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THE WITCH OF EDMONTON.] This tragi-comedy, which appears to have been brought on the stage in 1623, was not published till 1658. It was composed, as the title of the quarto edition bears, "by divers well esteemed poets, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, &c." It was acted by the prince's servants, often at the Cockpit in Drury Lane, and once at court, with singular applause. There is a rude woodcut on the titlepage of the quarto, with a portrait of the witch (Mother Sawyer), her familiar a black dog, and Cuddy Banks the clown of the piece, in the water. That no doubts might arise of the likenesses, the portraits are respectively authenticated by their proper names.

"It seems to have been a trick of the trade," says Mr. Gifford, "to accumulate a number of names in the titlepage, to catch as many readers as possible; and Rowley's was deservedly a very marketable name. Not content with the trio, they add after Ford an &c. With these we need not meddle, and I presume we may venture to dismiss Rowley, with the allowance of an occasional passage, since the drama seems fairly to divide itself between the other two, whose style is well understood, and here strongly marked."

If the witch of Ford's days was, as we have already intimated, a far less splendid intellectual creation than the sorceress of the present time, it gives one advantage to the play before us, by maintaining her in better keeping with the other characters, which are all derived from the middle or lower ranks of life. It is not, however, from tragedies of "stateliest and most regal argument" alone, as the reader of the following drama will feel himself compelled to acknowledge, that situations of the deepest interest and most heart-rending pathos can be derived.

Frank Thorney, the son of a gentleman, but whom his father's straitened circumstances had brought into some office of servitude with Sir Arthur Clarington, had won "the conquest of a fellow-servant's maiden-love," and was, it seems, in prospect of becoming a father by her. This error is repaired, as far as it can be, by a secret marriage; and Winnifrede, who at first displays a little of that harshness of character which a deviation from virtue generally

begets upon persons of strong natural intellect and a keen moral sense, gradually steals upon the reader's mind by the warmth of her attachment to her undeserving husband, by the depth of her repentance, and the evident purpose and fixed resolve, which ensure the future rectitude of her conduct.

Though Winnifrede's conscience had been thus in some degree relieved, it was a great object with the wily Frank to conceal their marriage from his father, till the inheritance to which he was born should be so assured, that no future resentment of the old man shall be able to "cross the thriving" of his recent engagements. In this scheme he is assisted with letters by Sir Arthur Clarington, who has his own reasons for accommodating himself to the views of his late "servant," and who exhibits, at least in the opening act of the drama, a character far more odious than even Frank himself. With a promise (and it appears to have been but a promise) of two hundred pounds from Sir Arthur to assist their occasions, the new-married pair leave the neighbourhood of Edmonton, for 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 villany 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 underplot hinges, would have been found a relief after such an interview; but the underplots 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 morris with all its accompaniments of tabor and pipe, double bells, trebles, means, forehorse,' hobby-horse, and Maid Marian to boot.

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

1 In Gosson's "Plays confuted in five Actions," the attractions of the hobby-horse and morris are included among the other delights which the Devil, according to this repentant dramatist, had created for the seduction of men's 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?

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 company with Winnifrede, dressed 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 companion 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, 't was time!

How many years might I have slept in sin!
The sin of my most hatred, too, adultery!

It is time to close this analysis: the attempt of the mur derer 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-bed-and the scene which closes for ever his earthly prospects, will be found to possess the deepest interest. A smile may perhaps be excited by the simple means which lead to young Thorney's detection; but the smile 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 villany 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."

VOL. II.-13

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