XXX.

HAMLET'S ADVICE TO THE PLAYERS. - SHAKESPEARE. SPEAK the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier had spoken my lines. And do not saw the air too much with your hands, but use all gently; for, in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must beget a temperance that will give it smoothness. Oh! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings; who (for the most part) are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. Pray you avoid it.

Be not too tame, either; but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing; whose end is, to hold, as it were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the times, their form and pressure. Now, this overdone, or come tardy off, though it may make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of one of which must, in your allowance, overweigh a whole theatre of others. Oh! there are players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that, highly, not to speak it profanely, — who, having neither the accent of Christian, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

XXXI. OTHELLO'S DEFENCE.

SHAKESPEARE.

I.

MOST potent, grave, and reverend seigniors,
My very noble and approved good masters,
That I have ta'en away this old man's daughter,
It is most true; true, I have married her;
The very head and front of my offending
Hath this extent, no more.

II.

Rude am I in speech,

And little bless'd with the set phrase of peace;
For since these arms of mine hath seven years' pith,
Till now some nine moons wasted, they have used
Their dearest action in the tented field;

And little of this great world can I speak,

More than pertains to feats of broil and battle;

And therefore little shall I grace my cause,

In speaking for myself. Yet, by your gracious patience

I will a round unvarnished tale deliver,

Of my whole course of love; what drugs, what charms, What conjuration, and what mighty magic

(For such proceedings I am charged withal)

I won his daughter with.

III.

Her father loved me; oft invited me ;

Still questioned me the story of my life,

From year to year; the battles, sieges, fortunes
That I have pass'd.

I ran it through, even from my boyish days,
To the very moment that he bade me tell it:
Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances;
Of moving accidents, by flood and field;

Of hair-breadth 'scapes in the imminent deadly breach;

Of being taken by the insolent foe,

And sold to slavery; of my redemption thence,
And with it all my travel's history.

IV.

These things to hear

Would Desdemona seriously incline;

But still the house affairs would draw her thence;
Which ever as she could with haste despatch,
She'd come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse; which I observing,
Took once a pliant hour; and found good means
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart,
That I would all my pilgrimage dilate,
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not attentively.

V.

I did consent;

And often did beguile her of her tears,
When I did speak of some distressful stroke
That my youth suffered. My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs;

She swore in faith, 't was strange, 't was passing strange; 'T was pitiful, 't was wondrous pitiful;

She wished she had not heard it; yet she wished
That heaven had made her such a man.

VI.

She thank'd me;

And bade me if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
And that would woo her. On this hint, I spake;
She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd;
And I loved her, that she did pity them.

This only is the witchcraft I have used.

THIS theology of conscience has been greatly obscured, but never, in any country, or at any period in the history of the world, has it been wholly obliterated. We behold the vestiges of it in the simple theology of the desert; and, perhaps, more distinctly there, than in the complex superstitions of an artificial and civilized heathenism. In confirmation of this, we might quote the invocations to the Great Spirit from the wilds of North America. But, indeed, in every quarter of the globe, where missionaries have held converse with savages, even with the rudest of Nature's children, when speaking on the topics of sin and judgment, they did not speak to them in vocables unknown. And as the sense of a universal law and a Supreme Lawgiver never waned into total extinction among the tribes of ferocious and untamed wanderers, so neither was it altogether stifled by the refined and intricate polytheism of more enlightened nations. When the guilty emperors of Rome were tempest-driven by remorse and fear, it was not that they trembled before a sceptre of their own imagination. When terror mixed, which it often did, with the rage and cruelty of Nero, it was the theology of conscience which haunted him. It was not the suggestion of a capricious fancy which gave him the disturbance, but a voice issuing from the deep recesses of a moral nature, as stable and uniform throughout the species as is the material structure of humanity; and in the lineaments of which we may read that there is a moral regimen among men, and therefore a moral governor who hath instituted, and who presides over it. Therefore it was that these imperial despots, the worst and

haughtiest of recorded monarchs, stood aghast at the spectacle of their own worthlessness.

This is not a local or a geographical notion. It is a universal feeling; to be found wherever men are found, because interwoven with the constitution of humanity. It is not, therefore, the peculiarity of one creed or of one country. It circulates at large throughout the family of man. We can trace it in the theology of savage life; nor is it wholly overborne by the artificial theology of a more complex and idolatrous paganism. Neither crime nor civilization can extinguish it; and, whether in the "conscientia scelerum" of the fierce and frenzied Catiline, or in the tranquil contemplative musings of Socrates and Cicero, we find the impression of at once a righteous and reigning Sovereign.

XXXIII. THE BATTLE OF LIFE.-S. OLIN.

SOME one asked the Duke of Wellington what his secret was for winning battles. And he said that he had no secret, that he did not know how to win battles, and that no man knew. For all, he said, that man could do was to look beforehand steadily at all the chances, and lay all possible plans beforehand; but from the moment the battle began, he said, no mortal prudence was of use, and no mortal man could know what the end would be. A thousand new accidents might spring up every hour, and scatter all his plans to the winds; and all that man could do was to comfort himself with the thought that he had done his best, and to trust in God.

Now, my friends, learn a lesson from this, a lesson for the battle of life, which every one of us has to fight from our cradle to our grave - the battle against misery, poverty, misfortune, sickness -the battle against worse enemies even than they the battle against our own weak hearts and the sins which so easily beset us; against laziness, dishonesty, profligacy, bad tempers, hard-heartedness, deserved disgrace, the