’Athulf. But, sirs, it is in haste—­in haste extreme—­
  Matters of state, and hot with haste.

  Second Monk.  My lord,
  We will so say, but truly at this present
  He is about to scourge himself.

  Athulf.  I’ll wait. 
  For a king’s ransom would I not cut short
  So good a work!  I pray you, for how long?

  Second Monk.  For twice the De Profundis, sung in slow time.

  Athulf.  Please him to make it ten times, I will wait. 
  And could I be of use, this knotted trifle,
  This dog-whip here has oft been worse employed.’

In his recent play, The Virgin Widow (1850), Mr Taylor declines from the promise of his earlier efforts.  The preface suggests great things; but they are not forthcoming.  There is much careful finish, much sententious rhetoric, much elegant description; but there is little of racy humour (the play is a ’romantic comedy’), little of poetical freshness, little of lively flesh and blood portraiture, and more of melodramatic expedience than dramatic construction.  Neither comedy nor melodrama is our author’s forte.

In 1836 Mr Taylor published The Statesman, a book which contained the ‘views and maxims respecting the transaction of public business,’ which had been suggested to its author by twelve years’ experience of official life.  He has since then allowed that it was wanting in that general interest which might possibly have been felt in the results of a more extensive and varied conversancy with public life.[9] In 1848 he produced Notes from Life, professedly a kind of supplemental volume to the former, embodying the conclusions of an attentive observation of life at large.  The first essay investigates in detail the right measure and manner to be adopted in getting, saving, spending, giving, taking, lending, borrowing, and bequeathing ‘money;’ and a weighty, valuable essay it is, with no lack of golden grains and eke of diamond-dust in its composition.  The thoughts are not given in the bullion lump, but are well refined, and having passed through the engraver’s hands, they shine with the true polish, ring with the true sound.  In terse, pregnant, and somewhat oracular diction, we are here instructed how to avoid the evils contingent upon bold commercial enterprise—­how to guard against excesses of the accumulative instinct—­how to exercise a thoroughly conscientious mode of regulating expenditure, eschewing prodigality, that vice of a weak nature, as avarice is of a strong one—­how to be generous in giving; ’for the essence of generosity is in self-sacrifice, waste, on the contrary, comes always by self-indulgence’—­how to withstand solicitations for loans, when the loans are to accommodate weak men in sacrificing the future to the present.  The essay on Humility and Independence is equally good, and pleasantly demonstrates