his hand to the plough of action, with clear foresight, not blindfold
bravery, his language is--'Though I indulge no more the dream of
living, as I hoped I might have lived, a life of temperate and
thoughtful joy, yet I repine not, and from this time forth will cast
no look behind.' The first part of the drama leaves him an exultant
victor, an honourable prosperous, and happy man. The second
part--which alike in interest and treatment is very inferior to the
first--finds him falling, and leaves him 'fallen, fallen, fallen, from
his high estate.' His sun, no longer trailing clouds of glory, sets in
a wintry and misty gloom. And yet in the act of dying he emits flashes
of the ancient brightness, and we feel that so dies a hero. The other
_dramatis personæ_ pale their ineffectual fires before his central
light.

After a silence of nearly ten years--characteristic of Mr Taylor's
deliberative and disciplined mind--he produced (1842) _Edwin the
Fair_, of whose story the little that was known, he observes, was
romantic enough to have impressed itself on the popular memory--the
tale of _Edwy and Elgiva_ having been current in the nursery long
before it came to be studied as a historical question. In illustrating
this tale he borrows from the bordering reigns 'incidents which were
characteristic of the times,' though some are of opinion, that his
deviation from historical truth has rather impaired than aided the
poetical effect of the drama. With artistic skill, and often with
sustained energy, he develops the career of the 'All-Fair' prince, and
his relation to the monkish struggle of the tenth century; the hostile
intrigues and stormy violence of Dunstan; the loyal tenacity and Saxon
frank-heartedness of Earl Leolf and his allies; the celebrated
coronation-scene, and 'most admired disorder' of the banquet; the
discovery and denunciation of Edwin's secret nuptials; his