They exaggerate the importance of facts and underrate the
importance of fiction. Such, at any rate, is the mood--and what is
criticism itself but a mood?--produced in us by a perusal of Mr.
Coleridge's Demetrius. It is the story of a young lad of unknown
parentage who is brought up in the household of a Polish noble. He is a
tall, fair-looking youth, by name Alexis, with a pride of bearing and
grace of manner that seem strange in one of such low station. Suddenly
he is recognised by an exiled Russian noble as Demetrius, the son of Ivan
the Terrible who was supposed to have been murdered by the usurper Boris.
His identity is still further established by a strange cross of seven
emeralds that he wears round his neck, and by a Greek inscription in his
book of prayers which discloses the secret of his birth and the story of
his rescue. He himself feels that the blood of kings beats in his veins,
and appeals to the nobles of the Polish Diet to espouse his cause. By
his passionate utterance he makes them acknowledge him as the true Tsar
and invades Russia at the head of a large army. The people throng to him
from every side, and Marfa, the widow of Ivan the Terrible, escapes from
the convent in which she has been immured by Boris and comes to meet her
son. At first she seems not to recognise him, but the music of his voice
and the wonderful eloquence of his pleading win her over, and she
embraces him in presence of the army and admits him to be her child. The
usurper, terrified at the tidings, and deserted by his soldiers, commits
suicide, and Alexis enters Moscow in triumph, and is crowned in the
Kremlin. Yet he is not the true Demetrius, after all. He is deceived
himself and he deceives others. Mr. Coleridge has drawn his character
with delicate subtlety and quick insight, and the scene in which he
discovers that he is no son of Ivan's and has no right to the name he
claims, is exceedingly powerful and dramatic. One point of resemblance
does exist between Alexis and the real Demetrius. Both of them are
murdered, and with the death of this strange hero Mr. Coleridge ends his
remarkable story.

On the whole, Mr. Coleridge has written a really good historical novel
and may be congratulated on his success. The style is particularly
interesting, and the narrative parts of the book are deserving of high
praise for their clearness, dignity and sobriety. The speeches and
passages of dialogue are not so fortunate, as they have an awkward
tendency to lapse into bad blank verse. Here, for instance, is a speech
printed by Mr. Coleridge as prose, in which the true music of prose is
sacrificed to a false metrical system which is at once monotonous and
tiresome:

But Death, who brings us freedom from all falsehood,
Who heals the heart when the physician fails,
Who comforts all whom life cannot console,
Who stretches out in sleep the tired watchers;
He takes the King and proves him but a beggar!
He speaks, and we, deaf to our Maker's voice,
Hear and obey the call of our destroyer!
Then let us murmur not at anything;
For if our ills are curable, 'tis idle,
And if they are past remedy, 'tis vain.