Count Julian | Page 5

nothing but "Gebir." His friend Hogg says that when he went to Shelley's rooms one morning to tell him something of importance, he could not draw his attention away from "Gebir." Hogg impatiently threw the book out of window. It was brought back by a servant, and Shelley immediately fastened upon it again.
At the close of 1805 Landor's father died, and the young poet became a man of property. In 1808 Southey and Landor first met. Their friendship remained unbroken. When Spain rose to throw off the yoke of Napoleon, Landor's enthusiasm carried him to Corunna, where he paid for the equipment of a thousand volunteers, and joined the Spanish army of the North. After the Convention of Cintra he returned to England. Then he bought a large Welsh estate--Llanthony Priory--paid for it by selling other property, and began costly improvements. But he lived chiefly at Bath, where he married, in 1811, when his age was thirty-six, a girl of twenty. It was then that he began his tragedy of "Count Julian." The patriotic struggle in Spain commended at the same time to Scott, Southey, and Landor the story of Roderick, the last of the Gothic kings, against whom, to avenge wrong done to his daughter, Count Julian called the Moors in to invade his country. In 1810 Southey was working at his poem of "Roderick the Last of the Goths," in fellowship with his friend Landor, who was treating the same subject in his play. Scott's "Roderick" was being printed so nearly at the same time with Landor's play, that Landor wrote to Southey early in 1812 while the proof-sheets were coming to him: "I am surprised that Upham has not sent me Mr. Scott's poem yet. However, I am not sorry. I feel a sort of satisfaction that mine is going to the press first, though there is little danger that we should think on any subject alike, or stumble on any one character in the same track." De Quincey spoke of the hidden torture shown in Landor's play to be ever present in the mind of Count Julian, the betrayer of his country, as greater than the tortures inflicted in old Rome on generals who had committed treason. De Quincey's admiration of this play was more than once expressed. "Mr. Landor," he said, "who always rises with his subject, and dilates like Satan into Teneriffe or Atlas when he sees before him an antagonist worthy of his powers, is probably the one man in Europe that has adequately conceived the situation, the stern self-dependency, and the monumental misery of Count Julian. That sublimity of penitential grief, which cannot accept consolation from man, cannot bear external reproach, cannot condescend to notice insult, cannot so much as SEE the curiosity of bystanders; that awful carelessness of all but the troubled deeps within his own heart, and of God's spirit brooding upon their surface and searching their abysses; never was so majestically described."
H. M.

CHARACTERS.

COUNT JULIAN. RODERIGO, King of Spain. OPAS, Metropolitan of Seville. SISABERT, betrothed to Covilla. MUZA, Prince of Mauritania. ABDALAZIS, Son of Muza. TARIK, Moorish Chieftain. COVILLA, Daughter of Julian. EGILONA, Wife of Roderigo. HERNANDO, } OSMA, } Officers. RAMIRO, &c. }

FIRST ACT: FIRST SCENE.

Camp of JULIAN.
OPAS. JULIAN.
OPAS. See her, Count Julian: if thou lovest God, See thy lost child.
JUL. I have avenged me, Opas, More than enough: I only sought to hurl The brands of war on one detested head, And die upon his ruin. O my country! O lost to honour, to thyself, to me, Why on barbarian hands devolves thy cause, Spoilers, blasphemers!
OPAS. Is it thus, Don Julian, When thy own offspring, that beloved child, For whom alone these very acts were done By them and thee, when thy Covilla stands An outcast and a suppliant at thy gate, Why that still stubborn agony of soul, Those struggles with the bars thyself imposed? Is she not thine? not dear to thee as ever?
JUL. Father of mercies! shew me none, whene'er The wrongs she suffers cease to wring my heart, Or I seek solace ever, but in death.
OPAS. What wilt thou do then, too unhappy man?
JUL. What have I done already? All my peace Has vanished; my fair fame in after-times Will wear an alien and uncomely form, Seen o'er the cities I have laid in dust, Countrymen slaughtered, friends abjured!
OPAS. And faith?
JUL. Alone now left me, filling up in part The narrow and waste intervals of grief: It promises that I shall see again My own lost child.
OPAS. Yes, at this very hour.
JUL. Till I have met the tyrant face to face, And gained a conquest greater than the last; Till he no longer rules one rood of Spain, And not one Spaniard, not one enemy, The least relenting, flags upon his flight; Till we