COUNT JULIAN:

A

TRAGEDY.

LONDON:

PRINTED FOR JOHN MURRAY, FLEET STREET,
By James Moyes, Greville Street, Hatton Garden.

1812.

The daughter of Count Julian is usually called Florinda—a fictitious appellation, unsuitable to the person and to the period.  Never was one devised more incompatible with the appearance of truth, or more fatal to the illusions of sympathy.  The city of Covilla, it is reported, was named after her.  Here is no improbability: there would be a gross one in deriving the word, as is also pretended, from La Cava.  Cities, in adopting a name, bear it usually as a testimony of victories or as an augury of virtues.  Small and obscure places, occasionally, receive what their neighbours throw against them; as Puerto de la mala muger in Murcia.  A generous and enthusiastic people, beyond all others in existence or on record, would affix no stigma to innocence and misfortune.

It is remarkable that the most important era in Spanish history should be the most obscure.  This is propitious to the poet, and above all to the tragedian.  Few characters of such an era can be glaringly misrepresented, few facts offensively perverted.

CHARACTERS.

Count Julian.

Roderigo, King of Spain.

Opas, Metropolitan of Seville.

Sisabert, betrothed to Covilla.

Muza, Prince of Mauritania.

Abdalazis, son of Muza.

Tarik, Moorish Chieftain.

Covilla, daughter of Julian.

Egilona, wife of Roderigo.

Officers.

Hernando, Osma, Ramiro, &c.

ACT I.  SCENE 1.

Camp of Julian.

OPAS.  JULIAN.

Opas.  See her, Count Julian: if thou lovest God,
See thy lost child.

Jul.  I have avenged me, Opas,
More than enough: I sought but to have hurled
The brands of war on one detested head,
And died upon his ruin.  O my country!
O lost to honour, to thyself, to me,
Why on barbarian hands devolves thy cause,
Spoilers, blasphemers!

Opas.  Is it thus, Don Julian,
When thy own ofspring, that beloved child,
For whom alone these very acts were done
By them and thee, when thy Covilla stands
An outcast, and a suppliant at thy gate,
Why that still stubborn agony of soul,
Those struggles with the bars thyself imposed?
Is she not thine? not dear to thee as ever?

Jul.  Father of mercies! show me none, whene’er
The wrongs she suffers cease to wring my heart,
Or I seek solace ever, but in death.

Opas.  What wilt thou do then, too unhappy man?

Jul.  What have I done already?  All my peace
Has vanished; my fair fame in after-times
Will wear an alien and uncomely form,
Seen o’er the cities I have laid in dust,
Countrymen slaughtered, friends abjured!

Opas.  And faith?

Jul.  Alone now left me, filling up in part
The narrow and waste intervals of grief:
It promises that I shall see again
My own lost child.

Opas.  Yes, at this very hour.

Jul.  Till I have met the tyrant face to face,
And gain’d a conquest greater than the last;
Till he no longer rules one rood of Spain,
And not one Spaniard, not one enemy,
The least relenting, flags upon his flight;
Till we are equal in the eyes of men,
The humblest and most wretched of our kind,
No peace for me, no comfort, no—no child!

Opas.  No pity for the thousands fatherless,
The thousands childless like thyself, nay more,
The thousands friendless, helpless, comfortless—
Such thou wilt make them, little thinking so,
Who now, perhaps, round their first winter fire,
Banish, to talk of thee, the tales of old,
Shedding true honest tears for thee unknown:
Precious be these, and sacred in thy sight,
Mingle them not with blood from hearts thus kind.
If only warlike spirits were evoked
By the war-demon, I would not complain.
Or dissolute and discontented men;
But wherefor hurry down into the square
The neighbourly, saluting, warm-clad race,
Who would not injure us, and could not serve;
Who, from their short and measured slumber risen,
In the faint sunshine of their balconies,
With a half-legend of a martyrdom
And some weak wine and withered grapes before them,
Note by their foot the wheel of melody
That catches and rolls on the sabbath dance.
To drag the steddy prop from failing age,
Break the young stem that fondness twines around,
Widen the solitude of lonely sighs,
And scatter to the broad bleak wastes of day
The ruins and the phantoms that replied,
Ne’er be it thine.

Jul.  Arise, and save me, Spain!

ACT I.  SCENE 2.

Muza enters.

Muza.  Infidel chief, thou tarriest here too long.
And art, perhaps, repining at the days
Of nine continued victories, o’er men
Dear to thy soul, tho’ reprobate and base.
Away!

[Muza retires.

Jul.  I follow.  Could my bitterest foes
Hear this! ye Spaniards, this! which I foreknew
And yet encounter’d; could they see your Julian
Receiving orders from and answering
These desperate and heaven-abandoned slaves,
They might perceive some few external pangs,
Some glimpses of the hell wherein I move,
Who never have been fathers.

Opas.  These are they
To whom brave Spaniards must refer their wrongs!

Jul.  Muza, that cruel and suspicious chief,
Distrusts his friends more than his enemies,
Me more than either; fraud he loves and fears,
And watches her still footfall day and night.

Opas.  O Julian! such a refuge! such a race!

Jul.  Calamities like mine alone implore.
No virtues have redeemed them from their bonds;
Wily ferocity, keen idleness,
And the close cringes of ill-whispering want,
Educate them to plunder and obey:
Active to serve him best whom most they fear,
They show no mercy to the merciful,
And racks alone remind them of the name.

Opas.  O everlasting curse for Spain and thee!

Jul.  Spain should have vindicated then her wrongs