the purpose of taking up their abode-young Thorney with his father at Edmonton itself, and Winnifrede with an uncle at Waltham-till time and Frank's endeavours had worked his father's love and liking to these stolen nuptials. Reports meantime of the marriage had got abroad, and it was not without feelings of the most painful kind that they had reached the ears of Frank's father himself. Encumbrances upon his estate had already circumscribed old Thorney's means of living, and his only mode of saving himself from more urgent distress consisted in a marriage, long before projected, between his son and the daughter of a neighbouring yeoman, Carter by name, whose wealth enabled him to offer such a portion with his girl, as would at once set free the lands of his poorer though more highly stationed neighbour. And the honest yeoman's Susan was one that would, though utterly portionless in money, have brought the best of dowries to a husband of her choice; and such it seems, though sought by suitors of a higher grade, had Frank long been in her young imagination. Pure, affectionate, confiding, faithful, Susan throughout exhibits all those native sweetnesses and sensibilities, which are not unfrequently found in humble life, and for which even the refinements of breeding and education seem at times but unequal substitutes. It will ensure the reader's detestation of Frank, to know that his seduction of Winnifrede must have been planned with a full knowledge on his part of a previous engagement to marry this excellent creature; it will add to this detestation to find the villain in his father's presence offering to fulfil this engagement, and with the most solemn oaths maintaining that there was nothing in his connexion with Winnifrede to prevent such an accomplishment of his father's wishes. The strong and multiplied assertions of young Thorney conquer even his father's violent suspicions; and the old man's fears being at last relieved, it is decided that the marriage between the young couple shall take place on the following day. The fearful perjuries of Frank, and the cold, calculating villainy which he displays throughout, render the scene between him and his father a painful one to the feelings, and the entrance of even a more frightful creature than Mother Sawyer, upon whom much of the under-plot hinges, would have been found a relief after such an interview; but the under-plots of Ford or Decker— after the greatest reductions-will be found a sufficient infliction on the reader's patience, without his undergoing a previous analysis of them; even though embracing, as the present one does, those prime attractions of our ancestors' fancies, a witch, a black dog or the devil, and a morrice with all its accompaniments of tabor and pipe, double bells, trebles, means, forehorse,* hobbyhorse, and Maid Marian to boot. * In Gosson's "Plays confuted in five Actions," the attractions of the hobby-horse and morrice are included among the other delights which the devil according to this repentant dramatist had created for the seduction of mens' souls. "For the eye, beeside the beautie of the houses and the stage, hee (the devil) sendeth in gearish apparel, mashes, ranting, tumbling, dauncing of gigges, galiardes, moriscos, hobbi-horses, nothing forgot that might serve to set out the matter with pompe, or ravish the beholders with varietie of pleasure." What would poor Gosson's language have been, had he seen the embellishments of the present stage? Susan and Frank are now married; and conscience already begins to do its work with this double husband. His days seem but a waking dream; and in his sleep sudden and distracted accents show a mind at enmity with peace. These appearances give birth to one of the tenderest and most interesting of scenes: the efforts of the young bride to ascertain the cause of this disorder ;the ominous words and half-intelligible sentences which drop from Frank himself—the fear of the modest Susan that some impropriety in her own behaviour may have occasioned this lapse from happiness in her husband— the mixed warmth and pudency in her language, together with the utter abandonment of self and passionate regard for her husband, which she displays-all these feelings are brought out with such inimitable skill, that if, as Mr. Gifford supposes, this part of the act was written by Decker, it must convey the highest opinion of his taste and judgment, and convince us that, under happier circumstances, he might have become one of the mightiest masters of his art. The fears of Susan finally resolve themselves into a persuasion, that an intended single combat with young Warbeck, (a discarded suitor of her own,) is the occasion of her husband's perplexing conduct; and this persuasion is accompanied by a resolution on her part not to leave him on the trying occasion-" cost it her undoing and unto that her life." That cost of life was nearer than this fond and faithful creature imagined. The next appearance of the guilty Frank is in com. pany with Winnifrede, drest in a page's habit. His second wife's portion, the dowry of his sin, is in his hand; and with this "foul ill-gotten coin" as his com panion terms it, a couple of horses are in readiness to convey himself and Winnifrede to some distant country, where his recent wife is to be quite forgot, and “have no name in his remembrance." A previous conversation, full of course of lies, on the part of Frank, had prepared Susan for these appearances, and only the parting scene remained to take place between them. The fond creature hangs over it as long as possible :—some affectionate directions to his supposed page-some lingering questions to himself-one pasture more-up to that knot of trees, and then among those shadows she will vanish from him. The pasture is crossed-the knot of trees is reached-and-the knife of the treacherous Frank is in her bosom. And as if the pangs of death were not enough, the monster, in coarser terms than our pages can admit, utters what might have added even to the pains of dissolution itself:-but the murderer knew not the pure mind he had to deal with : Sus. Die? oh, 'twas time! How many years might I have slept in sin! It is time to close this analysis: the attempt of the murderer to fasten the guilty deed on Warbeck, the rejected suitor of his victim, and Somerton the accepted lover of her sister Katherine-the detection of the real criminal-the horrors which surround Frank's sick bedand the scene which closes for ever his earthly prospects, will be found to possess the deepest interest. smile may perhaps be excited by the simple means which lead to young Thorney's detection; but the smile A can be but a momentary one; even Ford himself seems to have suspected, that the fearful and harrowing feelings which he had conjured up required some allayment; and accordingly with consummate art he has thrown such a sincere feeling of penitence and remorse round the "last days" of the wretched Frank, that even the commiseration of those, who had been the greatest sufferers by his villainy, is won for the last moments of the repentant sufferer, and the language of the honest yeoman, Carter, becomes almost that of the reader: "Go thy ways; I did not think to have shed one tear for thee, but thou hast made me water my plants spite of my heart." |