39 NOTE ON THE WITNESS, We are not acquainted with any drama in the English language, which resembles this piece, as far indeed as our knowledge extends; it is entitled to be regarded as an original composition. Yet the characters are not out of the course of nature, and the incidents, though possessing a deep superstitious interest, are in themselves so very simple, that they can scarcely be considered as inventions. It is the author's coloring which bestows on them all their peculiar dignity. The subject in itself seems almost incapable of dramatic situations. A man has been many years ago murdered by some unknown assassin. The occurrence is forgotten by every one except his widow aud a gentleman of a most estimable character, who has compassionately assisted the poor woman from the period of her husband's death. In the course of the play, the widow, in a fit of momentary disappointment, accuses her benefactor of the murder, and by a singular train of metaphysical reflections the judge is led to suspect that the gentleman actually did commit the crime, and in consequence so works upon his imagination as to obtain a confession of the fact. How far the author has succeeded in managing with due effect this delicate attempt, the reader's feelings alone can properly appreciate. The design has at least the merit of novelty. The author has omitted to mention in what country the scene is laid, and the reader is left at a loss to understand whether the place is a real town, or, as well as the circumstances, fictitious. We are of opinion that the whole is an invention, contrived to afford opportunities for unfolding a universal principle in the human mind, and that the subject has no local reference, but is applicable to the process of every man's reflection and associations. In this respect the play may be regarded as a philosophical essay. Besides that of the main story, a minor interest is created by a developement of the passion of fear on the character of Ariette. The passions, without doubt, take their complexion from constitutional peculiarities. The character of Ariette, though in unison with the tone of the composition, is, we apprehend, of too rare a kind to excite general sympathy. There is a degree of tenderness, a fragility of reason about her, beyond even what the general opinion of the world ascribes to the excess of sensibility in romantic girls. We are not sure that the author has failed in his delineation; but it will not be denied that he has painted a being that seems to be more for ornament than use in this world. She however serves to augment the interest of his drama. The character of Isbel is not only the most prominent in the piece, but, as a dramatic portrait, we think, unique. She is a mixture of religious confidence, insane enthusiasm, correct feeling, erroneous judgment, and acute observation, with a disposition to draw fanciful inferences; the effect of these contrarieties in combination is, at once, wildly impassioned and affectingly simple. Without such a character, the play would probably have been tedious, and yet the catastrophe depends less on her, than on the judge, who is represented as a calm dignified personage distinguished by a sedate sagacity more than by any of those emphatic qualities which are supposed to be indispensable to proper dramatic characters. We remember some years ago to have read in a publication called "The Phantasmagoria," a story which bore some resemblance to the catastrophe of the Witness. A person who had been accused of murder, being placed at the bar, appeared to be suddenly and strangely agitated, and enquired of the judge if a man could give evidence in his own cause. The judge suspecting from the tremor with which the man looked towards the witnesses' box, then empty, that he was under some superstitious terror, answered that it depended on the circumstance, and certainly in the present case he might-" Then” exclaimed the culprit "I am lost for I see the man 1 murdered in the witnesses' box". A story mentioned by Barnes, in his history of Edward III. has been pointed out to us, as probably the source from which the author was led to imagine the character of Ariette, and we think that the incidental circumstance alluded to in the second scene of the first act, was probably derived from Barnes, or some ballad founded on the story which he relates. "It is reported," says he, "that a young woman named Joan, living in the parish of Kingsly, in the Diocese of Winchester and the Deaconate of Aulton, being on the fourth of June at night, advised by a voice to go and meet her sweetheart William in the forest of Wolmar aforesaid, early in the morning met with an Incubus in his shape-at her return home she fell into a grievous malady, and then upon conference with her sweetheart William, it appeared that she had been seduced to her confusion by an evil spirit." |