Our author carried through life a very fair reputation, he was beloved and esteemed by Mr. Pope, who honoured him with a beautiful epitaph.  Mr. Fenton after a life of ease and tranquility, died at East-Hampstead-Park, near Oakingham, the 13th of July 1730, much regretted by all men of taste, not being obnoxious to the resentment even of his brother writers.

In the year 1723, Mr. Fenton introduced upon the stage his Tragedy of Mariamne, built upon the story related of her in the third volume of the Spectator, Numb. 171, which the ingenious author collected out of Josephus.  As this story so fully displays the nature of the passion of jealousy, and discovers so extraordinary a character as that of Herod, we shall here insert it, after which we shall consider with what success Mr. Fenton has managed the plot.  In a former paper, the author having treated the passion of jealousy in various lights, and marked its progress through the human mind, concludes his animadversions with this story, which he says may serve as an example to whatever can be said on that subject.

’Mariamne had all the charms that beauty, birth, wit, and youth could give a woman, and Herod all the love that such charms are able to raise in a warm and amorous disposition.  In the midst of his fondness for Mariamne, he put her brother to death, as he did her father not many years after.  The barbarity of the action was represented to Mark Anthony, who immediately summoned Herod into Egypt, to answer for the crime that was laid to his charge:  Herod attributed the summons to Anthony’s desire of Mariamne, whom therefore before his departure, he gave into the custody of his uncle Joseph, with private orders to put her to death, if any such violence was offered to himself.  This Joseph was much delighted with Mariamne’s conversation, and endeavoured with all his art and rhetoric to set out the excess of Herod’s passion for her; but when he still found her cold and incredulous, he inconsiderately told her, as a certain instance of her lord’s affection, the private orders he had left behind him, which plainly shewed, according to Joseph’s interpretation, that he could neither live nor die without her.  This barbarous instance of a wild unreasonable passion quite put out for a time those little remains of affection, she still had for her lord:  Her thoughts were so wholly taken up with the cruelty of his orders, that she could not consider the kindness which produced them; and therefore represented him in her imagination, rather under the frightful idea of a murderer, than a lover.

’Herod was at length acquitted, and dismiss’d by Mark Anthony, when his soul was all in flames for his Mariamne; but before their meeting he was not a little alarmed at the report he had heard of his uncle’s conversation and familiarity with her in his absence.  This therefore was the first discourse he entertained her with, in which she found it no easy matter to quiet his