Lady Laura it as generous and impetuous as her predecessors; but not so true to reality or to art, in the elaboration of her passion. She holds a virtue higher than a grace, and therefore prefers honesty to bashfulness. Let the pillars of society quiver and quake as they list at her masculine procedure—she exults with masculine philosophy in her mens conscia recti—let them exclaim,
O, doubtful pass
To come to!—for a maiden unenforced
To tell her love! What can be urged for her?
What can she urge herself?
She is not a whit dumbfoundered by the cross-examination, but replies:
Why this,—that heaven
Inform'd her; so she knew its handiwork,
And worshipp'd heaven in it!
An unanswerable position to take up, in behalf of
A man to love whom is to boast one's self.
The world may utter its "critique of pure reason" as it will, and draw up as many systems of courtship, and text-books of etiquette, and logics of matrimony, as it pleases: Lady Laura, meanwhile, refuses to admit logic as a guide, or authority as a law, and resolutely abides by her own intuitions, as indeed most young ladies do in such, matters, albeit not with the same practical determination. She erects her intuitions into a science, and puts the science into practice. Colonel Green is the only other character of note; a man who has endured the buffets of the battle of life in sturdy self-reliance, and is sound and hale within. The bad man of the play (what an indispensable personage is that! and one that deserves a service of gold plate as much as other indifferent characters in actual life), Lord Byerdale, is a rather commonplace villain, whom one is not at the trouble to bate so much as might be desirable; and the Mercutio, his son, talks an infinite deal of nothing not quite so cleverly as Gratiano did on the quays of Venice.
With "The Secretary" terminated the cours dramatique of Mr. Knowles. Be it true or not that all the world's a stage, and all its men and women merely players, there is no gainsaying the fact that he, in his time, has played many parts—off as well as on the boards. Now a song-writer; now a professor of rhetoric; now an opera librettist; now a schoolmaster[1] at Belfast; now a dramatist; now an actor; now a theological controversialist; now a lecturer; now a novelist; and now—emphatically now —if the newspapers fib not, a chartered professor of elocution at a Baptist college—himself a professed and duly matriculated Baptist. There is something amusing, and withal serious, in the incompatibility of this, his final vocation, with the report of a monthly contemporary, that Mr. Knowles is now enjoying the curatorship of Shakspeare's house at Stratford-upon-Avon.
- ↑ In which capacity one of his pupils, Mr. Attorney-General Napier, speaks of him with fervent eulogy:—"No man gave so great an impulse to the cause of education in the north of Ireland. His habits were altogether those of a child of genius—Whence bis discipline was irregular; he was neither our schoolmaster nor our schoolfellow—he was both, and sometimes more than both; but we loved him, and he taught us. …. I delight," adds the hon. and learned gentleman, "in the simplest tribute to my dear old master, whom I love as heartily as when I hid his cane, or put his hat up the chimney."—Dublin U. Mag., ccxxxviii.
