siderably more than a third part of it, is an unknown region, not to be penetrated by our most zealous and intelligent researchers. It may be regarded by us as a kind of central Africa, which our reason assures us to be glowing with fertility and alive with population; but which is abandoned in our maps, from the ignorance of our geographers, to the death of barrenness, and the silence of sandy desolation. . . In 1606, James procured from the Continent a large importation of mulberry trees with a view to the establishment of the silk manufactory in his dominions; and, either in this year or in the following, Shakspeare enriched his garden at New Place (in Stratford) with one of these exotic, and at this time very rare trees. This plant of his hand took root and flourished till the year 1752, when it was destroyed by the barbarous axe of one Francis Gastrell, a clergyman, into whose worse than Gothie hands New Place had most unfortunately fallen. This insensibility in our author to the offspring of his brain may be the subject of our wonder or admiration: but its consequences have been calamitous to those who in after times have hung with delight over his pages. On the intellect and the temper of these ill-fated mortals it has inflicted a heavy load of punishment in the dulness and the arrogance of commentators and illustrators-in the conceit and petulance of Theobald; the imbecility of Capell; the pert and tasteless dogmatism of Steevens; the ponderous littleness of Malone and of Drake. Some superior men, it is true, have enlisted themselves in the cause of Shakspeare. Rowe, Pope, Warburton, Hanmer, and Johnson have successively been his editors; and have professed to give his scenes in their original purity to the world. But from some cause or other, which it is not our present business to explore, each of these editors, in his turn, has disappointed the just expectations of the public: and, with an inversion of nature's general rule, the little men have finally prevailed against the great. The blockheads have hooted the wits from the field; and attaching themselves to the mighty body of Shakspeare, like barnacles to the hull of a proud man-of-war, they are prepared to plough with him the vast ocean of time; and thus, by the only means in their power, to snatch themselves from that oblivion to which nature had devoted them. It would be unjust, however, to defraud these gentlemen of their proper praise. They have read for men of talents; and by their gross labour in the mine, they have accumulated materials to be arranged and polished by the hand of the finer artist. With his various powers of pleasing;

his wit and his humour; the gentleness of his manners; the flow of his spirits and his fancy; the variety of anecdote with which his mind must have been stored; his knowledge of the world, and his intimacy with man, in every gradation of society, from the prompter of a playhouse to the peer and the sovereign, Shakspeare must have been a delightful-nay, a fascinating companion; and his acquaintance must necessarily have been courted by all the prime inhabitants of Stratford and its vicinity. But over this, as over the preceding periods of his life, brood silence and oblivion; and in our total ignorance of his intimacies and friendships, we must apply to our imagination to furnish out his convivial board where intellect presided, and delight with admiration gave the applause. On the 2nd February, 1615-16, he married his youngest daughter, Judith, then in the thirty-first year of her age, to Thomas Guiney, a vintner in Stratford; and on the 25th of the succeeding month he executed his Will. He was then, as it would appear, in the full vigour and enjoyment of life; and we are not informed that his constitution had been previously weakened by the attack of any malady. But his days, or rather his hours, were now all numbered; for he breathed his last on the 23rd of the ensuing April, on that anniversary of his birth which completed his fifty-second year. . It is well that we are better acquainted with the rectitude of his morals, than with the symmetry of his features. To the integrity of his heart; the gentleness and benignity of his manners, we have the positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson; the former of whom seems to have been drawn by our poet's good and amiable qualities, from the faction of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his love and admiration of the man, to have lost all his natural jealousy of the successful competition for the poetic palm. I have already cited Chettle: let me now eite Jonson, from whose pages much more of a similar nature might be adduced. I loved," he says in his " Discoveries," "I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry as much us any. He was, indeed, honest, of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions," &c. &c. When Jonson apostrophizes his deceased friend, he calls him, "My gentle Shakspeare," and the title of "The Sweet Swan of Avon," so generally given to him, after the example of Jonson, by his contemporaries, seems to have been given with reference as much to the suavity of his temper as to the harmony of his verse. In their dedication of his works to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, his

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fellows, Heminge and Condell, profess that their great object in their publication was "only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakspeare:" and their preface to the public appears evidently to have been dictated by their personal and affectionate attachment to their departed friend. If we wish for any further evidence in the support of the moral character of Shakspeare, we may find it in the friendship of Southampton; we may extract it from the pages of his immortal works. . Judith, his younger daughter, appears either not to have received any education, or not to have profited by the lessons of her teachers, for to a deed, still in existence, she affixes her mark. We have already mentioned the dates of the birth, marriage, and death of Susanna Hall. She left only one daughter, Elizabeth, who died, and was buried at Abington, a small village in the vicinity of Northampton, on the 17th of February, 1669-70; and as she left no issue by either of her husbands, her death terminated the lineal descendants of Shakspeare. His collateral kindred have been indulged with a much longer period of duration; the descendants of his sister Joan, having continued in a regular succession of generations even to our days; whilst none of them, with a single exception, have broken from that rank in the community in which their ancestors William Hart (a hatter in Stratford) and Joan Shakspeare united their unostentatious fortunes in the year 1599. The single exception to which we allude is that of Charles Hart, believed, for good reasons, to be the son of William and Joan Hart, and consequently the grand-nephew of our poet. At the early age of seventeen, Charles Hart, as lieutenant in Prince Rupert's regiment, fought at the battle of Edgehill; and subsequently betaking himself to the stage, he became the most renowned tragic actor of his time. "What Mr. Hart delivers," says Rymer, (I adopt the citation from the page of Malone), "every one takes upon content: their eyes are prepossessed and charmed by his action before ought of the poet's can approach their ears; and to the most wretched of characters he gives a lustre and brilliancy, which dazzles the sight that the deformities in the poetry cannot be perceived." "Were I a poet," (says another contemporary writer) "nay a Fletcher or a Shakspeare, I would quit my own title to immortality so that one actor might never die. This I may modestly say of him (nor is it my particular opinion, but the sense of all mankind) that the best tragedies on the English stage have received their lustre from Mr. Hart's performance: that he has left such an

impression behind him, that no less than the interval of an age can make them appear again with half their majesty from any second hand." This was a brilliant eruption from the family of Shakspeare: but as it was the first, so it appears to have been the last; and the Harts have ever since, as far at least as it is known to us, "pursued the noiseless tenor of their way," within the precints of their native town on the banks of the soft-flowing Avon. (By intelligence, on the accuracy of which I can rely, and which has only just reached me, from the birthplace of Shakspeare, I learn that the family of the Harts, after a course of lineal descents during the revolution of two hundred and twenty-six years, is now on the verge of extinction; an aged woman, who retains in single blessedness her maiden name of Hart, being at this time (Nov. 1825) its sole surviving representative. For some years she occupied the house of her ancestors, in which Shakspeare is reported to have first seen the light; and here she obtained a comfortable subsistence by showing the antiquities of the venerated mansion to the numerous strangers who were attracted to it. Being dispos sessed of this residence by the rapaciousness of its proprietor, she settled herself in a dwelling nearly opposite to it. Here she still lives, and continues to exhibit some relics, not reputed to be genuine, of the mighty bard, with whom her maternal ancestor was nourished in the same womb. She regards herself also as a dramatic poet; and, in support of her pretensions, she produces the rude sketch of a play, uninformed, as it is said, with any of the vitality of genius.)-Symmons' Life of Shakspeare.

To have a text corrupt in many places, and in many doubtful, is, among the authors that have written since the use of types, almost peculiar to Shakspeare. Most writers, by publishing their own works, prevent all various readings, and preclude all conjectural criticism. Books indeed are sometimes published after the death of him who produced them; but they are better secured from corruption than these unfortunate compositions. They subsist in a single copy written or revised by the author; and the faults of the printed volume can be only faults of one descent. But of the works of Shakspeare the condition has been far different: he sold them, not to be printed, but to be played. They were immediately copied for the actors, and multiplied by transcript after transcript, vitiated by the blunders of the penman, or changed by the affectation of the player; perhaps enlarged to introduce a jest, or mutilated to shorten the representation; and printed at last without the concurrence

of the author, without the consent of the proprietor, from compilations made by chance or by stealth out of the separate parts written for the theatre; and thus thrust into the world surreptitiously and hastily, they suffered another deprivation from the ignorance and negligence of the printers, as every man who knows the state of the press in that age will readily conceive. It is not easy for invention to bring together so many causes concurring to vitiate the text. No other author ever gave up his works to fortune and time with so little care; no books could be left in hands so likely to injure them, as plays frequently acted, yet continued in manuscript: no other transcribers were likely to be so little qualified for their task as those who copied for the stage, at a time when the lower ranks of the people were universally illiterate: no other editions were made from fragments so minutely broken, and so fortuitously reunited; and in no other age was the art of printing in such unskilful hands. With the causes of corruption that make the revisal of Shakspeare's dramatic pieces necessary, may be enumerated the causes of obscurity, which may be partly imputed to his age, and partly to himself. When a writer outlives his contemporaries, and remains almost the only unforgotten name of a distant time, he is necessarily obscure. Every age has its modes of speech, and its cast of thought; which, though easily explained when there are many books to be compared with each other, become sometimes unintelligible, and always difficult, when there are no parallel passages that may conduce to their illustration. Shakspeare is the first considerable author of sublime or familiar dialogue in our language. Of the books which he read, and from which he formed his style, some perhaps have perished, and the rest are neglected. His imitations are therefore unnoted, his allusions are undiscovered, and many beauties, both of pleasantry and greatness, are lost with the objects to which they were united, as the figures vanish when the canvas is decayed. It is the great excellence of Shakspeare, that he drew his scenes from nature, and from life. He copied the manners of the world then passing before him, and has more allusions than other poets to the traditions and superstition of the vulgar; which must therefore be traced before he can be understood. He wrote at a time when our poetical language was yet unformed, when the meaning of our phrases was yet in fluctuation, when words were adopted at pleasure from the neighbouring languages, and while the Saxon was still visibly mingled in our diction. The reader is therefore em