and Bassanio. This was enough for the purpose. Orders are given for preparations to receive them, and for the music. Then the dialogue proceeds.

How sweet the moon-light sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of musick
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica Look! how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patterns of bright gold;
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st,
But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins :*
Such harmony is in immortal souls ;

But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

Purer stream of poetry than this never flowed from poet's pen. Higher thoughts never found happier expression. The cultivated mind of Lorenzo might well, in such a night, turn to the Pythagorean notion of Heavenly Harmony. He is to be regarded here as a kind of teacher of philosophy, delivering instruction to his fair companion who sits silent by, as Adam, in the only scene which can bear comparison with this, pours instruction into the ear of Eve. It would have given an unpleasing air of pedantry to the character of Jessica had she sought again to rival Lorenzo, or shewn that she had before any acquaintance with these high mysteries. Yet it cannot be denied that there is a difficulty in adjusting the sense which seems to have been intended to the words as they are delivered to us. It is a difficulty from which neither various reading nor happy conjecture has yet been sufficient wholly to extricate us.

* This is the orthography of all the early editions, and is no doubt what Shakespeare wrote. The difficulty is not why Shakespeare annexed the plural 's to a word that was already plural without it, but why he preferred the Chaldee plural to the common Hebrew plural, and did not write the more familiar word cherubim, or, if it so pleased him, cherubims.

Take it, as it is generally understood to mean, that while we are in the body we cannot hear the music of the spheres, and it must be admitted that this is one of the "unfiled expressions," an uncorrected passage, one of those which Jonson, a more correct and classical writer, wished that he had reformed. Still, if we can suppose Shakespeare to have been intending to represent Lorenzo as acquainted with a philosophical opinion of a more recondite nature than that of the harmony of the spheres, the words admit of an interpretation, and a very just and proper one, without any disturbance of the text, and where every clause and every word has its just and proper meaning. Beside that music of the spheres, which no mortal ear ever caught a note of, there was by some philosophers supposed to be a harmony in the human soul. "Touching musical harmony," says Hooker," whether by instrument or by voice, it being but of high and low sounds in a due proportionable disposition, such, notwithstanding, is the force thereof, and so pleasing effects it hath in that very part of man which is most divine, that some have been thereby induced to think that the soul itself, by nature is, or hath in it, harmony." If we apply this profounder doctrine to the illustration of Lorenzo's speech we must suppose that we have done with the music of the spheres at the line,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.

Lorenzo then begins to instruct Jessica in a deeper mystery:

Such harmony is in immortal souls.

Harmony such as that which the cherubim hear, as the spheres pass swiftly along, is also in the immortal souls of men. But though it is thus in us, and within us, it is so closed in by this "muddy vesture of decay," this gross cor

poreal substance in which the soul is placed, that we cannot hear it. It was Dr. Farmer who first illustrated this passage, from the doctrine noticed by Hooker.*

One verbal criticism this passage requires. There was difficulty from the beginning. One of the two quartos reads pattens, the other pattents; the first folio has pattens, the second folio patterns. Pattents is wholly inadmissible. Patterns has been almost universally rejected, so little favour have the readings of the second folio found at the hands of the modern editors. We usually find pattens, but against this reading is the formidable objection, that nothing called at any period a patten can be supposed to have been used to represent a star. To get quit of this difficulty, the word was turned into patine, the Latin word patina Anglicised. There is no happiness or propriety in likening the stars to dishes, not even golden ones. I have no doubt that pattern was the word from the beginning, and that Lorenzo was speaking of the stars as in their constellations, not individually; and the constellations may not unsuitably be spoken of as patterns, just as we speak of the pattern of mosaic work, or the pattern of a flowered or spotted damask.

To proceed with this fascinating scene. When Lorenzo calls to the musicians, it is in the words,

Come ho and wake Diana with a hymn.

*The book of the Ecclesiastical Polity (Book v.) in which these words are found, was first published in 1597, too late, it is probable, to have been read by Shakespeare when he wrote this play; but Shakespeare, as well as Hooker, might have read of the doctrine elsewhere, or heard of it in some philosophic discourse.

Warburton (Boswell's Malone, vol. v. p, 131.) says that a patten is "a round broad plate of gold, borne in heraldry;" and to this Steevens appears to give his sanction. But it is a mistake. Such a plate of gold is called a

bezant.

This is in reference to what he said just before of the moon's sleeping,

How sweet the moon-light sleeps upon this bank.

And again,

How the moon

Sleeps with Endymion, and would not be awaked :*

but the naming Diana recalls, by association, the idea of Portia; and Lorenzo proceeds,

With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear,

And draw her home with music.

From the contemplation of the clear cloudless sky, the moon walking in her brightness, and the eldest sons of God singing together in their courses, the mind of Lorenzo is now turned to the sweet music which may be heard with the outward ear, led to it by the well-interposed remark of Jessica,

I am never merry when I hear sweet music;

and he discourses, still in the character of tutor or instructor, to his companion, on the power of music on both beasts and men:

The reason is, your spirits are attentive:

For do but note a wild and wanton herd,

*There is not a more inexcusable defeat committed on the text of Shakespeare by any editor than is done by Mr. Malone in this exquisite passage. He not only would read, but actually prints, as his text,

Peace, hoa! the moon sleeps with Endymion,

And would not be awaked.

And this because, as he says, of the oddness of the phrase, "How the moon would not be awaked." But can any one read the words as they stand in Shakespeare, and not recognize in a moment one of the commonest and most intelligible of English phrases by which we express admiration? All the beauty of the expression is lost by the change: Portia looks upwards and observes the steady, still, settled, and almost imperceptible motion of the fair planet of the night, and thus expresses her admiration of the soft beauty of the scene.

Or race of youthful and unhandled colts,
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing, and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood;

If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of musick touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze,

By the sweet power of musick: therefore, the poet
Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods;
Since nought so stockish, hard, and full of rage,
But musick for the time doth change his nature:
The man that hath no musick in himself,
Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:

Let no such man be trusted.

With such eloquent discourse the interval is filled up till the arrival of Portia.

There is a dramatic purpose worthy of notice in the words which Portia utters when she first appears upon the scene:

That light we see is burning in my hall:

How far that little candle throws his beams!

So shines a good deed in this naughty world.

It was meant to connect the present with the past; the defeated attempt of Shylock on the life of Anthonio with the scenes of Belmont; and the spectators are thus led to look upon Portia returning to the house in which the scene of the caskets had been presented, crowned with the honours of the good deed she had done in freeing the merchant.

There is also great dramatic skill shewn in the dialogue which now ensues between Portia and Nerrissa. It is not quite unlike that to which we have been listening with such charmed ears between Lorenzo and Jessica; yet it is less philosophical, and so leads gently to the change from those sweet discourses to the business of the story, to which it was now necessary to proceed.