This tragedy has a construction which we will not attempt to construe. To construe some of its single lines has been too much for us. It rarely diverges much from the narratives of the prose chroniclers of the epoch; the chief divergence, perhaps, being that they give a less prosy account of the matter. Yet the poet is no groundling, either; he soars pretty high at times, and leaves us in amaze at the altitudes he affects. His imagery is almost as profuse as that of Mr. Alexander Smith, though without much likeness in other respects. Let us cull a dainty similitude here and there—not, indeed, picking and choosing, but taking them indifferently as they come. Saith Barrère to Robespierre
And perched in mist, as high an eagle sits,
At whose mere hoot the hawk his quarry quits,
You, wrapt in terror, wield its arm supreme.
In vain the Safety seize whom you redeem ….
You wield that axe, which hangs o'er every brain,
Like Thor's own hammer, and descends like rain.
Convention and Committee spurned as dust,
You haunt the Jacobins—like youth in lust.
This is uncivil. But the disputants make it up, or pretend to do so; Barrère exclaiming as he goes out, in the most cordial manner,
To-morrow, then, tell France, and tell mankind,
Our hearts are hence as axe and helve combined.
Adieu! I fly with olive o'er the flood,
To cheer our colleagues, and pledge peace in blood.
But as soon as he is gone, Robespierre (who, like ourselves, appears dull to the beauty of Barrère's similitudes) is distrustful enough to observe to St. Just—
His olive flies to pilot us to wreck;
and St. Just concurs, by adding,
Their axe and helve seek nothing but our neck!
whereupon his bilious guide, philosopher, and friend remarks—
But his to-morrow shall be ripe and rank,
To chop with half his colleagues o'er the plank.
(A couplet that might, peradventure, "bring down the house," if the house limited its entrance fees to "Boxes threepence," and pit and gallery in proportion. Indeed, Mr. Bliss is great in passages that the gods of the minors—Dî minorum—would relish; Whitechapel butchers, for instance, and the subs and supers of the slaughter-house; for he has a knack at writing such lines as,
Whence, flash on flash, a clanking cleaver swoops;
The neck-stroke echoes, and heads roll as hoops. (p. 4.)
Or, again—
A clink, a cleaver's swoop, a clank, cut, crash—
And death. 'Tis nothing. Severed heads may gnash,
May scowl—A bullock's, galvanized, can more.
An instant spasm—and life and death are o'er.
The gurgling flash, the forehead plunging prone,
The hireling's hiss, the crush of flesh and bone, &c. (p. 8.)
