This last is the rendering of the character which Mr Taylor has selected. It is evidently the most difficult to treat. Perhaps the difficulty and novelty of the task it presented, as well as its greater fidelity to history, induced him to accept this interpretation. That second and more popular one which we have mentioned would appear, to a mind like Mr Taylor's, too facile and too trite. Any high-churchman of almost any age--any bishop, if you inflate the lawn sleeves, or even any young curate, whose mind dwells too intensely on the _power of the keys_--would present the rudiments of the character. However that may be, Mr Taylor undertook the bold and difficult task of depicting the strong, shrewd, fervent mind, saint and politician both, but acting with the wild and irregular force of insanity. How, we may ask ourselves, would such a mind display itself? Not, we way be sure, in a tissue of weakness or of wildness. We should often see the ingenious reasoner, more cunning than wise, the subtle politician, or even the deep moraliser upon human life; but whenever the fatal chords were touched--the priestly power, the priestly mission, the intercourse with the world of spirits--there we should see symptoms of insanity and delusion. Such is the character which Mr Taylor has portrayed.
Earl Leolf, calm and intelligent, and the perfect _gentleman_ (those who remember the play will feel the truth of this last expression,) gives us at the very commencement the necessary explanation--
"_Leolf._ How found you the mid-counties? _Athulf._ Oh! monk-ridden; Raving of Dunstan. _Leolf._ 'Tis a raving time: Mad monks, mad peasants; _Dunstan is not sane, And madness that doth least declare itself Endangers most, and ever most infects The unsound many._ See where stands the man, And where this people: thus compute the peril To one and all. _When force and cunning meet Upon the confines of one cloudy mind_, When ignorance and knowledge halve the mass, When night and day stand at an equinox, Then storms are rife."
No justice, it is plain, can be done to Mr Taylor's drama, unless the intimation here given us be kept in view. Yet we suspect, from the remarks sometimes made upon this play, that it has been overlooked, or not sufficiently attended to. Passages have been censured as crude or extravagant which, in themselves, could be no otherwise, since they were intended to portray this half-latent and half-revealed insanity. The arrogance of Dunstan, and his communings with the spiritual world, not often have the air of sublimity, for they arise from the disorder and hallucination of his mind. When he tells the Queen Mother not to sit in his presence, as well as when he boasts of his intercourse with angels and demons, we see the workings of a perturbed spirit:--