Immediately another Prosopopoeia is introduced. She thinks she hears her angry father rebuking her: Vilis Europe (pater urget absens) Quid mori cessas? &c. Of this dramatic species, also, is the conclusion of the eleventh ode of the third book, where one of the daughters of Danaüs, who is not base enough to comply with her father's commands, dismisses her husband with a speech that is much in character. I cannot forbear adding, that of this kind, likewise, is the whole of the fifth. Epode, upon which I beg leave to be a little particular, as I do not remember to have seen it considered as it ought to be. It suddenly breaks out with a beautiful and forcible abruptness: At O Deorum quisquis in cœlo regis Terras et humanum genus, Quid iste fert tumultus? aut quid omnium Vultus in unum me truces? It is a boy utters these words, who beholds him self surrounded by an horrible band of witches, with with Canidia at their head, who instantly seize and strip him, in order to make a love-potion of his body. He proceeds to deprecate their undeserved rage by moving supplications, and such as are adapted to his age and situation : Per liberos te, si vocata partubus Lucina veris adfuit; Per hoc inane purpuræ decus, precor, The poet goes on to enumerate, with due solemnity, the ingredients of the charm. Those which Shakespeare, in his Macbeth, has described, as being thrown into the magical caldron, have a near resemblance with these of Horace; It is observable, that Shakespeare, on this great occasion, which involves the fate of a king, multiplies all the circumstances of horror. The babe, whose finger is used in the enchantment, must be strangled in its birth: the grease must not only be human, but must have dropped from a gibbet, the gibbet of a murderer; and even the sow, whose blood is used, must have offended nature by devouring her own farrow. Johnson's Observations on Macbeth. Act. IV. Scene 1. 1 race; but he has added others well calculated to impress the deepest terror, from his own imagination. Canidia having placed the victim in a pit where he was gradually to be starved to death, begins to speak in the following awful and striking manner : O Rebus meis Non infideles arbitræ, Nox, & Diana, quæ silentium regis, Arcana cum fiunt sacra! Nunc, nunc adeste! nunc in hostiles domos Iram atque numen vertite, &c. But she suddenly stops, surprised to see the incantation fail: Quid accidit?-cur dira barbaræ minus Venena Medeæ valent? In a few lines more, she discovers the reason that her charms are inefficacious: Ah, ah solutus ambulat veneficæ, &c. She resolves therefore to double them: Majus * Majus parabo: majus infundam tibi And * Sanadon has a remark in the true spirit of a fastidious French critic. "These descriptions of witchcraft must have been very pleasing to ancient poets, since they dwell upon them so largely and frequently. But surely such objects have so much horror in them, that they cannot be presented with too much haste and rapidity to the imagination."-Such false delicacy and refinement have rendered some of the French incapable of relishing many of the forcible and masculine images with which the ancients strengthened their compositions. The most natural strokes in a poem that most abounds with them, the Odyssey, is to such judges a fund of ridicule. They must needs nauseate the scenes that lie in Eumeus's cottage, and despise the coarse ideas of so ill-bred a princess as Nausicaa. Much less can such effeminate judges bear the bold and severe strokes, the terrible graces, of our irregular Shakespeare, especially in his scenes of magic and incantations. These gothic charms are, in truth, more striking to the imagination than the classical. The magicians of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser, have more powerful spells than those of Apollonius, Seneca, and Lucan. The inchanted forest of Ismeno is more awfully and tremendously poetical, than even the Grove which Cæsar orders to be cut down in Lucan, l. iii. 400, which was so full of terrors, that, at noon day or midnight, the Priest himself dared not approach it, Dreading the Dæmon of the Grove to meet! Who, that sees the sable plumes waving on the prodigious helmet in the Castle of Otranto, and the gigantic arm on the top of And concludes with this spirited threat: Priusque cœlum sidet inferius mari Tellure porrecta super, Quain non amore sic meo flagres, uti The boy, on hearing his fate cruelly determined, no longer endeavours to sue for mercy, but breaks out into those bitter and natural execrations, mixed with a tender mention of his parents, which reach to the end of the Ode. If we consider how naturally the fear of the boy is expressed in the first speech, and how the dreadful character of Canidia is supported in the second, and the various turns of passion with which she is agitated, and if we add to these the concluding imprecations, we must own that this of the great staircase, is not more affected than with the paintings of Ovid and Apuleius? What a group of dreadful images do we meet with in the Edda! The Runic poetry abounds in them. Such is Gray's thrilling Ode on the Descent of Odin. 'Tis remarkable, that the idea of the Fatal Sisters weaving the Danish standard, bears a marvellous resemblance to a passage in Sophocles, Ajax, v. 1053. « Did not Erinnys herself make this sword? and Pluto, that dreadful workman, this belt? 66 |