The Soldier of Fortune. A Tragedy in Five Acts. By
J. Leicester Warren. (Smith and Elder.)—The author of "Philoctetes" will always have a claim to attention, but it is impossible for a critic, with even the most favourable recollection of Mr. Lancaster's past achievements, to pronounce The Soldier of Fortune a success. Its enormous length, to begin with, alarms us. There are no less than six times as many lines as in an average Greek play, and three or four times as many as we have in a drama of Shakespeare, and the incidents are of the fewest. Conrad saves the kingdom of the aged and half-imbecile Sigismund, seeks the hand of his daughter and is contemptuously rejected, murders him, ascends the throne; incurs the hatred of his wife, who was a confidante, though not an accomplice, of the deed by which he won the crown ; and meets with his punishment from her, when she murders his child and exhibits the dead body in the church where the infant was to bo betrothed to the daughter of a neigh- bouring king. There is no really dramatic situation, no genuine tragical power throughout the play, not even an attempt to give a variety to the language, or to distinguish between one character and another. Whatever their position, whatever the exigency of the time, they are equally long-winded, equally profuse of more or less extravagant metaphor. For the space of forty-two pages—more than a thousand lines, a apace in which lEschylus concludes the magnificent drama of the "Bound Prometheus"— Sigismund and Bertha rant at each other, and tell us nothing either about themselves or their belongings that might not have been told in fifty lines. Mr. Warren's verse is always carefully constructed. Sometimes it rises into dignity. Its rhetoric has often a certain power, and it is often truly poetical, but it fails seriously
in taste, and any dramatic quality it absolutely lacks. Here is a specimen of Mr. Warren's manner, which makes us think that he would be better for reading " Firmilian ":—
I am sick with hatred: earth is sick and leer
Of all delightful aspects. I discern Only a lame, pale sun grating along Above me in an awful mist of clouds.
The grassy valleys of the landscape seem Red with the knots of interlacing worms,
Plum-coloured coils, with yellow humpy bands;
The garden leaves are drilled away to ribs By the palmer and the locust. There were meadows,
But they seem poisoned as with furnace-scum.
Here went a grass-green mountain rivulet, And now the filthy mother of the stye Would hardly snuff at those polluted waves, Where the green ribbon crusts the stinking ooze."
What a passage that is about the worms
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