ranean familiarly as the Enchanted Island. The reason for its being deserted is thus given by Captain Smyth: "It was never inhabited on account, it is gravely said, of the horrible spectres that haunted it ;" and, quoting from Coronelli, he it; says, "Even writers worthy of confidence assert that no one can reside on this island on account of the phantasms, spectres, and horrible visions that appear in the night, repose and quiet being banished by the formidable apparitions and frightful dreams that fatally affect with death-like terrors whoever does remain there so much as one night." Crusius in 1584 has these few words relating to the supernatural appearances ;—"Noctes ibi spectris tumultuosæ."

We thus obtain an island in many respects invested with the attributes which belong to the island of Prospero, and in the proper geographical position. But so far we have met with no coincident circumstances which are of a peculiar and remarkable character, such as we should not expect to find at once in an actual island and in the island of a work of poetic invention, unless the writer of the fiction had some acquaintance with the island actually existing. But, pursuing our inquiries further, we find that "the Turks are governed by a ridiculous superstitious idea that no one would be able to go out of the island who did not leave something there, or who had the hardihood to take away the merest trifle!" Compare with this one mode of the operations of Prospero.

PROSPERO.-Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,

Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury

Do I take part; the rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance; they being penitent,

The sole drift of my purpose doth extend.

Not a frown further: go, release them, Ariel.-Act v. Sc. 1.

The island of Prospero is bound in by a rocky coast. This is the case with Lampedusa. What can be inferred from this? I cheerfully answer, nothing. But then in the rocky bounds of Lampedusa there are hollows, troglodytic caves, as Captain Smyth expressly calls them, and he found some of them actually inhabited. This is not common to every rock-bound island, and yet this same peculiarity we find in the island of Prospero. Caliban, like one of Mr. Fernandez' Maltese, inhabits one of these caverns:

For I am all the subjects that you have,

Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me

In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me

The rest of the island.-Act i. Sc. 2.

We have another allusion to these caves in the conversation between the clowns concerning the wine:

TRINCULO.-Oh, Stephano, hast any more of this?

STEPHANO. The whole butt, man; my cellar is in a rock by the sea-side where my wine is hid.-Act ii. Sc. 1.

Prospero, however, does not live the life of a troglodyte. He has his cell, "a full poor cell," as compared with his Milanese palace, but capacious enough to receive himself and Miranda, and those books which he prized above his dukedom. It was the only place in the island which was fit for the habitation of human beings. Now just one such building was there at Lampedusa. Captain Smyth says that "it stood at a little distance from Cala Croce, up a ravine in some degree picturesque." The cell of Prospero is made by Shakespeare, perhaps accidentally, picturesque, by shading it with line-trees.

This cell had a solitary inhabitant, a faint prototype of Prospero, the person whose memory is perpetuated in the common proverb of the Sicilians, who call a man of any faith an hermit of Lampedusa, explaining it thus :-the hermit had a chapel adjoining his cell which he lighted up for the crescent or the cross, according to the nation of any vessel which he saw approaching his shores.

In the Sicilian legends there is a story which bears a slight resemblance to the story of this play. In early times a vessel was wrecked on Lampedusa, and the only persons who escaped were two Palermitan ladies, Rosina and Clelia. They found on the island two hermits, Sinibald and Guido, who, renouncing their ascetic life, married them.*

Another point of resemblance between Lampedusa and the island of The Tempest is too remarkable to be passed over, and too peculiar to have existed at all were there no connection between the actual island and the island of this play. Malta is supplied with fire-wood from Lampedusa and it will be recollected that the labour which Prospero imposed upon Ferdinand was to place logs of wood in a pile; to which it may be added that the chief employment of Caliban, the "servant-monster," was the collecting of fire-wood, of which he is for ever talking. This does not look like a mere poetic invention; at least the coincidence, if there was no connection, is very extraordinary. And here we may remark, as illustrating that realization of every scene, and that consistency which runs through all the works of Shakespeare, that they were logs of pine which Ferdinand was employed in piling. This does not appear directly in anything which is said, but may be inferred from what Miranda says:

• On this tradition is founded a poem of Wieland's, "Klelia and Sinibald, oder die Bevol-ferung von Lampeduse."

When this burns

'Twill weep for having wearied you.

Nor is it distinctly affirmed in terms that pine trees were of the natural growth of the island, but we collect it from the fact that it was in a cloven pine that Ariel was imprisoned.

Reverting, then, to the point which it was proposed to establish, namely, that Lampedusa was the island on which Shakespeare intended that we should understand the scenes of his drama to have taken place, it may be asked if it can be regarded probable that the poet formed in his mind from his own stores (as undoubtedly he was abundantly capable of doing if he chose to do so) the full image of his Enchanted Island with all its attributes, without any reference to an actual island, when there is an island possessing so many of those attributes in the very place which the exigencies of the story require ?*

ORIGIN. It will probably here be asked how Shakespeare could become acquainted with Lampedusa, an obscure island, rarely mentioned anywhere, and of which it is probable that no account could be gained from any book of geography or travels easily within his reach; and this leads us to

* There is some want of consistency in Mr. Collier. Having told us that the mention of "the still-vex'd Bermoothes" seems directly to connect this drama with Jourdan's Discovery of the Bermudas, he immediately afterwards tells us that he cannot admit that Lampedusa was the island, because "we cannot persuade ourselves that Shakespeare had any particular island in his mind." Then not Bermuda. Mr. Collier should make his election; either contend that the island of The Tempest had no actual prototype, which excludes Bermuda, or that it had a prototype in Bermuda, in which case the pretension of any other island may be put forward. There is the same self-contradictory writing in the article in The Quarterly Review, to which reference has before been made. "It is" and "It is not," just as suits the purpose. I agree, however, with Mr. Collier that we might have expected to have seen the name of the island in the play: but I think nothing of what he says about the Turco-Græcia.

another point-the origin of this play and of the principal characters and incidents in it. The answer I conceive to be this: that Shakespeare did not obtain his acquaintance with Lampedusa from Crusius or any other learned writer, and then devise a story adapted to the natural features of the place and to the opinions respecting it; but that when he wrote The Tempest he proceeded as he did when he wrote most of his other romantic dramas; that is, he took a story which had been previously written by another hand, and then in his own inimitable manner told the story again in the dramatic form; and that it was in the story so prepared for him that he found Lampedusa and the several peculiarities which belonged to it, and that, like the other stories which form the basis of The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and others of his romantic dramas, it was a story not of home growth, but the work of foreign invention, the production of a French, Spanish, or Italian artist, but in this instance probably an Italian story, the work of some person to whom the attributes, physical and metaphysical, of the island of Lampedusa were familiarly known, as easily they might be. Thus it was, I conceive, that Shakespeare became acquainted with Lampedusa.

That Shakespeare worked on some such previously constructed story will be thought too bold an assumption only by those who do not advert to the fact that he is usually found working out in the dramatic form stories previously constructed, or, if not taking entire stories, using incidents as the basis of his plots which he found in previous writers. Origins, more or less complete, have been discovered for all his romantic plays, with the exception of the Love Labours Lost and The Tempest. The absence of the original stories of both these is a remarkable circumstance, since the stories of both are off-shoots as it were from a stock of genuine his