as well as base and ungrateful, he could hardly have devised for him a less discreet or a more irritating speech than this. Medea now turns from red heat to white; recapitulates Jason's obligations to herself, the services she has done him, the crimes she has committed for him, and casts to the winds all his shallow, hypocritical pretences of having done his best for her and their sons. We imagine that no one will feel any pity for Jason, or deny that he richly deserved the words that, like "iron sleet of arrowy shower," fall, in this scene, upon his head,—terrible, yet just, as the fulminations hurled against Austria's Duke by Lady Constance in "King John:"—
"Thou slave, thou wretch, thou coward,
Thou little valiant, great in villany!
Thou ever strong upon the stronger side!
Thou fortune's champion—thou art perjured too,
And sooth'st up greatness. Thou cold-blooded slave!"
Jason keeps up, like Joseph Surface, his fair speeches to the last, and this connubial dialogue closes characteristically on either side:—
"Jason. Then do I call the gods to witness this,
How I desire to serve thee and thy sons;
Yet thou'lt not like good gifts, but wantonly
Dost spurn thy friends, therefore shalt mourn the more.
Medea. Begone, for longing after thy new bride
Seizes thee, so much tarrying from her home:
Take her, for it is like—yea, and possessed
By a god I will declare it—thou dost wed
With such a wedding as thou'lt wish undone."
After a brief but very beautiful song, in which the
