Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 70, No. 433, November 1851

And forthwith Elgiva, in spite of the king's resistance, is carried out a captive. The king, too, is imprisoned in the Tower, and here ensues a scene which brings out another aspect of the mind of Dunstan. It was the object of the crafty priest to induce Edwin to resign the crown; he had, therefore, made his imprisonment as painful as possible. He now visits him in the Tower, and in this interview we see, underneath the mad zealot and the subtle politician, something of the genuine man. Dunstan had not been always, and only, the priest; he understood the human life he trampled on —

"Dunstan. What makes you weak? Do you not like your food?
Or have you not enough?
Edwin. Enough is brought;
But he that brings it drops what seems to say
That it is mixed with poison – some slow drug;
So that I scarce dare eat, and hunger always.
Dunstan. Your food is poisoned by your own suspicions.
'Tis your own fault. —
But thus it is with kings; suspicions haunt,
And dangers press around them all their days;
Ambition galls them, luxury corrupts,
And wars and treasons are their talk at table.
Edwin. This homily you should read to prosperous kings;
It is not needed for a king like me.
Dunstan. Who shall read homilies to a prosperous king!
… To thy credulous ears
The world, or what is to a king the world,
The triflers of thy court, have imaged me
As cruel, and insensible to joy,
Austere, and ignorant of all delights
That arts can minister. Far from the truth
They wander who say thus. I but denounce
Loves on a throne, and pleasures out of place.
I am not old; not twenty years have fled
Since I was young as thou; and in my youth
I was not by those pleasures unapproached
Which youth converses with.
Edwin. No! wast thou not?
How came they in thy sight?
Dunstan. When Satan first
Attempted me, 'twas in a woman's shape;
Such shape as may have erst misled mankind,
When Greece or Rome upreared with Pagan rites
Temples to Venus…
… 'Twas Satan sang,
Because 'twas sung to me, whom God had called
To other pastime and severer joys.
But were it not for this, God's strict behest
Enjoined upon me – had I not been vowed
To holiest service rigorously required,
I should have owned it for an angel's voice,
Nor ever could an earthly crown, or toys
And childishness of vain ambition, gauds
And tinsels of the world, have lured my heart
Into the tangle of those mortal cares
That gather round a throne. What call is thine
From God or man, what voice within bids thee
Such pleasures to forego, such cares confront?

… Unless thou by an instant act
Renounce the crown, Elgiva shall not live.
The deed is ready, to which thy name affixed
Discharges from restraint both her and thee.
Say wilt thou sign?
Edwin. I will not.
Dunstan. Be advised.
What hast thou to surrender? I look round;
This chamber is thy palace court, and realm.
I do not see the crown – where is it hidden?
Is that thy throne? – why, 'tis a base joint-stool;
Or this thy sceptre? – 'tis an ashen stick
Notched with the days of thy captivity.
Such royalties to abdicate, methinks,
Should hardly hold thee long. Nay, I myself,
That love not ladies greatly, would give these
To ransom whom I loved."

These feelings of humanity, in part indeed simulated, do not long keep at bay the cruelty and insane rage or the priest. Edwin persists in his refusal; Dunstan leaves him for a moment, but shortly after returns holding the deed in his hand, and followed by his tool Grumo.

"Dunstan. Thy signature to this.
Edwin. I will not sign.
Dunstan. Thou wilt not! wilt thou that thy mistress die?
Edwin. Insulting abbot! she is not my mistress;
She is my wife, my queen.
Dunstan. Predestinate pair!
He knoweth who is the Searcher of our hearts,
That I was ever backward to take life,
Albeit at His command. Still have I striven
To put aside that service, seeking still
All ways and shifts that wit of man could scheme,
To spare the cutting off your wretched souls
In unrepented sin. But tendering here
Terms of redemption, it is thou, not I,
The sentence that deliverest.
Edwin. Our lives
Are in God's hands.
Dunstan. Sot, liar, miscreant, No!
God puts them into mine! and may my soul
In tortures howl away eternity,
If ever again it yield to that false fear
That turned me from the shedding of thy blood!
Thy blood, rash traitor to thy God, thy blood!
Thou delicate Agag, I will spill thy blood!"

We believe we have done justice to all the aspects in which the character of Dunstan is here represented to us, but it would require a much larger space than we have at command to do justice to the whole drama of Edwin the Fair. The canvass is crowded with figures, almost every one of which has been a careful study, and will repay the study of a critical reader; and if the passages of eloquent writing are not so numerous as in his previous work, there is no deficiency of them, and many are the pungent, if not witty sayings, that might be extracted. The chief fault which seems to us to pervade this drama, is, indeed, that there is too much apparent study – that too much is seen of the artist. Speaking generally of Mr Taylor, and regarding him as a dramatic poet, we could desire more life and passion, more abandonment of himself to the characters he is portraying. But we feel this more particularly in Edwin the Fair. We seem to see the artist sorting and putting together again the elements of human nature. His Wulfstan, the ever absent sage, his tricksy Emma, and her very silly lover, Ernway, are dramatic creations which may probably be defended point by point; but, for all that, they do not look like real men and women. As to his monks, the satellites of Dunstan, it may be said that they could not have been correctly drawn if they had borne the appearance of being real men. We do not like them notwithstanding.

In the edition which lies before us, bound up with Edwin the Fair is the republication of an early drama, Isaac Comnenus. It excited, we are told in the preface, little attention in its first appearance. We ourselves never saw it till very lately. Though inferior to his subsequent productions, it is not without considerable merit, but it will probably gather its chief interest as the forerunner of Philip Van Artevelde, and from the place it will occupy in the history of the author's mind. A first performance, which was allowed to pass unnoticed by the public, might be expected to be altogether different in kind from its fortunate successors. The author, in his advance out of obscurity into the full light of success, might be supposed to have thrown aside his first habits of thought and expression. It is not so here. We have much the same style, and there is the same combination of shrewd observation with a philosophic melancholy, the same gravity, and the same sarcasm. It is curious to notice how plainly there is the germ of Philip Van Artevelde in Isaac Comnenus. The hero of Ghent is far more sagacious, more serious, and more tender; but he looks on life with a lingering irony, and a calm cynicism: to him it is a sad and disenchanted vision. In Isaac Comnenus the same elements are combined in a somewhat different proportion: there is more of the irony and a more bitter cynicism; less of the grave tenderness and the practical sagacity. Artevelde is Isaac Comnenus living over life again – the same man, but with the advantage of a life's experience. Indeed Artevelde, if we may venture to jest with so grave a personage, has something of the air of one who had been in the world before, who was not walking along its paths for the first time: he treads with so sure a footstep, and seems to have no questions to ask, and nothing to learn of experience.