With a privilege, rarely indulged even to the sons | make them worse, are said to have been written
of genius, he had produced his admirable works after Combe's death. Steevens and Malone dis-
without any throes or labour of the mind: they had credit the whole tale. The two first lines, as given
obtained for him all that he had asked from them, to us by Rowe, are unquestionably not Shak-
-the patronage of the great, the applause of the speare's; and that any lasting enmity subsisted
witty, and a competency of fortune adequate to between these two burghers of Stratford is dispro-
the moderation of his desires. Having fulfilled, or, ved by the respective wills of the parties, John
possibly, exceeded his expectations, they had dis- Combe bequeathing five pounds to our Poet, and
charged their duty; and he threw them altogether our Poet leaving his sword to John Combe's ne-
from his thought; and whether it were their des- phew and residuary legatee, John Combe himself
tiny to emerge into renown, or to perish in the being at that time deceased. With the two com-
drawer of a manager; to be brought to light in a mentators above mentioned, I am inclined, therefore,
state of integrity, or to revisit the glimpses of the on the whole, to reject the story as a fabrication;
moon with a thousand mortal murders on their head, though I cannot, with Steevens, convict the lines of
engaged no part of his solicitude or interest. They malignity; or think, with him and with Malone, that
had given to him the means of easy life, and he the character of Shakspeare, on the supposition of
sht from them nothing more. This insensi- his being their author, could require any laboured
bility in our Author to the offspring of his brain vindication to clear it from stain. In the anecdote,
may be the subject of our wonder or admira- as related by Rowe, I can see nothing but a whim-
tion: but its consequences have been calamitous sical sally, breaking from the mind of one friend,
to those who in after times have hung with delight and of a nature to excite a good-humoured smile on
over his pages. On the intellect and the temper of the cheek of the other. In Aubrey's hands, the
these ill-fated mortals it has inflicted a heavy load transaction assumes a somewhat darker com-
of punishment in the dullness and the arrogance of plexion; and the worse verses, as written after the
commentators and illustrators-in the conceit and death of their subject, may justly be branded as
petulance of Theobald; the imbecility of Capell; malevolent, and as discovering enmity in the heart
the pert and tasteless dogmatism of Steevens; the of their writer. But I have dwelt too long upon a
ponderous littleness of Malone and of Drake. Some topic which, in truth, is undeserving of a syllable;
superior men, it is true, have enlisted themselves and if I were to linger on it any longer, for the purpose
in the cause of Shakspeare. Rowe, Pope, War- of exhibiting Malone's reasons for his preference of
burton, Hanmer, and Johnson have successively Aubrey's copy of the epitaph to Rowe's, and his
been his editors; and have professed to give his discovery of the propriety and beauty of the single
scenes in their original purity to the world. But Ho in the last line of Aubrey's, as Ho is the abbre-
from some cause or other, which it is not our pre-viation of Hobgoblin, one of the names of Robin
sent business to explore, each of these editors, in Good-fellow, the fairy servant of Oberon, my read-
his turn, has disappointed the just expectations of ers would have just cause to complain of me, as
the public; and, with an inversion of Nature's sporting with their time and their patience.
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, With his various powers of pleasing; his wit and
by the only means in their power, to snatch them- his humour; the gentleness of his manners; the flow
selves from that oblivion to which Nature had devo- of his spirits and his fancy; the variety of anec
ted them. It would be unjust, however, to defraud dote with which his mind must have been stored;
these gentlemen of their proper praise. They have his knowledge of the world, and his intimacy
read for men of talents; and, by their gross labour with man, in every gradation of the society, from
in the mine, they have accumulated materials to the prompter of a playhouse to the peer and the
be arranged and polished by the hand of the finer sovereign, Shakspeare must have been a delightful
artist. Some apology may be necessary for this-nay, a fascinating companion; and his acquain-
short digression from the more immediate subject tance must necessarily have been courted by all
of my biography. But the three or four years, the prime inhabitants of Stratford and its vicinity.
which were passed by Shakspeare in the peaceful
retirement of New Place are not distinguished by
any traditionary anecdote deserving of our record;
and the chasm may not improperly be supplied with
whatever stands in contiguity with it. I should
pass in silence, as too trifling for notice, the story
of our Poet's extempore and jocular epitaph on On the 2d of February, 1615-16, he married his
John Combe, a rich townsman of Stratford, and a youngest daughter, Judith, then in the thirty-
noted money-lender, if my readers would not object first year of her age, to Thomas Quiney, a vintner
to me that I had omitted an anecdote which had in Stratford; and on the 25th of the succeeding
been honoured with a place in every preceding bio-month he executed his will. He was then, as it
graphy of my author. As the circumstance is re- would appear, in the full vigour and enjoyment of
fated by Rowe, "In a pleasant conversation among life; and we are not informed that his constitution
their common friends, Mr. Combe told Shakspeare, had been previously weakened by the attack of any
in a laughing manner, that he fancied he intended
to write his epitaph if he happened to outlive him:
and, since he could not know what might be said of
him when he was dead, he desired it might be done
immediately upon which Shakspeare gave him
these four verses:

Ten in the hundred lies here ingraved :
'Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved.
If any man ask, who lies in this tomb:
Ho! Ho! quoth the devil, 'tis my John a Combe.

But the sharpness of the satire is said to have stung
the man so severely that he never forgave it." By
ubrey the story is differently told; and the lines
question, with some alterations, which evidently

On the 9th of July, 1614, Stratford was ravaged by a fire, which destroyed fifty-four dwelling-houses besides barns and out-offices. It abstained, however, from the property of Shakspeare; and he had only to commiserate the losses of his neighbours.

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.

malady. But his days, or rather his hours, were now
all numbered; for he breathed his last on the 23d of i
the ensuing April, on that anniversary of his birth
which completed his fifty-second year. It would be
gratifying to our curiosity to know something of the
disease, which thus prematurely terminated the life
of this illustrious man: but the secret is withheld
from us; and it would be idle to endeavour to ob-
tain it. We may be certain that Dr. Hall, who was
father-in-law in his last illness; and Dr. Hall kept
a physician of considerable eminence, attended his
a register of all the remarkable cases, with their
symptoms and treatment, which in the course of
his practice had fallen under his observation. This
curious MS., which had escaped the enmity of time,
was obtained by Malone: but the recorded cases in

it most unfortunately began with the year 1617; whose expense the monument was constructed, and the preceding part of the register, which most nor by whose hand it was executed; nor at what probably had been in existence, could no where be precise time it was erected. It may have been found. The mortal complaint, therefore, of Williain wrought by the artist, acting under the recollections Shakspeare is likely to remain for ever unknown; of the Shakspeare family into some likeness of the and as darkness had closed upon his path through great townsman of Stratford; and on this probalife, so darkness now gathered round his bed of bility, we may contemplate it with no inconsidedeath, awfully to cover it from the eyes of succeed-rable interest. I cannot, however, persuade mying generations.

On the 25th of April, 1616, two days after his decease, he was buried in the chancel of the church of Stratford; and at some period within the seven subsequent years, (for in 1623 it is noticed in the verses of Leonard Digges,) a monument was raised to his memory either by the respect of his townsmen, or by the piety of his relations. It represents the Poet with a countenance of thought, resting on a cushion and in the act of writing. It is placed under an arch, between two Corinthian columns of black marble, the capitals and bases of which are gilt. The face is said, but, as far as I can find, noted during his life; and it is certain that no portrait of on any adequate authority, to have been modelled from the face of the deceased; and the whole was painted, to bring the imitation nearer to nature. The face and the hands wore the carnation of life the eyes were light hazel: the hair and beard were auburn a black gown, without sleeves, hung loosely over a scarlet doublet. The cushion in its upper part was green in its lower, crimson; and the tassels were of gold colour. This certainly was not in the high classical taste; though we may learn from Pausanias that statues in Greece were sometimes coloured after life; but as it was the work of contemporary hands, and was intended, by those who knew the Poet, to convey to posterity some resemblance of his lineaments and dress, it was a monument of rare value; and the tastelessness of Malone, who caused all its tints to be obliterated with a daubing of white lead, cannot be sufficiently ridiculed and condemned. Its material is a species of free-stone; and as the chisel of the sculptor was most probably under the guidance of Doctor Hall, it bore some promise of likeness to the mighty dead. Immediately below the cushion is the following distich :

self that the likeness could have been strong. The forehead, indeed, is sufficiently spacious and intel lectual: but there is a disproportionate length in the under part of the face: the mouth is weak; and the whole countenance is heavy and inert. Not having seen the monument itself, I can speak of it only from its numerous copies by the graver; and by these it is possible that I may be deceived. But if we cannot rely on the Stratford bust for a resemblance of our immortal dramatist, where are we to look with any hope of finding a trace of his features? K is highly probable that no portrait of him was painthim, with an incontestible claim to genuineness, is at present in existence. The fairest title to authenticity seems to be assignable to that which is called the Chandos portrait; and is now in the collection of the Duke of Buckingham, at Stowe. The possession of this picture can be distinctly traced up to Betterton and Davenant. Through the hands of successive purchasers, it became the property of Mr. Robert Keck. On the marriage of the heir ess of the Keck family, it passed to Mr. Nicholl, of Colney-Hatch, in Middlesex: on the union of this gentleman's daughter with the Duke of Chandos, it found a place in that nobleman's collection; and, finally, by the marriage of the present Duke of Buckingham with the Lady Anne Elizabeth Brydges, the heiress of the house of Chandos, it has settled in the gallery of Stowe. This was pronounced by the late Earl of Orford. (Horace Walpole,) as we are informed by Mr. Granger, to be the only origi nal picture of Shakspeare. But two others, if not more, contend with it for the palm of originality; one, which in consequence of its having been in the pos session of Mr. Felton, of Drayton, in the county of Salop, from whom it was purchased by the Boydells, has been called the Felton Shakspeare; and one, a miniature, which, by some connection, as I believe, with the family of its proprietors, found its way into the cabinet of the late Sir James Lamb, more generally, perhaps, known by his original name of James Bland Burgess. The first of these pictures was reported to have been found at the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, one of the favourite haunts, as it was erroneously called, of Shakspeare and his companions; and the second by a tradition, in the family of Somervile the poet, is affirmed to have been drawn from Shakspeare, who sate for it at the presand the flat stone, covering the grave, holds out, in sing instance of a Somervile, one of his most intivery irregular characters, a supplication to the read-mate friends. But the genuineness of neither of er, with the promise of a blessing and the menace of a curse:

Judicio Pylium; genio Socratem; arte Maronem

Terra tegit; populus mœret; Olympus habet.

On a tablet underneath are inscribed these lines:

Stay, passenger, why dost thou go so fast?

Read, if thou can'st, whom envious death has placed
Within this monument-Shakspeare; with whom
Quick Nature died; whose name doth deck the tomb
Far more than cost: since all that he hath writ
Leaves living art but page to serve his wit:

Good Friend for Jesus' sake forbear
To dig the dust inclosed here.

Blest be the man that spares these stones;
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
The last of these inscriptions may have been written
by Shakspeare himself under the apprehension of
his bones being tumbled, with those of many of his
townsmen, into the charnel-house of the parish.
But his dust has continued unviolated, and is likely
to remain in its holy repose till the last awful scene
of our perishable globe. It were to be wished that
the two preceding inscriptions were more worthy,
than they are, of the tomb to which they are at
tached. It would be gratifying if we could give any
faith to the tradition, which asserts that the bust of
this monument was sculptured from a cast moulded
on the face of the departed poet; for then we might
assure ourselves that we possess one authentic re-
semblance of this pre-eminently intellectual mortal.
But the cast, if taken, must have been taken im-
mediately after his death; and we know neither at

these pictures can be supported under a rigid investigation; and their pretensions must yield to those of another rival portrait of our Poet, which was once in the possession of Mr. Jennens, of Gopsal in Leicestershire, and is now the property of that liberal and literary nobleman, the Duke of Somerset. For the authenticity of this portrait, attributed to the pencil of Cornelius Jansenn, Mr. Boaden* contends with much zeal and ingenuity. Knowing that some of the family of Lord Southampton, Shakspeare's especial friend and patron, had been painted by Jansenn, Mr. Boaden speciously infers that, at the Earl's request, his favourite dramatist had, likewise, allowed his face to this painter's imitation; and that the Gopsal portrait, the result of the artist's skill on this occasion, had obtained a distinguished place in the picture-gallery of the noble Earl. This, however, is only unsupported assertion, and the mere idleness of conjec ture. It is not pretended to be ascertained that the Gopsal portrait was ever in the possession of Shak

An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Pictures and Prints offered as Portraits of Shakspeare, p. 67-80

regarded as a component part of the drama. To any attentive reader these distinguishing characters of the dramatic history of Henry VIII. must be sufficiently obvious; and we can only wonder that the same mind should produce such fine pieces as those of "Henry IV.," "Richard III.," and Henry VIII.," each written with a pen appropriate to itself, and the last with a pen not employed in any other instance.

"facies non omnibus una; Nec diversa tainen."

To illustrate what I mean, let us contemplate Portia, Desdemona, Imogen, Rosalind, Beatrice, Cordelia, and Ophelia. They are equally amiable and affectionate women; equally faithful and attached as wives, as friends, as daughters: two of them, also, are noted for the poignancy and sparkle of their wit: and yet can it be said that any one of If we were to pause in this stage of our progress, them can be mistaken for the other; or that a single we might confidently affirm that we had suggested speech can with propriety be transferred from the to the minds of our readers such a mass of poetic lips of her to whom it has been assigned by her and dramatic genius as would be sufficient to excite dramatic creator? They are all known to us as the the general interest of an intellectual and literary children of one family, with a general resemblance, people. But we are yet only in the vestibule which and an individual discrimination. Benedict and opens into the magnificence of the palace, where Mercutio are both young men of high birth; of Shakspeare is seated on the throne of his great-known valour; of playful wit, delighting itself in ness. The plays, which we have hitherto been pleasantry and frolic: yet are they not distinguished considering, are constructed, for the most part, beyond the possibility of their being confounded? with materials not his own, supplied either by the So intimately conversant is our great dramatist arcient chronicler, or by some preceding drama- with the varieties of human nature, that he scatters tist; and are wrought up without any reference to character, as a king on his accession scatters gold, nat essential portion of a drama, a plot or fable. among the populace; and there is not one, perhaps, But when he is disengaged from the incumbrances of his subordinate agents, who has not his peculiar to which he had submitted in his histories, he as- features and a complexion of his own. So mighty sumes the full character of the more perfect dra- is our Poet as a dramatic creator, that characters matist; and discovers that art, for which, equally of the most opposite description are thrown in equal with the powers of his imagination, he was cele- perfection and with equal facility from his hand. brated by Ben Jonson. In some of his plays, in- The executive decision of Richard; the meditative deed, we acknowledge the looseness with which his inefficiency of Hamlet; the melancholy of Jaques, fable is combined, and the careless hurry with which which draws subjects of moral reflection from every he accelerates its close: but in the greater triumphs object around him; and the hilarity of Mercutio, of his genius, we find the fable artificially planned which forsakes him not in the very act of dying; and solidly constructed. In "The Merchant of the great soul of Macbeth, maddened and bursting Venice," in "Romeo and Juliet," in "Lear," in under accumulated guilt; and "the unimitated and 'Othello," and, above all, in that intellectual won- inimitable Falstaff," (as he is called by S. Johnson, der, "The Tempest," we may observe the fable in the single outbreak of enthusiasm extorted from managed with the hand of a master, and contribu- him by the wonders of Shakspeare's page) revell ting its effect, with the characters and the dialogue, ing in the tavern at Eastcheap, or jesting on the to amuse, to agitate, or to surprise. In that beau-field of Shrewsbury, are all the creatures of one tiful pastoral drama, "As You Like It," the sudden plastic intellect, and are absolute and entire in their disappearance of old Adam from the scene has kind. Malignity and revenge constitute the founbeen a subject of regret to more than one of the dation on which are constructed the two very dissi commentators: and Samuel Johnson wishes that milar characters of Shylock and Iago. But there the dialogue between the hermit, as he calls him, is something terrific and even awful in the inexora and the usurping duke, the result of which was the bility of the Jew, whilst there is nothing but meanconversion of the latter, had not been omitted on ness in the artifices of the Venetian standardthe stage. But old Adam had fulfilled the purposes bearer. They are both men of vigorous and acute of his dramatic existence, and it was, therefore, understandings: we hate them both; but our ha properly closed. He had discovered his honest at-tred of the former is mingled with involuntary retachment to his young master, and had experienced his young master's gratitude. He was brought into a place of safety; and his fortunes were now blended with those of the princely exiles of the forest. There was no further part for him to act; and he passed naturally from the stage, no longer the object of our hopes or our fears. On the subject of S. Johnson's wish respecting the dialogue between the old religious man and the guilty duke, we may shortly remark, that nothing could have been more undramatic than the intervention of such a scene of dry and didactic morality, at such a crisis of the drama, when the minds of the audience were heated, and hurrying to its approaching close. Like Felix in the sacred history, the royal criminal might have trembled at the lecture of the noly man but the audience, probably, would have been irritated or asleep. No! Shakspeare was not so ignorant of his art as to require to be instructed in it by the author of Irene.

But it was in the portraiture of the human mind: in the specific delineation of intellectual and moral man, that the genius of Shakspeare was pre-eminently conspicuous. The curious inquisition of his eye into the characters, which were passing beneath its glance, cannot be made too much the subject of our admiration and wonder. He saw them not only under their broad distinctions, when they became obvious to the common observer; but he beheld them in their nicer tints and shadings, by which they are diversified, though the tone of their general colouring may be the same.

spect; of the latter our detestation is made more intensely strong by its association with contempt. In his representation of madness, Shakspeare must be regarded as inimitably excellent; and the picture of this last degradation of humanity, with nature always for his model, is diversified by him at his pleasure. Even over the wreck of the human mind he throws the variegated robe of character. How different is the genuine insanity of Lear from the assumed insanity of Edgar, with which it is immediately confronted; and how distinct, again, are both of these from the disorder which prevails in the brain of the lost and the tender Ophelia.

In one illustrious effort of his dramatic power, our Poet has had the confidence to produce two delineations of the same perversion of the human heart, and to present them, at once similar and dissimilar, to the examination of our wondering eyes. In Timon and Apemantus is exhibited the same de formity of misanthropy: but in the former it springs from the corruption of a noble mind, stricken and laid prostrate by the ingratitude of his species: in the latter, it is a noisome weed, germinating from a bitter root, and cherished by perverse cultivation into branching malignity. In each of them, as the vice has a different parentage, so has it a diversified aspect.

With such an intimacy with all the fine and subtle workings of Nature in her action on the human heart, it is not wonderful that our great dramatist should possess an absolute control over the passions; and should be able to unlock the cell of each

the loftiest aspirations of the human mind in the ages which are yet to come. The great Milton's imagination alone can be placed in competition with that of Shakspeare; and even Milton's must yield the palm to that which is displayed in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and in the almost divine "Tempest."

or

But having sported a while with the fairies, "as on the sands with printless feet They chase the ebbing Neptune,"

"in the spiced Indian air, They dance their ringlets to the whistling wind,”

of them is the impulse of his fancy may direct. When we follow Macbeth to the chamber of Duncan: when we stand with him by the enchanted caldron; or see him, under the infliction of conscience, glaring at the spectre of the blood-boltered Banquo in the possession of the royal chair, horror is by our side, thrilling in our veins, and bristling in our hair. When we attend the Danish prince to his midnight conference with the shade of his murdered father, and hear the ineffable accents of the dead, willing, but prohibited, " to tell the secrets of his prison-house," we are appalled, and our faculties are suspended in terror. When we see the faithful and the lovely Juliet awaking in the house of darkness and corruption with the corpse of her husband on her bosom: when we behold the innocent Desdemona dying by the hand, to which she the mighty Poet turns from their bowers, "overwas the most fondly attached; and charging on canopied with luscious woodbine," and plants us herself, with her latest breath, the guilt of her mur- on "the blasted heath," trodden by the weird sis derer: when we witness the wretchedness of Lear, ters, the Fates of the north; or leads us to the contending with the midnight storm, and strewing dreadful cave, where they are preparing their inhis white locks on the blast; or carrying in his fernal caldron, and singing round it the incantations withered arms the body of his Cordelia murdered of hell. What a change, from all that is fascinain his cause, is it possible that the tear of pity ting, to all that is the most appalling to the fancy; should not start from our eyes and trickle down our and yet each of these scenes is the product of the cheeks? In the forest of Arden, as we ramble with same astonishing intellect, delighting at one time its accidental inmates, our spirits are soothed into to lull us on beds of roses, with the spirit of Or cheerfulness, and are, occasionally, elevated into pheus, and at another to curdle our blood by throwgaiety. In the tavern at Eastcheap, with the wittying at us the viper lock of Alecto. But to show and debauched knight, we meet with "Laughter his supreme command of the super-human world, holding both his sides;" and we surrender our-our royal Poet touches the sepulchre with his ma selves, willingly and delighted, to the inebriation of gic rod, and the sepulchre opens "its pond'rous his influence. We could dwell for a long summer's day amid the fertility of these charming topics, if we were not called from them to a higher region of poetic enjoyment, possessed by the genius of Shakspeare alone, where he reigns sole lord, and where his subjects are the wondrous progeny of his own creative imagination. From whatever quarter of the world, eastern or northern, England may have originally derived her elves and her fairies, Shakspeare undoubtedly formed these little beings, as they flutter in his scenes, from an idea of his own; and they came from his hand, beneficent and friendly to man; immortal and invulnerable; of such corporeal minuteness as to lie in the bell of a cowslip; and yet of such power as to disorder the seasons; as

and marble jaws," and gives its dead to "revisit the glimpses of the moon." The belief that the dead, on some awful occasions, were permitted to assume the semblance of those bodies, in which they had walked upon earth; or that the world of spirits was sometimes disclosed to the eye of mortality, has prevailed in every age of mankind, in the most enlightened as well as in the most dark. When philosophy had attained its widest extent of power, and had enlarged and refined the intellect, not only of its parent Greece, but of its pupil Rome, a spectre is recorded to have shaken the firmness of Dion, the scholar and the friend of Plato; and another to have assayed the constancy of the philosophic and the virtuous Brutus. In the superstitious age of our Elizabeth and of her Scottish successor, the belief in the existence of ghosts and apparitions was nearly universal; and when Shakspeare produced upon his stage the shade of the Danish sovereign, there was not, perhaps, a heart, amid the crowded audience, which did not To this little ethereal people our Poet has assigned palpitate with fear. But in any age, however little manners and occupations in perfect consistency tainted it might be with superstitions credulity, with their nature; and has sent them forth, in the would the ghost of royal Denmark excite an agita richest array of fancy, to gambol before us, to asto- ting interest, with such awful solemnity is he intro nish and delight us. They resemble nothing upon duced, so sublimely terrible is his tale of woe, earth: but if they could exist with man, they would such are the effects of his appearance on the peract and speak as they act and speak, with the inspi- sons of the drama, who are its immediate wit ration of our Poet, in "The Tempest," and "Anesses. We catch, indeed, the terrors of Horatio Midsummer Night's Dream." In contrast with his and the young prince; and if the illusion be not Ariel, "a spirit too delicate," as the servant of a so strong as to seize in the first instance on our own witch, "to act her earthy and abhorred com- minds, it acts on them in its result from theirs. mands:" but ready, under the control of his philo-The melancholy, which previously preyed on the sophic master,

"to bedim

The noontide sun; call forth the mutinous winds:
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault,
Set roaring war."

"To answer his best pleasure, be it to fly,
To swim; to dive into the fire; to ride
On the curl'd clouds ;"

and

spirits of the youthful Hamlet, was certainly heightened into insanity by this ghostly conference; and from this dreadful moment his madness is partly assumed, and partly unaffected. It is certain that no spectre, ever brought upon the stage, can be compared with this phantom, created by the power in contrast with this aerial being, the imagination of Shakspeare. The apparition of the host, in of Shakspeare has formed a monster, the offspring "The Lover's Progress," by Fletcher, is too conof a hag and a demon; and has introduced him temptible to be mentioned on this occasion: the into the scene with a mind and a character appro- spirit of Almanzor's mother, in "The Conquest of priately and strictly his own. As the drama, into Granada," by Dryden, is not of a higher class; and which are introduced these two beings, beyond the even the ghost of Darius, in "The Persians," of action of Nature, as it is discoverable on this earth, the mighty and sublime schylus, shrinks into insig one of them rising above, and one sinking beneath nificance before this of the murdered Majesty of the level of humanity, may be received as the Denmark. For his success, indeed, in this instance, proudest evidence, which has hitherto been pro- Shakspeare is greatly indebted to the superior awduced, of the extent and vigour of man's imagina-fulness of his religion; and the use which he has tion; so it bids fair to stand unrivalled amid all made of the Romish purgatory must be regarded as

instrument. The stream of passion, like a stream of electricity, rushes from the actor to us, and we are as unable as we are unwilling to resist it. Now it is this feeling, which constitutes the poetic probability of what we see and hear, and which may be violated by an injudicious and lawless shifting of the scene. If our passions be interested by an action passing at a place called Rome, it must shock and chill them to have our attentions hurried suddenly, without any reason for the discontinuance of the action, to a piace called Alexandria, separaus suppose, then, that in the fulness of the scenic excitement, a friend at our elbow, with the impassible fibre of a Johnson, were to shake us and to say, "What! are you mad? Know you not where you are? in Drury Lane theatre? within a few hundred yards of your own chambers in Lincoln's Inn, and neither at Rome nor at Alexandria? and perceive you not that the old man whom you see there on his knee, with his hands clenched, and his eyes raised in imprecation to heaven, is our old friend, Garrick, who is reciting with much propriety some verses made by a man, long since in his grave? Yes! Garrick, with whom you conversed not many hours ago; and who, a few hours hence, will be talking with his friends, over a comfortable supper, of the effects of his present mimickry?" If we should be thus addressed, (and a sudden shifting of the scene may produce an equal dissipation of the illusion which delights us,) should we be thankful to our wise friend for thus informing our understanding by the interruption of our feelings? Should we not rather exclaim with the Argive noble of Horace, when purged by hellebore into his senses, "Pol me occidisti

supremely felicitous. When the imagination of Shakspeare sported without control amid these creations of its own, it unquestionably lifted him high above any competition. As he plays with the fairies in their bowers of eglantine and woodbine; er directs the operations in the magic cave; or calls the dead man from the "cold obstruction" of the tomb, "to make night hideous," he may challenge the poets of every age, from that of Homer to the present, and be fearless of the event. But either from his ignorance of them, which is not easily credible, or from his disregard to them, or rather, per-ted by the intervention of a thousand miles. Let haps, from his desire to escape from their yoke, he violates without remorse the dramatic urities of time and place, contenting himself to preserve the unity of action or design, without which, indeed, nothing worthy of the name of composition can exist. And who steps forward, in this instance of his licentious liberty, as the champion of Shakspeare, but that very critic who brings such charges against him as a poet and a dramatist, that, if they were capable of being substantiated, would overturn him from his lofty pedestal; and would prove the object of our homage, during two centuries, to be a little deformed image, which we had with the most silly idolatry mistaken for a god? But Johnson's defence of Shakspeare seems to be as weak as his attack; though in either case the want of power in the warrior is concealed under the glare of his ostentatious arms. It is unquestionable that, since the days of the patrician of Argos, recorded by Horace, who would sit for hours in the vacant theatre, and give his applause to actors who were not there, no man, unattended by a keeper, ever mistook the wooden and narrow platform of a stage for the fields of Philippi or Agincourt; or the painted canvass, shifting under his eye, for the palace of the Ptolemies or the Cesars; or the walk, which had brought him from his own house to the theatre, for a voyage across the Mediterranean to Alexandria; or the men and women, with whom he had probably conversed in the common intercourse of life, for old Romans and Grecians. Such a power of illusion, quite incompatible with any degree of sanity of mind, has never been challenged by any critic, as attached to poetry and the stage; and it is adduced, in his accustomed style of argument, by Johnson, only for the purpose of confounding his adversaries with absurdity, or of baffling them with ridicule. But there is a power of illusion, belonging to genuine poetry, which, without overthrowing the reason, can seize upon the imagination, and make it subservient to its purposes. This is asserted by Horace in that often cited passage:

"Ille per extentum funem mihi posse videtur Ire poeta, meum qui pectus inaniter angit, Irritat, mulcet falsis terroribus implet

Ut magus; et modo me Thebis modo ponit Athenis."

cui sic extorta voluptas

Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error."

With the illusion of the poetic or dramatic imitation, established as an unquestionable truth in our minds, let us now turn and consider the dramatic unities in their origin and effect. The unity of action, indeed, may be thrown altogether from our notice; for, universally acknowledged to be essen tially necessary to the drama, and constituting what may be called its living principle, it has escaped from violation even by our lawless Poet himself. The drama, as we know, in Greece, derived its ori gin from the choral odes, which were sung at certain seasons before the altar of Bacchus. To these, in the first instance, was added a dialogue of two persons; and, the number of speakers being subsequently increased, a regular dramatic fable was, at length, constructed, and the dialogue usurped the prime honours of the performance. But the chorus, though degraded, could not be expelled from the scene, which was once entirely its own; and, consecrated by the regard of the people, it was forced upon the acceptance of the dramatist, to act with it

Assisted by the scenery, the dresses of the actors, and their fine adaptation of the voice and counte-in the best manner that he could. It was stationed, nance to the design of the poet, this illusion becomes therefore, permanently on the stage, and made to so strong as intimately to blend us with the fictitious occupy its place with the agents who were to conpersonages whom we see before us. We know, duct the action of the fable. From the circumstance indeed, that we are seated upon benches, and are of its being stationary on the stage, it secured the spectators only of a poetic fiction: but the power, strict observance of the unity of place: for with a which mingles us with the agents upon the stage, is stage, which was never vacant, and consequently of such a nature that we feel, as it were, one inter- with only one scene, the Grecian dramatist could est with them we resent the injuries which they not remove his agents whithersoever he pleased, in suffer, we rejoice at the good fortune which betides accommodation to his immediate convenience; but them: the pulses of our hearts beat in harmony on the spot, where the scene opened, he was conwith theirs; and as the tear gushes from their eyes, strained to retain them till the action of the drama it swells and overflows in ours. To account for was closed, and what could not consistently be this influence of poetic imitation, for this contagion acted was necessarily onsigned to narration. This of represented passion belongs to the metaphysi- was a heavy servitude to the dramatist; but it had cian, the sole business of the critic is to remark its compensations ir uninterrupted feeling, and in and to reason from the fact. It is unquestionable the greater conservation of probability. To the that our imaginations are, to a certain extent, under the control of authentic poetry, and especially of that poetry which employs the scenic imitation for its

unity of time, as time is more pliant to the imagination than place, the Grecian dramatist seems to have paid little fany regard. In the Agamemnon of Eschylus, the fire signals have only just announced to Mycena the fall of Troy, when the herald arrives with the tidings of the victorious