tells us that, to enjoy poetry, we must combine a more than ordinary sympathy with the objects, emotions, or incidents contemplated by the poet, consequent on rare sensibility, with a more than ordinary activity of the mind in respect of the fancy and imagination.  This more than ordinary mental activity is especially demanded from the readers—­say rather the students—­of Philip van Artevelde and its kindred dramas.  Those who are thus equipped will commonly be found to agree in admiring the writings of this author; among them he is unquestionably ‘popular,’ if it be any test of popularity to send forth a second edition three months after the first.  Scholarship can appreciate, pure intellect can find nutriment in, his reflective and carefully-wrought pages.  His heroes and heroines, cold and unimpassioned to the man of society, are classic and genial to the man of thought.  A Quarterly Reviewer observes, that the blended dignity of thought, and a sedate moral habit, invests his poetry with a stateliness in which the drama is generally deficient, and makes his writings illustrate, in some degree, a new form of the art.  In all that he writes he stands revealed the true English gentleman, ‘that grand old name,’ as Tennyson calls it,

    Defamed by every charlatan,
    And soiled with all ignoble use.’

Isaac Comnenus—­in which a recent critic discovers much of that Byronian vein upon which Mr Taylor is severe in his own criticisms—­being little remarkable in itself, as well as the least remarkable of his dramatic performances, need not detain us.  The career of Philip van Artevelde belongs to an era when, as Sir James Stephen remarks, the whole of Europe, under the influence of some strange sympathy, was agitated by the simultaneous discontents of all her great civic populations—­when the insurgent spirit, commencing in the Italian republics, had spread from the south to the north of the Alps, everywhere marking its advance by tumult, spoil, and bloodshed.  ’Wat Tyler and his bands had menaced London; and the communes of Flanders, under the command of Philip van Artevelde, had broken out into open war with the counts, their seigneurs, and with their suzerain lord, the Duke of Burgundy.  On the issue of that attempt the fate of the royal and baronial power seemed to hang in France, not less than in Flanders.’[5] The drama composed by Mr Taylor to represent the fortunes of the ’Chief Captain of the White Hoods and of Ghent,’ consists of two plays and an interlude—­The Lay of Elena—­and being, as he says in his preface, equal in length to about six such plays as are adapted to the stage, was not, of course, intended to solicit the most sweet voices of pit and gallery, although it has since been subjected to that ordeal at the instance of Mr Macready.  Historic truth is said to be preserved in it, as far as the material events are concerned—­with the usual exception of such occasional dilatations and compressions of