time as are required in dramatic composition.  And notwithstanding the limited imagination and the too artificial passion which characterise it, Philip van Artevelde is in very many respects a noble work, as it certainly is its author’s chef-d’oeuvre.  It has been pronounced by no mean authority the superior of every dramatic composition of modern times, including the Sardanapalus of Lord Byron, the Remorse of Coleridge, and the Cenci of Shelley.  The portraiture of Philip is one of those elaborate and highly-finished studies which repay as well as require minute investigation.  He is at once profoundly meditative and surpassingly active.  His energy of brain is only rivalled by his readiness of hand.  In him the active mood and the passive—­the practical and the ideal—­the objective and the subjective—­are not as parallel lines that never meet, but are sections of one line, describing the circle of his all-embracing mind.  His youth has been, that of a dreamy recluse, the scorn of men of the world.  ’Oh, fear him not, my lord,’ says one of them to the Earl of Flanders: 

                       —­’His father’s name
    Is all that from his father[6] he derives. 
    He is a man of singular address
    In catching river fish.  His life hath been
    Till now, more like a peasant’s or a monk’s,
    Than like the issue of so great a man.’

Similarly the earl himself describes him as ’a man that as much knowledge has of war as I of brewing mead—­a bookish nursling of the monks—­a meacock.’  But when the last scene of all has closed his strange eventful history, the testimony of a nobler, wiser foe,[7] ascribes to him great gifts of courage, discretion, wit, an equal temper, an ample soul, rock-bound and fortified against assaults of transitory passion, but founded on a surging subterranean fire that stirs him to lofty enterprise—­a man prompt, capable, and calm, wanting nothing in soldiership except good-fortune.  Ever tempted to reverie, he yet refuses, even for one little hour, to yield up the weal of Flanders to idle thought or vacant retrospect.  Having once put his hand to the plough of action, with clear foresight, not blindfold bravery, his language is—­’Though I indulge no more the dream of living, as I hoped I might have lived, a life of temperate and thoughtful joy, yet I repine not, and from this time forth will cast no look behind.’  The first part of the drama leaves him an exultant victor, an honourable prosperous, and happy man.  The second part—­which alike in interest and treatment is very inferior to the first—­finds him falling, and leaves him ’fallen, fallen, fallen, from his high estate.’  His sun, no longer trailing clouds of glory, sets in a wintry and misty gloom.  And yet in the act of dying he emits flashes of the ancient brightness, and we feel that so dies a hero.  The other dramatis personae pale their ineffectual fires before his central light.