Michael Angelo had omitted to provide a balcony whence the Pope could bless the Faithful; and that, though comprehending a far larger area, he had failed to enclose all the consecrated ground which the old Basilica had covered. Maderno was accordingly desired to provide more space, and did it in the only possible way by adding the long limb which restored the form of the Latin Cross. Further, uncontrolled by any traditions of respect, and as ignorant as his superiors of what constituted the special beauty of the structure, he erected in place of Michael Angelo's graceful Peristyle a high, flat, commonplace, club-house front, which effectually screens from sight the grandest feature of the grandest Christian Temple in the world. Nothing can mask the dignity of the Dome when seen from a height, but it virtually disappears from a spectator level with the building. So utterly was the effect destroyed that the sculptor Bernini's purposeless colonnade of crowded columns, which, like the outstretched wings of a bird, divert all attention from the body, became a necessary addition, or rather evil. It was Bernini also who, by Papal order, so far weakened the piers by hollowing out a space in each large enough to admit a staircase, as seriously to threaten the safety of the Dome. Thus the ill fate which attended the works of Michael Angelo in all three arts remains here in a petrified form no one can dispute. Bernini's share in the work of deformation did not end till 1690, when the building, which had been carried on by thirteen architects, during the reigns of twenty-five Pontiffs, and over a period of 184 years, finally assumed its present form.

One more phase of this man's genius remains to be briefly mentioned. We do not say that he wrote Sonnets, for that means little at a time when every Italian of note did the same, but that he was really a great poet. The mind that found nourishment in the works of Dante, and the heart that embraced the teaching of Savonarola, left their reflection in verse to which poets of all nations have accorded a high place. Here and there we are struck with a coincidence of feeling and expression between him and Shakspeare. Such a passage as this, translated by Southey, will recall the Sonnet entitled The World's Way:'

'Ill hath he chosen his part who seeks to please

The worthless world. Ill hath he chosen his part.
For often must he wear the look of ease

When grief is in his heart.

And ever his own bitter thoughts concealing,
Must he in stupid grandeur's praise be loud;

VOL. CXLIV. NO. CCXCV.

L

And to the error of the ignorant crowd
Assent with lying tongue.'

But the comparison soon fails. For Shakspeare is the child of Nature, Michael Angelo the disciple of mysticism. Shakspeare teems with happy familiar images, for which we seek as vainly in Michael Angelo's poetry as in his art. The one plays with the whole scale of Love's fascinating vocabulary-the other dwells no less perpetually on the yearnings and aspirations of what then went by that name, though, compounded as it was of the transcendental philosophy of Dante, the recondite Platonism of the Academies, and the pedantry of Bembo, it is as different from Shakspeare's genuine passion as black is from white. Very strangely have these expressions been interpreted, especially by modern French analysts, as embodying his love for an earthly object, and that love, owing to female coldness and prudery, unrequited. Vittoria Colonna, the Marchesa di Pescara, a sonnetteer herself, is credited with having alone possessed the power to kindle the tender passion in the great Master's breast, and yet the barbarity not to gratify it; and a sensational romance has been conjured up as little flattering to the parties as it is false and ridiculous in itself. The facts are that a most respectful friendship and correspondence existed between an accomplished and high-born lady, past fifty years of age, and the venerable artist, twenty years her senior. Their talk about art was, as we have hinted before, not very instructive; but otherwise their intercourse, as befitted persons of their age, turned chiefly on those sacred topics which, among the purer minds of the time, were suggested by the echoes of the Reformation transmitted across the Alps-topics always more or less occupying Michael Angelo's thoughts. For the chord that strikes the truest sound in his poetry is that of mingled piety and melancholy. It was no misanthropy as some have averred, or moroseness of temper, which overclouded his great soul. He had seen the triumph of evil too often not to wonder that any could be gay; he was, morally, before his time; he was weary of life; and he lived to be eighty-nine! His portraits present us with one of the saddest faces that sorrow and work ever furrowed, or art preserved; fit illustrations of that plaintive plea so often urged in his later letters, when taxed and worried beyond his strength, son vecchio!'

We shall be thankful to have in some measure succeeded in imparting to others the impression that these Letters have left on ourselves. Impetuous, impatient, and indignant he could be, but all in right time and place; but as to the wilfulness

and uncontrollability with which he has been charged, his life displays, on the contrary, one course of meek submission of his opinions, wishes, and interests to authority which, by any artist worthy the name, would now be defied with equal contempt and safety. Far, therefore, from endorsing the character which his biographers have given of him, these Letters rather leave the impression of a figure like his own Jeremiah; bowed down with the contemplation of human wickedness and woe-grand, mournful, patient, and weary.

ART. VI.-Erechtheus. A Tragedy. By ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. London: 1876.

IF the world has lost by the destruction of many tragedies

of Euripides, Mr. Swinburne at least has little reason to regret them. Had they been spared to us, a subject so inspiring as the tragic story of the House of Erechtheus would have been monopolised to all time by one of the great Greek lyrical dramatists, for no modern poet would have dared to bend the bow of Ulysses or present himself as the rival of the master. It would be hard indeed to find another theme that could be brought into more perfect harmony with the Greek tragic genius. Let us accept the canon of Aristotle, that the chief ends of tragic composition are to move us to pity and strike us with terror, and here we are unceasingly under the mastership of the one emotion or the other. In its origin the drama of the Greeks was among the solemn rites of their religion. The loftiest lessons in piety, morality, or patriotism were inculcated by the stage representation of some grand episode of mythology or history, relieved and illustrated by lyrical effusions in glorious bursts of choral song. And the story of the fated daughter of Erechtheus flows out naturally in plaintive melody, and is fruitful in the profound religious impressions that ennoble and soften its unpleasing details. So it is that Mr. Swinburne seems to have risen far above a simple imitation, like Mr. Browning's Balaustion,' and to have achieved the difficult feat of casting a genuine Greek tragedy in the more cumbrous moulds of modern English diction. For the ancient Greek in its graceful strength was the most flexible of languages, while our own tongue, whatever may be its masculine merits, lends itself far less easily to the exigencies of metre and the delicate niceties of poetical expression. Mr. Swinburne has an instinct for rhythm rather

than a command over it, for the easy sweep of his flowing verse suggests anything rather than the idea of effort. Nor have we ever seen him stronger than in this poem of Erechtheus,' while no one can say, as they are borne along with his melodious numbers, that he has been betrayed into sacrificing meaning to sound. He seems to have caught the enthusiasm of a congenial subject; to have been carried back to the spirit of a heroic age; to have fired his fancy with the thoughts and sensations that might have animated the soul of a god-born Athenian in the supreme crisis of his country's fate. Now he sets out his argument with a stern dignity, that shrinks from none of the horrors of a situation it is bracing itself bravely to endure. Now he breaks away with the chorus in a plaintive wail of lamentation over the tragedy it is doomed to behold, and has no power to avert. And again we are awakened from the oppression of terror by some stirring apostrophe to the immortal gods, as if they could be moved by fervent eloquence to interpose in the dire extremity of their eager suppliants; or we are thrilled with the strophes of a martial war-song, resounding to the distant clash of steel upon shields, and the echoes of the horse-hoofs and the chariot-wheels of charging warriors. Yet with all this vivid variety of passionate sensation and the swift transition in metrical measures, there is nothing in meretricious discord with the severe and simple rules that governed the art of an Eschylus or a Sophocles. The drama in every separate part bears distinct and apposite reference to the central subject, but the main interest unfolds itself in the utterances of those leading personages who pay the penalty of their prominent position in being doomed to death or to suffering for their country and their people. While the chorus, strongly sympathetic with the sufferers, and yet with some perceptible undercurrent of patriotic elation at the prospect of averting the anger of the gods, has the imagination easy enough to disport itself among those subordinate myths and legends that clustering thickly round the main episode are made to embellish the modern poem. And the poem gains in verisimilitude and grandeur from that dash of paganism in its author's ideas of religion, of which we fancy we detect the traces. We imagine him inspiring himself for the moment with something of the heathen faith in the potency for good or ill of the embodied forces of nature; or sharing the belief of his heaven-descended heroes in the reality of their typical birth and the protection of their divine parentage.

The story falls half on the remote borderland of credible history, half within the limits of those shadowy regions of

poetical mythology that lie beyond.* Its scene is the sacred soil of Athens, hallowed already by the favour of Pallas Athena; but now the destinies of the city that is to be the bulwark of western civilisation and the polestar of arts and letters are trembling in the balance. For god is contending with god, moved by the intensified mortal passions of those pagan immortals. Poseidon has not forgotten the old feud with Pallas, though the cause had been decided against him by a tribunal of their celestial peers. The dawning promise of the beautiful city has revived his old lust for its tutelage; if he cannot obtain the reverent allegiance he aspires to, at least he may console himself with a display of vengeance and of power. So fierce war has been stirred up at his bidding, and his son Eumolpus is mustering the Thracian legions for the assault. Against the strength of the sea-god and the hordes of the northern barbarians, Erechtheus the king of Athens stands forth as the human guardian of the coveted prize. As to his precise identity there is some confusion, and classical authorities differ as to whether there were not at least two of the name among the early princes of his line. According to the legend adopted in the poem, he too, like his enemy, was of immortal birth, sprung from the Earth by the embraces of Hephaston. But although born of a god and a goddess, all the powers he derives from his origin are a statesmanlike wisdom illumined by some vague foreshadowings of the future, and that heroic capacity to do and to endure which he transmits in full measure to his children. With his hand on the helm of state when such a storm is blowing up from the ocean, he is oppressed by the responsibility of his mighty trust, and a consciousness of his helplessness, if left to himself, to make head against the overpowering league of his enemies. His hopes are in the interposition of the gods, but in the absence of reassuring signs his faith is struggling against thickening anxieties; and meantime his messengers have sought the oracles of Delphi, to inquire if there be a way of warding off the calamity. The answer comes at last, reassuring to the

It is curious that the legend of Erechtheus, one of the most remote and obscure traditions of Greece, should be commemorated to this day by the existence of the Erechtheion, one of the most beautiful and perfect of the temples still standing on the Acropolis of Athens. The mystic cleft in the rock, ascribed by tradition to the dispute of Neptune and Pallas, is within its walls. But his memory is not undeservedly preserved on that spot, if, as Hyginus relates, Erichthonius et quadrigas et sacrificia Minerva, et templum in arce Athenarum 'primus instituit.' The building now in existence is supposed not to have been completed till near the end of the Peloponnesian War.