre, of which the following is, we have reason to believe, a true account. A young republican, of the name of Laponneraye, one of the heroes, it seems, of the Great Days of July, 1830, being grievously mortified at the result of that very untoward victory, betook himself to the task of enlightening the lower classes of the Parisians by certain lectures on the history of the French Revolution, which he delivered gratuitously on the Sunday evenings in a style that procured for their author we know not how many prosecutions and penal inflictions. In the course of these lectures he undertook the defence of Robespierre, whom he considers as the purest of patriots and the best of men. It happened that in an obscure quarter of Paris there still existed-on a pension originally granted by Buonaparte, but continued by those cruel and bigoted Bour bons, |