| Would turn his kind to planless brutishness. |
| His knavery soars, indeed, and strikes the stars, |
| Yet is worse knavery than the meanest felon’s. |
| (Strafford fixes his eyes on Pym, who hesitates.) |
| Oh! no, my Lords, Oh! no, |
| (Aside to Hampden.) His eye confounds me; |
| he[1] was once my friend. |
| (Aloud.) Oh! no, my Lords, the very self-same rule, &c. |
The eloquence of this period could not be improved upon; but it is much to select from and use its ebullitions with the fine effect we admire in this play. Whatever view be taken of Strafford, whether as condemnatory as the majority of writers popular among us, the descendants of the puritans, would promote, or that more lenient and discriminating, brought out in this play, for which abundant grounds may be discovered by those who will seek, we cannot view him at this period but with the interest of tragedy as of one suffering unjustly. For however noble the eloquence of the parliamentary leaders in appealing to a law above the law, to an eternal justice in the breast, which afforded sufficient sanction to the desired measure, it cannot but be seen, at this distance of time, that this reigned not purely in their own breasts, that his doom, though sought by them from patriotic, not interested, motives, was, in itself, a measure of expediency. He was the victim, because the most dreaded foe, because they could not go on with confidence, while the only man lived, who could and would sustain Charles in his absurd and wicked policy. Thus, though
- ↑ Through the whole of the speech Strafford is described to have been closely and earnestly watching Pym, when the latter suddenly turning, met the fixed and faded eyes and haggard features of his early associate, and a rush of feelings from other days, so fearfully contrasting the youth and friendship of the past with the love-poisoned hate of the present, and the mortal agony impending in the future, for a moment deprived the patriot of self-possession. “His papers he looked on,” says Baillie, “but they could not help him, so he behooved to pass them.” For a moment only; suddenly recovering his dignity and self-command, he told the court, &c.—Life of Pym, Cabinet Cyclopædia.
