publickly acted by the Queen's Majestie's players, in the Honourable city of London." It is curious to find that the former was almost an exact forerunner of the latter, in point of incidents and personages. I say personages and not characters, for Shakspeare has thrown more vivacity into the part of Faulconbridge than can be found in the prototype; more dignity into that of Constance, and more pathos into that of Arthur. In the old piece there was no anticipation of Shakspeare's high painting,

"All's Well that Ends Well" (1598) was derived originally from Boccacio, but was immediately borrowed by Shakspeare from a novel in Painter's "Palace of Pleasure," entitled Giletta of Narbona. It is far from being in the front rank of his plays.

The play of "Henry V." had a forerunner in an older drama which bore the same title, and contained many of the incidents which Shakspeare has employed.

In Shakspeare's "Henry V." there is no want of spirited action and striking personages; but I cannot agree with Schlegel as to the nice discrimination which he discovers in the portraiture of Irish, Scotch, and Welsh character among the brave captains of Henry's camp. The play has noble passages. And amongst these, the description of the night before the battle of Agincourt will be repeated by the youth of England when our children's children shall be gray with age. It was said of Eschylus, that he composed his "Seven Chiefs against Thebes," under the inspiration of Mars himself. If Shakspeare's "Henry V." had been written for the Greeks, they would have paid him the same compliment.

The delicious comedy of "As You Like It" was taken from Lodge's "Rosalynd, or Euphues' Golden Legacye," but never was the prolixity and pedantry of a prosaic narrative transmuted by genius into such magical poetry. The events of the play are not numerous, and its interest is preserved by characters more than incidents. But what a tablet of characters! the witty and impassioned Rosalind, the love-devoted Orlando, the friendship-devoted Celia, the duty-devoted old Adam, the humourous Clown, and the melancholy Jaques; all these, together with the dignified and banished Duke, make the forest of Arden an Elysium to our imagination; and our hearts are so stricken by those benevolent beings, that we easily forgive the other once culpable but at last repentant characters.

The principal incident in the comedy of " Much Ado about Nothing," (i. e. the crimination of an innocent woman, in consequence of a villain procuring the lady's maid-servant to appear dressed like her mistress, and receive a lover at the window,) is found in the "Orlando Furioso" of Ariosto, as well as in one of the novels of Bandello, who borrowed it from his compatriot poet. The story is probably still older than Ariosto. It is likely to have reached Shakspeare through Belleforest's "Cent Histoires Tragiques," published in 1583, and translated into English shortly afterwards.

The story which mainly forms the plot of "Hamlet," (1600,) can be traced back to the History of Denmark by Saxo Grammaticus. Amidst our universal admiration of this tragedy, the precise character of its hero has nevertheless remained a problem in the hands of its admirers. Hamlet is strong in imagination, beautiful in abstracted thoughts, and great and good in his general intentions; yet he is weak, wayward, and inconsistent; fond, but barbarous towards Ophelia ; proudly and justly conscious of his superiority to ordinary men, and yet, not always unjustly, a despiser of himself. The theorists respecting his character reconcile its contrarieties to their own satisfaction, but no two of them in the same manner. My solution of the question about Hamlet's inconsistencies is, that his morbid mind is indued both with the reality and the affectation of madness. Such cases are not unknown in the history of mental aberration. Surpassingly excellent as Shakspeare's "Hamlet" is, it has a fault, as a piece of dramatic structure, in the unnecessary perplexity of events towards its close, when the prince sails for England and returns, whilst all this while ne might as well have been in Denmark.

In "The Merry Wives of Windsor," (1600,) which displays a rich variety of incidents and a throng of well-supported characters, we are presented with an unrivaled instance of pure, domestic English comedy, heightened in zest by the frolicsome adjunction of mock fairy mythology.

"Twelfth Night" is shown by Mr. Collier to have been written in 1601. The delicacy with which a modest maiden makes love to her lord in male disguise, and the pathos with which she describes her imaginary, but too real self-when "concealment, like a worm i' the bud, preyed on her damask cheek," and the sudden growth of Orsino's attachment to her on the discovery of her sex, and on the recalling of her words from his memory to his understanding, form beauties in this comedy which no touch of human revision could improve.

"Troilus and Cressida" was probably written in 1602. It is not one of Shakspeare's masterpieces. The language is too often tortuously and tumultuously figurative, and is so cramped with Shakspeare's frequent fault of trying to be overmuscular in expression, that there are almost whole scenes which, if they had been written by a satiric imitator of his style, I should say were a cruel caricature of Shakspeare.

It seems to me that "Henry VIII." was written, at the latest, in 1602. Poetical art perhaps never flattered a monster with such palpable likeness, and yet with such impalpable and cunning mitigation. He suborns his guilty love itself to seduce our sympathy by the beauty of its object.

"Measure for Measure" was written in 1603. In the drama, as in the merry conversation of common life, we forgive a man for telling whitelie anecdotes; but they must be lily-white lies, and must be fragrant with merriment. At the same time, we must own that Shakspeare, in

"Measure for Measure," presumes a little too far on his right to improbability, and, to use a vulgar phrase, "draws a long bow."

The tragedy of "Othello" (1604) has evident marks of its plot and incidents having been largely borrowed from the seventh novel of the third decade of Cinthio's Hecatommithi.

This drama, by itself, would have immortalized any poet; then what are we to think of Shakspeare, when we may hesitate to pronounce it to be the best of his plays! Certainly, however, it has no superior in his own theatre, and no rival in any other. The Moor is at once one of the most complex and astonishing, and yet most intelligible pictures, that fiction ever portrayed of human character. His grandeur of soul is natural, and we admire it; his gentleness is equally natural, and we love him for it; his appearance we cannot but conceive to be 'majestic, and his physiognomy benevolent. Othello had been bred a barbarian, and though his bland nature and intercourse with the more civilized world had long warred against and conquered the half-natural habits of barbarism, yet those habits, at last, broke out, and prevailed in the moments of his jealousy. He is not a jealous man by nature, but, being once made jealous, he reverts to savageness, and becomes as terrible as he had before been tender. This contrast in his conduct, however, is not an Ovidian metamorphosis, but a transition so probably managed as to seem unavoidable; yet, the naturalness of the change prevents neither our terror nor pity on the contrary, the sweetness of his character before its fall is the smoothness of the stream before its cataract; and his bland dispositions, heretofore displayed, appear, like a rich autumnal day, contrasted with the thunder-storm of its evening. The terrors of the storm are also made more striking to our imagination by the gentleness of the victim on which they fallDesdemona. Had one symptom of an angry spirit appeared in that lovely martyr, our sympathy with her would have been endangered; but Shakspeare knew better.

tural or made the substances of truth more awful by their superstitious shadows-than has the tragedy of Macbeth." The progress of Macbeth in crime is an unparalleled lecture in ethical anatomy. The heart of man, naturally prone to goodness, is exposed so as to teach us clearly through what avenues of that heart the black drop of guilt found its way to expel the more innocent blood. A semblance of superstitious necessity is no doubt preserved in the actions of Macbeth; and a superficial reader might say that the witches not only tempted, but necessitated Macbeth to murder Duncan. But this is not the case, for Shakspeare has contrived to give at once the awful appearance of preternatural impulse on Macbeth's mind, and yet visibly to leave him a free agent, and a voluntary sinner.

"Julius Cæsar" was written in 1607. Three out of four of Shakspeare's classical dramas, "Julius Cæsar," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Coriolanus," are so consummate, that he must be pronounced as much at home in Roman as in romantic history. Already he had shown, in his allusions to Pagan mythology, that he had inhaled its sweetest aroma, distilled, not by toiling scholarship, but by the fire of his genius. But, now that he was in the fullest manhood of his mind, he could borrow more from the ancients than the bloom and breath of their mythology. He cast his eyes both in their quiet and in their kindled inspiration, both as a philosopher and as a poet, on the page of classic history; he discriminated its characters with the light of philosophy; and he irradiated truth without encroaching on its solid shapes with the hues of fancy.

"Timon of Athens" is referred to 1610. It is far from displaying Shakspeare improved either in his philosophy or his philanthropy at the time he wrote it. It is the production of his spleen more than of his heart. The interwoven episode of Alcibiades is uninteresting, for it is a moot point whether he or the Athenians were in the wrong. Altogether "Timon" is a pillar in his theatric fame that might be removed without endanger

66

Wher

Enlightened criticism and universal opinion have so completely set the seal of celebrity on the tragedy of Macbeth," (1606,) that it will stand whilst our language exists, as a monument of English genius. Nay, it will outlast the present form of our language, and speak to generations unborn in parts of the earth that are yet uninhabited. No drama in any national theatre, taking even that of Greece into the account, has more wonder

66

I exaggerate not, in saying that Shakspeare has nowhere breathed more pleasurable feelings over the mind, as an antidote to tragic pain, than in "Cymbeline."

If I were to select any historical play of Shakspeare, in which he has combined an almost literal fidelity to history with an equally faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and in which he superinduces the merit of skilful dramatic management, it would be "Antony and Cleopatra," (1608.) In his portraiture of Antony there is, perhaps, a flattered likeness of the original by Plutarch; but the similitude loses little of its strength by Shakspeare's softening and keeping in the shade his traits of cruelty. In Cleopatra, we can discern nothing materially different from the vouched historical sorceress; she nevertheless has a more vivid meteoric and versatile play of enchantment in Shakspeare's likeness of her, than in a dozen of other poetical copies in which the artists took much greater liberties with historical truth: he paints her as if the gipsy herself had cast her spell over him, and given her own witchcraft to his pencil.

"Coriolanus" was written in 1610; "Winter's Tale" in 1611; and "The Tempest"-believed to be the last of Shakspeare's plays—in the same year. This drama is comparatively a grave counterpart to "A Midsummer Night's Dream." I say comparatively, for its gayety is only less abandoned and frolicsome. To be condemned to give the preference to either would give me a distress similar to that of being obliged to choose between the loss of two very dear friends.

"The Tempest," however, has a sort of sacredness, as the last work of the mighty workman. Shakspeare, as if conscious that it would be his last, and, as if inspired to typify himself, has made

its hero a natural, a dignified, and benevolent magician, who could conjure up spirits from the vasty deep, and command supernatural agency by the most seemingly natural and simple means.-And this final play of our poet has magic indeed; for what can be simpler in language than the courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda, and yet what can be more magical than the sympathy with which it subdues us? Here Shakspeare himself is Prospero, or rather the superior genius who commands both Prospero and Ariel. But the time was approaching when the potent sorcerer was to break his staff, and to bury it fathoms in the ocean

Deeper than did ever plummet sound.

That staff has never been, and never will be, recovered.

The exact period at which Shakspeare quitted the metropolis, and settled in his native place, has not been ascertained, but as it was certainly some years before his death, it cannot be well put later than 1611 or 1612. His fame, his engaging manners, and his easy fortune-for he retired with an income of three hundred pounds a-year-equal to fifteen hundred pounds in the present daymust have made him associate with the best society in and around Stratford; and we cannot conceive his settlement to have been less than a joyous era to his townsmen and neighbourhood.

His wife had brought him three children: Susanna, who was born in May, 1583; about eighteen months afterwards, she was delivered of twins, a son and daughter, who were baptized by the names Hamnet and Judith. In the year 1596, he lost his only son, who died at the age of twelve. Susanna was married, June 5, 1607, to Dr. John Hall, a respectable physician; and in 1615-16 his youngest daughter Judith, then in her thirty-first year, was married to Thomas Quiney, a vintner, in Stratford. On the 25th of the succeeding month he executed his will, as if warned of impending fate, for, on the 23d of April, 1616, on his birthday, and when he had exactly completed his fifty-second year, the best of poets expired.-G.]

SONNETS.

WHEN forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter'd weed of small worth held;
Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,-
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days-
To say "within thine own deep sunken eyes,"
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise;
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer "This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,"
Proving his beauty by succession thine:
This were to be new-made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it
cold.

OH! how much more doth Beauty beauteous

seem,

By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live;
The canker'd blooms have full as deep a dye,
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly,
When summer's breath their masked buds dis-
closes;

But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo'd, and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves-Sweet roses do not so,

Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made;
As so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade my verse distils your truth.

LET me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove;
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be
taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

THOSE lips, that Love's own hand did make,
Breathed forth the sound that said "I hate,"
To me that languish for her sake.
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that, ever sweet,
Was used in giving gentle doom;
And taught it thus anew to greet:
"I hate" she alter'd with an end
That follow'd it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who, like a fiend,
From heav'n to hell is flown away.
"I hate"-from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying-"not you."

As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spight,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth;
For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,
Or any of these all, or all, or more,
Entitled in their parts do crowned sit,

I make my love engrafted to this store:
So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised,

Whilst that this shadow doth such substance

give,

That I in thy abundance am sufficed,
And by a part of all thy glory live.

Look what is best, that best I wish in thee;
This wish I have; then ten times happy me!

No longer mourn for me when I am dead,
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell;
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;
But let your love even with my life decay;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.

WHEN in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possest,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark, at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd, such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

SAY that thou didst forsake me for some fault,
And I will comment upon that offence;
Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt;
Against thy reasons making no defence.
Thou canst not, love, disgrace me half so ill,
To set a form upon desired change,
As I'll myself disgrace: knowing thy will,
I will acquaintance strangle, and look strange;
Be absent from thy walks; and on my tongue
Thy sweet beloved name no more shall dwell;
Lest I (too much profane) should do it wrong,
And haply of our old acquaintance tell.
For thee, against myself I'll vow debate,
For I must ne'er love him whom thou dost hate.

LET me confess that we two must be twain,
Although our undivided loves are one:
So shall those blots that do with me remain,
Without thy help, by me be borne alone,
In our two loves there is but one respect,
Though in our lives a separable spight,
Which though it alter not love's sole effect,
Yet doth it steal sweet hours from love's delight.
may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame;
Nor thou with public kindness honour me,
Unless thou take that honour from thy name:
But do not so; I love thee in such sort,
As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.

ALAS, 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view, [dear,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most
Made old offences of affections new.
Most true it is, that I have look'd on truth
Askance and strangely; but, by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worst assaies proved thee my best of love.
Now all is done, have what shall have no end:
Mine appetite I never more will grind
On newer proof, to try an older friend,
A god in love, to whom I am confined.
Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best
Even to thy pure and most, most loving breast.

IT is difficult exactly to estimate the poetical | character of this great man, as many of the pieces that are ascribed to him have not been authenticated. Among these is the "Soul's Farewell," which possesses a fire of imagination that we would willingly ascribe to him; but his claim to it, as has been already mentioned, is exceedingly doubtful. The tradition of his having written it on the night before his execution, is highly interesting to the fancy, but, like many fine stories, it has the little defect of being untrue, as the poem was in existence more than twenty years before his death. It has accordingly been placed in this collection, with several other pieces to which his name has been conjecturally affixed, among the anonymous poetry of that period.

Sir Walter was born at Hayes Farm, in Devonshire, and studied at Oxford. Leaving the university at seventeen, he fought for six years under the Protestant banners in France, and afterwards served a campaign in the Netherlands. He next distinguished himself in Ireland during the rebellion of 1580, under the lord deputy Lord Grey de Wilton, with whom his personal disputes eventually promoted his fortunes; for being heard in his own cause on returning to England, he won the favour of Elizabeth, who knighted him, and raised him to such honours as alarmed the jealousy of her favourite Leicester.

In the mean time, as early as 1579, he had commenced his adventures with a view to colonize America-surveyed the territory now called Virginia, in 1584, and fitted out successive fleets in support of the infant colony. In the destruction of the Spanish armada, as well as in the expedition to Portugal in behalf of Don Antonio, he had his full share of action and glory; and though recalled, in 1592, from the appointment of general of the expedition against Panama, he must have made a princely fortune by the success of his fleet, which sailed upon that occasion, and returned with the richest prize that had ever been brought to England. The queen was about this period so indignant with him for an amour which he had with one of her maids of honour, that, though he married the lady, (she was the daughter of Sir Nicholas Throgmorton,) her majesty committed

THE SILENT LOVER.

PASSIONS are liken'd best to floods and streams,
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb;
So when affection yields discourse, it seems
The bottom is but shallow whence they come;
They that are rich in words must needs discover
They are but poor in that which makes a lover.

Wrong not, sweet mistress of my heart,
The merit of true passion,

With thinking that he feels no smart
That sues for no compassion.

him, with his fair partner, to the Tower. The queen forgave him, however, at last, and rewarded his services with a grant of the manor of Sherborne, in Dorsetshire, where he built a magnificent seat. Raleigh's mind was not one that was destined to travel in the wheel-ruts of common prejudice. It was rumoured that he had carried the freedom of his philosophical speculation to an heretical height on many subjects; and his acceptance of the church lands of Sherborne, already mentioned, probably supplied additional motives to the clergy to swell the outery against his principles. He was accused (by the jesuits) of atheism-a charge which his own writings sufficiently refute. Whatever were his opinions, the public saved him the trouble of explaining them; and the queen, taking it for granted that they must be bad, gave him an open, and, no doubt, edifying reprimand. To console himself under these circumstances, he projected the conquest of Guiana, sailed thither in 1595, and having captured the city of San Joseph, returned and published an account of his voyage. In the following year he acted gallantly under the Earl of Essex at Cadiz, as well as in what was called the "Island Voyage."* On the latter occasion he failed of complete success only through the jealousy of the favourite.

His letter to Cecil, in which he exhorted that statesman to the destruction of Essex, forms but too sad and notorious a blot in our hero's memory; yet even that offence will not reconcile us to behold the successor of Elizabeth robbing Raleigh of his estate to bestow it on the minion Carr; and on the grounds of a plot in which his participation was never proved, condemning to fifteen years of imprisonment the man who had enlarged the empire of his country, and the boundaries of human knowledge. James could estimate the wise, but shrunk from cordiality with the brave. He released Raleigh, from avaricious hopes about the mine of Guiana; and when disappointed in that object, sacrificed him to motives still baser than avarice. On the 29th of October, 1618, Raleigh perished on a scaffold, in Old Palace-yard, by a sentence originally iniquitous, and which his commission to Guiana had virtually revoked.

Since if my plaints were not t' approve
The conquest of thy beauty,

It comes not from defect of love,
But fear t'exceed my duty.

For not knowing that I sue to serve

A saint of such perfection

As all desire, but none deserve

A place in her affection,

A voyage that was aimed principally at the Spanish Plate fleets.