obligations; and, unhappily, it is from the selfish autocratic possession of such property, that our landholders have learned their present theory of trading with that which was never meant to be an object of com

merce.

APRIL 5, 1833.

Massinger-Shakspeare-Hieronimo.

To please me, a poem must be either music or sense; if it is neither, I confess I cannot interest myself in it.

The first act of the Virgin Martyr is as fine an act as I remember in any play. The Very Woman is, I think, one of the most perfect plays we have. There is some good fun in the first scene between Don John, or Antonio, and Cuculo, his master;* and can any thing exceed the skill and sweetness of the scene between him and his mistress, in which he relates his story? The Bondman is also a delightful play.

*Act iii., sc. 2.

+ Act iv., sc. 3 :

"ANT. Not far from where my father lives, a lady,
A neighbour by, bless'd with as great a beauty
As nature durst bestow without undoing,

Dwelt, and most happily, as I thought then,

And bless'd the home a thousand times she dwelt in.
This beauty, in the blossom of my youth,
When my first fire knew no adulterate incense,
Nor I no way to flatter, but my fondness;
In all the bravery my friends could show me,
In all the faith my innocence could give me,

In the best language my true tongue could tell me,
And all the broken sighs my sick heart lent me,
I sued and served: long did I love this lady,
Long was my travail, long my trade to win her;
With all the duty of my soul, I served her.

ALM. How feelingly he speaks! (Aside.) And she loved

you too?

It must be so.

Massinger is always entertaining; his plays have the interest of novels.

But, like most of his contemporaries, except Shakspeare, Massinger often deals in exaggerated passion. Malefort senior, in the Unnatural Combat, however he may have had the moral will to be so wicked, could never have actually done all that he is represented as guilty of, without losing his senses. He would have

This story had been needless, and this place,

I think, unknown to me.

ALM. Were your bloods equal?

ANT. Yes, and I thought our hearts too.

ALM. Then she must love.

ANT. She did-but never me; she could not love me, She would not love, she hated; more, she scorn'd me,

And in so poor and base a way abused me,

For all my services, for all my bounties,
So bold neglects flung on me.

ALM.

An ill woman!

Belike you found some rival in your love, then?
ANT. How perfectly she points me to my story!
(Aside.)
Madam, I did; and one whose pride and anger,
Ill manners, and worse mien, she doted on,
Doted to my undoing, and my ruin.

And, but for honour to your sacred beauty,
And reverence to the noble sex, though she fall,
As she must fall that durst be so unnoble,
I should say something unbeseeming me.
What out of love, and worthy love, I gave her,
Shame to her most unworthy mind! to fools,
To girls, and fiddlers, to her boys she flung,
And in disdain of me.

ALM.

Pray you take me with you.

Of what complexion was she?
ANT.

But that I dare not

Commit so great a sacrilege 'gainst virtue,
She look'd not much unlike-though far, far short,
Something, I see, appears—your pardon, madam—
Her eyes would smile so, but her eyes could cozen
And so she would look sad; but yours is pity,
A noble chorus to my wretched story;

Hers was disdain and cruelty.

ALM.

Pray heaven,

Mine be no worse! he has told me a strange story.

(Aside.)" &c.-ED.

been in fact mad. Regan and Goneril are the only pictures of the unnatural in Shakspeare; the pure unnatural-and you will observe that Shakspeare has left their hideousness unsoftened or diversified by a single line of goodness or common human frailty. Whereas in Edmund, for whom passion, the sense of shame as a bastard, and ambition, offer some plausible excuses, Shakspeare has placed many redeeming traits. Edmund is what, under certain circumstances, any man of powerful intellect might be, if some other qualities and feelings were cut off. Hamlet is, inclusively, an Edmund, but different from him as a whole, on account of the controlling agency of other principles which Edmund had not.

Remark the use which Shakspeare always makes of his bold villains, as vehicles for expressing opinions and conjectures of a nature too hazardous for a wise man to put forth directly as his own, or from any sustained character.

The parts pointed out in Hieronimo as Ben Jonson's bear no traces of his style; but they are very like Shakspeare's; and it is very remarkable that every one of them reappears in full form and development, and tempered with mature judgment, in some one or other of Shakspeare's great pieces.*

* By Hieronimo Mr. Coleridge meant The Spanish_Tragedy, and not the previous play, which is usually called The First Part of Jeronimo. The Spanish Tragedy is, upon the authority of Heywood, attributed to Kyd. It is supposed that Ben Jonson originally performed the part of Hieronimo, and hence it has been surmised that certain passages and whole scenes connected with that character, and not found in some of the editions of the play, are, in fact, Ben Jonson's own writing. Some of these supposed interpolations are among the best things in the Spanish Tragedy; the style is singularly unlike Jonson's, while there are turns and particular images which do certainly seem to have been imitated by or from Shakspeare. Mr. Lamb at one time gave them to Webster. Take this passage, in the fourth act:

"HIERON. What make you with your torches in the dark? PEDRO. You bid us light them, and attend you here. VOL. II.-D

7

APRIL 7, 1833.

Love's Labour Lost-Gifford's Massinger-Shakspeare

-The Old Dramatists.

I THINK I could point out to a half line what is really Shakspeare's in Love's Labour Lost, and some other of the non-genuine plays. What he wrote in that play is of his earliest manner, having the all-pervading sweetness which he never lost, and that extreme condensation which makes the couplets fall into epigrams,

HIERON. No! you are deceived; not I; you are deceived. Was I so mad to bid light torches now?

Light me your torches at the mid of noon,
When as the sun-god rides in all his glory;
Light me your torches then.

PEDRO. Then we burn daylight.

HIERON. [Let it be burnt; night is a murd'rous slut,
That would not have her treasons to be seen;

And yonder pale-faced Hecate there, the moon,
Doth give consent to that is done in darkness;
And all those stars that gaze upon her face
Are aglets on her sleeve, pins on her train;
And those that should be powerful and divine,
Do sleep in darkness when they most should shine.]

PEDRO. Provoke them not, fair sir, with tempting words,
The heavens are gracious, and your miseries and sorrow
Make you speak you know not what.

HIERON. [Villain! thou liest, and thou dost naught But tell me I am mad: thou liest, I am not mad :

I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques;

I'll prove it thee; and were I mad, how could I?

Where was she the same night, when my Horatio was murder'd! She should have shone then search thou the book:

Had the moon shone in my boy's face, there was a kind of grace, That I know-nay, I do know, had the murderer seen him,

His weapon would have fallen, and cut the earth,

Had he been framed of naught but blood and death,"] &c.

Again, in the fifth act :

"HIERON. But are you sure that they are dead?

CASTILE. Ay, slain too sure.

HIERON. What, and yours too?

VICEROY. Ay, all are dead; not one of them survive.
HIERON. Nay, then I care not-come, we shall be friends;

Let us lay our heads together.

See, here's a goodly noose will hold them all.

as in the Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece.* In the drama alone, as Shakspeare soon found out, could the sublime poet and profound philosopher find the conditions of a compromise. In the Love's Labour Lost there are many faint sketches of some of his vigorous portraits in after-life-as, for example, in particular, of Benedict and Beatrice.t

VICEROY. O damned devil! how secure he is!
HIERON. Secure! why dost thou wonder at it?
[I tell thee, Viceroy, this day I've seen revenge,
And in that sight am grown a prouder monarch
Than ever sate under the crown of Spain.
Had I as many lives as there be stars,
As many heavens to go to as those lives,
I'd give them all, ay, and my soul to boot,
But I would see thee ride in this red pool.
Methinks, since I grew inward with revenge,
I cannot look with scorn enough on death.]

KING. What! dost thou mock us, slave? Bring tortures forth.
HIERON. [Do, do, do; and meantime I'll torture you.

You had a son, as I take it, and your son

Should have been married to your daughter: ha! was it not so? You had a son too, he was my liege's nephew.

He was proud and politic-had he lived,

He might have come to wear the crown of Spain;

I think 'twas so-'twas I that killed him;

Look you this same hand was it that stabb'd

His heart-do you see this hand?

For one Horatio, if you ever knew him—

A youth, one that they hang'd up in his father's garden-
One that did force your valiant son to yield,"] &c.—ED.

"In Shakspeare's Poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war-embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length, in the drama, they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly, and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current, and with one voice."-Biog. Lat., vol. ii., p. 21.

+ Mr. Coleridge, of course, alluded to Biron and Rosaline; and there are other obvious prolusions, as the scene of the mask with the courtiers, compared with the play in A Midsummer Night's Dream -ED.