Indeed I think no man
would have sought my Father's daily society who was not predominantly
given to reflection. What is very striking in this play is the character
of the heroine, whose earnest and scrupulous devotion to her mother
occasions the partial estrangement of her lover, d'Ormond, and, in its
consequences, an overwhelming misery, which overturns her reason and
causes her death, and thus, through remorse, works the conversion of
those guilty persons of the drama, who have been slaves to passion, but
are not all "enslaved, nor wholly vile." Strong is the contrast which
this play presents, in its exhibition of the female character, with that
of the celebrated French and German writers, who have treated similar
subjects. Men write,--I have heard a painter say, men even paint,--as
they feel and as they are. Goethe's Margaret has been thought equal to
Shakespeare's Ophelia and Desdemona; in some respects it is so; but it
is like a pot of sweet ointment into which some tainting matter has
fallen. I think no Englishman of Goethe's genius and sensibility would
have described a maiden, whom it was his intention to represent, though
frail on one point, yet lovely and gentle-hearted, as capable of being
induced to give her poor old mother a sleeping potion. "It will do her
no harm." But the risk!--affection gives the wisdom of the serpent
where there would else be but the simplicity of the dove.
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