MARMADUKE Discerning Monitor, my faithful Wilfred,
              Why art thou here?
     [Turning to WALLACE.]
                                Wallace, upon these Borders,
              Many there be whose eyes will not want cause
              To weep that I am gone.  Brothers in arms! 
              Raise on that dreary Waste a monument
              That may record my story:  nor let words—­
              Few must they be, and delicate in their touch
              As light itself—­be there withheld from Her
              Who, through most wicked arts, was made an orphan
              By One who would have died a thousand times,
              To shield her from a moment’s harm.  To you,
              Wallace and Wilfred, I commend the Lady,
              By lowly nature reared, as if to make her
              In all things worthier of that noble birth,
              Whose long-suspended rights are now on the eve
              Of restoration:  with your tenderest care
              Watch over her, I pray—­sustain her—­

SEVERAL OF THE BAND (eagerly)
              Captain!

MARMADUKE No more of that; in silence hear my doom: 
              A hermitage has furnished fit relief
              To some offenders; other penitents,
              Less patient in their wretchedness, have fallen,
              Like the old Roman, on their own sword’s point. 
              They had their choice:  a wanderer must I go,
              The Spectre of that innocent Man, my guide. 
              No human ear shall ever hear me speak;
              No human dwelling ever give me food,
              Or sleep, or rest:  but, over waste and wild,
              In search of nothing, that this earth can give,
              But expiation, will I wander on—­
              A Man by pain and thought compelled to live,
              Yet loathing life—­till anger is appeased
              In Heaven, and Mercy gives me leave to die.

* * * * *

In June 1797 Coleridge wrote to his friend Cottle: 

“W. has written a tragedy himself.  I speak with heart-felt sincerity, and, I think, unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself a little man by his side, and yet I do not think myself a less man than I formerly thought myself.  His drama is absolutely wonderful.  You know I do not commonly speak in such abrupt and unmingled phrases, and therefore will the more readily believe me.  There are in the piece those profound touches of the human heart which I find three or four times in the ‘Robbers’ of Schiller, and often in Shakspeare; but in W. there are no inequalities.”

On August 6, 1800, Charles Lamb wrote to Coleridge: