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of human nature. Their attainments of different kinds bore the same general stamp, and it was sterling: what they did had the mark of their age and country upon it. Perhaps the genius of Great Britain (if I may so speak without offence or flattery) never shone out fuller or brighter, or looked more like itself, than at this period. . . .

For such an extraordinary combination and development of fancy and genius many causes may be assigned; and we may seek for the chief of them in religion, in politics, in the circumstances of the time, the recent diffusion of letters, in local situation, and in the character of the men who adorned that period, and availed themselves so nobly of the advantages placed within their reach.

I shall here attempt to give a general sketch of these causes, and of the manner in which they operated to mould and stamp the poetry of the country at the period of which I have to treat; independently of incidental and fortuitous causes, for which there is no accounting, but which, after all, have often the greatest share in determining the most important results.

The first cause I shall mention, as contributing to this general effect, was the Reformation, which had just then taken place. This event gave a mighty impulse and increased activity to thought and inquiry, and agitated the inert mass of accumulated prejudices throughout Europe. The effect of the concussion was general; but the shock was greatest in this country. It toppled down the full-grown intolerable abuses of centuries at a blow; heaved the ground from under the feet of bigoted faith and slavish obedience; and the roar and dashing of opinions, loosened from their accustomed hold, might be heard like the noise of an angry sea, and has never yet subsided. Germany first broke the spell of misbegotten fear, and gave the watchword: but England joined the shout, and echoed it back, with her island voice, from her thousand cliffs and craggy shores, in a longer and a louder strain. With that cry, the genius of Great Britain rose, and threw down the gauntlet to the nations. There was a mighty fermentation: the waters were out; public opinion was in a state of projection. Liberty was held out to all to think and speak the truth. Men's brains were busy; their spirits stirring; their hearts full; and their hands not idle. Their eyes were opened to expect the greatest things, and their ears burned with curiosity and zeal to know the truth, that the truth might make them free. The deathblow which had been struck at scarlet vice and bloated hypocrisy loosened their tongues, and made the talismans and love-tokens of Popish superstition, with which she had be

guiled her followers and committed abominations with the people, fall harmless from their necks.

The translation of the Bible was the chief engine in the great work. It threw open, by a secret spring, the rich treasures of religion and morality which had there been locked up as in a shrine. It revealed the visions of the prophets, and conveyed the lessons of inspired teachers, to the meanest of the people. It gave them a common interest in a common cause. Their hearts burnt within them as they read. It gave a mind to the people by giving them common subjects of thought and feeling. It ce mented their union of character and sentiment; it created endless diversity and collision of opinion. They found objects to employ their faculties, and a motive in the magnitude of the consequences attached to them, to exert the utmost eagerness in the pursuit of truth, and the most daring intrepidity in maintaining it. Religious controversy sharpens the understanding by the subtlety and remoteness of the topics it discusses, and embraces the will by their infinite importance. We perceive in the history of this period a nervous masculine intellect. No levity, no feebleness, no indifference; or, if there were, it is a relaxation from the intense activity which gives a tone to its general character. But there is a gravity approaching to piety; a seriousness of impression, a conscientious severity of argument, an habitual fervour and enthusiasm, in their method of handling almost every subject. The debates of the schoolmen were sharp and subtle enough; but they wanted interest and grandeur, and were besides confined to a few they did not affect the general mass of the community. But the Bible was thrown open to all ranks and conditions "to run and read," with its wonderful table of contents from Genesis to the Revelations. Every village in England would present the scene so well described in Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night." I cannot think that all this variety and weight of knowledge could be thrown in all at once upon the mind of the people and not make some impression upon it the traces of which might be discerned in the manners and literature of the age. For, to leave more disputable points, and take only the historical parts of the Old Testament, or the moral parts of the New, there is nothing like them in the power of exciting awe and admiration, or of riveting sympathy. We see what Milton has made of the account of the Creation, from the manner in which he has treated it, imbued and impregnated with the spirit of the time of which we speak. Or what is there equal (in that romantic interest and patriarchal simplicity which goes to the

heart of a country, and rouses it, as it were, from its lair in wastes and wildernesses) to the story of Joseph and his Brethren, of Rachel and Laban, of Jacob's Dream, of Ruth and Boaz, the descriptions in the book of Job, the deliverance of the Jews out of Egypt, or the account of their captivity and return from Babylon? There is, in all these parts of the Scripture, and numberless more of the same kind,-to pass over the Orphic hymns of David, the prophetic denunciations of Isaiah, or the gorgeous visions of Ezekiel, -an originality, a vastness of conception, a depth and tenderness of feeling, and a touching simplicity in the mode of narration, which he who does not feel need be made of no "penetrable stuff."

There is something in the character of Christ too (leaving the religious faith quite out of the question) of more sweetness and majesty, and more likely to work a change in the mind of man, by the contemplation of its idea alone, than any to be found in history, whether actual or feigned. This character is that of a sublime humanity, such as was never seen on earth before nor since. This shone manifestly both in his words and actions. We see it in his washing the disciples' feet the night before his death, that unspeakable instance of humility and love, above all art, all meanness, and all pride; and in the leave he took of them on that occasion: 66 My peace I give unto you, that peace which the world cannot give, give I unto you;" and in his last commandment, that "they should love another." Who can read the account of his behaviour on the cross, when turning to his mother he said, "Woman, behold thy son," and to the disciple John," Behold thy mother," and "from that hour that disciple took her to his own home," without having his heart smote within! We see it in his treatment of the woman taken in adultery, and in his excuse for the woman who poured precious ointment on his garment as an offering of devotion and love which is here all in all. His religion was the religion of the heart. We see it in his discourse with the disciples as they walked together towards Emmaus, when their hearts burned within them; in his sermon from the Mount, in his parable of the Good Samaritan, and in that of the Prodigal Son,-in every act and word of his life, a grace, a mildness, a dignity and love, a patience and wisdom, worthy of the Son of God. His whole life and being were imbued, steeped, in this word, charity; it was the spring, the wellhead from which every thought and feeling gushed into act; and it was this that breathed a mild glory from his face in that last agony upon the cross, when the meek Saviour bowed his head and died," praying for his

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enemies. He was the first true teacher of morality: for he alone conceived the idea of a pure humanity. He redeemed man from the worship of that idol, self, and instructed him by precept and example to love his neighbour as himself, to forgive our enemies, to do good to those that curse us and despitefully use us. He taught the love of good for the sake of good, without regard to personal or sinister views, and made the affections of the heart the sole seat of morality, instead of the pride of the understanding or the sternness of the will. In answering the question, "Who is our neighbour?" as one who stands in need of our assistance, and whose wounds we can bind up, he has done more to humanize the thoughts, and tame the unruly passions, than all who have tried to reform and benefit mankind. The very idea of abstract benevolence, of the desire to do good because another wants our services, and of regarding the human race as one family, the offspring of one common parent, is hardly to be found in any other code or system. 66 It was to the Jews a stumbling block, and to the Greeks foolishness." The Greeks and Romans never thought of considering others, but as they were Greeks or Romans, as they were bound to them by certain positive ties, or, on the other hand, as separated from them by fiercer antipathies. Their virtues were the virtues of political machines, their vices were the vices of demons, ready to inflict or to endure pain with obdurate and remorseless inflexibility of purpose. But in the Christian religion

66

we perceive a softness coming over the heart of a nation, and the iron scales that fence and harden it melt and drop off." It becomes malleable, capable of pity, of forgiveness, of relaxing in its claims, and remitting its power. We strike it and it does not hurt us: it is not steel or marble, but flesh and blood, clay tempered with tears, and "soft as sinews of the new-born babe."

Nor can I help thinking that we may discern the traces of the influence exerted by religious faith in the spirit of the poetry of the age of Elizabeth, in the means of exciting terror and pity, in the delineations of the passions of grief, remorse, love, sympathy, the sense of shame, in the fond desires, the longings after immortality, in the heaven of hope and the abyss of despair it lays open to us.

The literature of this age, then, I would say, was strongly influenced (among other causes), first, by the spirit of Christianity, and secondly, by the spirit of Protestantism.

The effects of the Reformation on politics and philosophy may be seen in the writings and history of the next and of following ages.

They are still at work, and will continue to be so. The effects on the poetry of the time were chiefly confined to the moulding of the characters, and giving a powerful impulse to the intellect of the country. The immediate use or application that was made of religion to subjects of imagination and fiction was not (from an obvious ground of separation) so direct or frequent as that which was made of the classical and romantic literature.

For, much about the same time, the rich and fascinating stores of the Greek and Roman mythology, and those of the romantic poetry of Spain and Italy, were eagerly explored by the curious, and thrown open in translations to the admiring gaze of the vulgar. This last circumstance could hardly have afforded so much advantage to the poets of that day, who were themselves, in fact, the translators, as it shows the general curiosity and increasing interest in such subjects as a prevailing feature of the times. There were translations of Tasso by Fairfax, and of Ariosto by Harrington, of Homer and Hesiod by Chapman, and of Virgil long before, and of Ovid soon after; there was Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch, of which Shakspeare has made such admirable use in his Coriolanus and Julius Cæsar; and Ben Jonson's tragedies of Catiline and Sejanus may themselves be considered as almost literal translations into verse of Tacitus, Sallust, and Cicero's Orations in his consulship. Petrarch, Dante, the satirist Aretine, Machieval, Castiglion, and others, were familiar to our writers, and they make occasional mention of some few French authors, as Ronsard and Du Bartas; for the French literature had not at this stage arrived at its Augustan period, and it was the imitation of their literature a century afterwards, when it had arrived at its greatest height (itself copied from the Greek and Latin), that enfeebled and impoverished our own. But of the time that we are considering it might be said, without much extravagance, that every breath that blew, that every wave that rolled to our shores, brought with it some accession to our knowledge, which was engrafted on the national genius.

the zenith. The people, the soil, the clime,
everything gave unlimited scope to the curi
osity of the traveller and reader. Other
manners might be said to enlarge the bounds
of knowledge, and new mines of wealth
were tumbled at our feet. It is from a voy-
age to the Straits of Magellan that Shak-
speare has taken the hint of Prospero's En-
chanted Island, and of the savage Caliban
with his god Setebos. Spenser seems to
have had the same feeling in his mind in the
production of his Faery Queen.
Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the
Age of Elizabeth.

THE CHARACTER OF HAMLET.

It is the one of Shakspeare's plays that we think of the oftenest, because it abounds most in striking reflections on human life, and because the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of his mind, to the general account of humanity. Whatever happens to him, we apply to ourselves, because he applies it to himself as a means of general reasoning. He is a great moraliser; and what makes him worth attending to is, that he moralises on his own feelings and experience. He is not a commonplace pedant. If Lear is distinguished by the greatest depth of passion, Hamlet is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and unstudied development of character. Shakspeare had more magnanimity than any other poet, and he has shown more of it in this play than in any other. There is no attempt to force an interest: everything is left for time and circumstances to unfold. The attention is excited without effort; the incidents succeed each other as matters of course; the characters think, and speak, and act, just as they might do if left entirely to themselves. There is no set purpose, no straining at a point. The observations are suggested by the passing scene, the gusts of passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind. The whole play is an exact transcript of what might be supposed to have taken place at the court of Denmark at the remote period of time fixed upon, beWhat gave also an unusual impetus to the fore the modern refinements in morals and mind of men at this period was the discovery manners were heard of. It would have been of the New World, and the reading of voy-interesting enough to have been admitted as ages and travels. Green islands and golden sands seemed to arise, as if by enchantment, out of the bosom of the watery waste, and invite the cupidity, or wing the imagination, of the dreaming speculator. Fairy-land was realised in new and unknown worlds. "Fortunate fields, and groves, and flowery vales, thrice happy isles," were found floating, "like those Hesperian gardens famed of old," beyond Atlantic seas, as dropt from

a bystander in such a scene, at such a time, to have heard and witnessed something of what was going on. But here we are more than spectators. We have not only the outward pageants and the signs of grief, but "we have that within which passes show." We read the thoughts of the heart, we catch the passions living as they rise. Other dramatic writers give us very fine versions and paraphrases of nature; but Shakspeare, to

gether with his own comments, gives the original text, that we may judge for ourselves. This is a very great advantage.

done much otherwise than he did. His conduct does not contradict what he says when he sees her funeral :

"I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum."

Characters of Shakspeare's Plays.

RICHARD THE THIRD AND MACBETH.

around him! Amidst the natural and preternatural horrors of his situation, he might be excused in delicacy from carrying on a The character of Hamlet stands quite by regular courtship. When "his father's spirit itself. It is not a character marked by was in arms," it was not a time for his son strength of will or even of passion, but by to make love in. He could neither marry refinement of thought and sentiment. IIam- Ophelia, nor wound her mind by explaining let is as little of the hero as a man can well the cause of his alienation, which he durst be; but he is a young and princely novice, hardly trust himself to think of. It would full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility, have taken him years to have come to a di-the sport of circumstances, questioning rect explanation on the point. In the harwith fortune, and refining on his own feel-assed state of his mind he could not have ings, and forced from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect,- -as in the scene where he kills Polonius; and, again, where he alters the letters which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are taking with them to England, purporting his death. At other times, when he is most bound to act, he remains puzzled, undecided, and sceptical: dallies with his purposes till the occasion is lost, and finds out some pretence to relapse into indolence and thoughtfulness again. For this reason he refuses to kill the king when he is at his prayers; and, by a refinement in malice, which is in truth only an excuse for his own want of resolution, defers his revenge to a more fatal opportunity.... The moral perfection of this character has been called in question, we think by those who did not understand it. It is more interesting than according to rules; amiable, though not faultless. The ethical delineations of " that noble and liberal casuist" (as Shakspeare has been well called) do not exhibit the drab-coloured quakerism of morality. His plays are not copied either from The Whole Duty of Man, or from The Academy of Compliments! We confess we are a little shocked at the want of refinement in those who are shocked at the want of refinement in Hamlet. The neglect of punctilious exactness in his behaviour either partakes of the "license of the time," or else belongs to the very excess of intellectual refinement in the character, which makes the common rules of life, as well as his own purposes, sit loose upon him. He may be said to be amenable only to the tribunal of his own thoughts, and is too much taken up with the airy world of contemplation to lay as much stress as he ought on the practical consequences of things. His habitual principles of action are unhinged and out of joint with the time. His conduct to Ophelia is quite natural in his circumstances. It is that of assumed severity only. It is the effect of disappointed hope, of bitter regrets, of affection suspended, not obliterated, by the distractions of the scene

The leading features in the character of Macbeth are striking enough, and they form what may be thought at first only a bold, rude, Gothic outline. By comparing it with other characters of the same author, we shall perceive the absolute truth and identity which is observed in the midst of the giddy whirl and rapid career of events. With powerful and masterly strokes, for instance, he has marked the different effects of ambition and cruelty, operating on dif ferent dispositions and in different circumstances, in his Macbeth and Richard III. Both are tyrants, usurpers, murderers; both violent and ambitious; both courageous, cruel, treacherous. But Richard is cruel from nature and constitution. Macbeth becomes so from accidental circumstances. Richard is from his birth deformed in body and mind, and naturally incapable of good. Macbeth is full of "the milk of human kindness," is frank, sociable, generous. He is urged to the commission of guilt by golden opportunity, by the instigations of his wife, and by prophetic warnings. "Fate and metaphysical aid" conspire against his virtue and his loyalty. Richard, on the contrary, needs no prompter, but wades through a series of crimes to the height of his ambition, from the ungovernable violence of his passions and a restless love of mischief. He is never gay but in the prospect or in the success of his villanies; Macbeth is full of horror at the thoughts of the murder of Duncan, which he is with difficulty prevailed on to commit, and of remorse after its perpetration. Richard has no mixture of common humanity in his composition, no regard to kindred or posterity; he owns no fellowship with others, but is "himself alone." Macbeth endeavours to escape from reflec

tion on his crimes by repelling their consequences, and banishes remorse for the past by the meditation of future mischief. This is not the principle of Richard's cruelty, which resembles the cold malignity, the wanton malice, of a fiend, rather than the frailty of human nature. Macbeth is goaded on to acts of violence and retaliation by necessity; to Richard, blood is a pastime. There are other essential differences. Richard is a man of the world; a vulgar, plotting, hardened villain, wholly regardless of everything but his own ends, and the means to accomplish them. Not so Macbeth. The superstitions of the age, the rude state of society, the local scenery and customs, all give a wildness and imaginary grandeur to bis character. From the strangeness of the events that surround him, he is full of amazement and fear, and stands in doubt between the world of reality and the world of fancy. He sees sights not shown to mortal eye, and hears unearthly music. All is tumult and disorder within and without his mind; his purposes recoil upon himself, are broken and disjointed; he is the double thrall of his passions and his evil destiny. He treads upon the brink of fate, and grows dizzy with his situation. Richard is not a character either of imagination or pathos, but of pure will. There is no conflict of opposite feelings in his breast. The apparitions which he sees only haunt him in his sleep; nor does he live, like Macbeth, in a waking dream. There is nothing tight or compact in Macbeth, no tenseness of fibre nor pointed decision of manner. He has indeed considerable energy and manliness of soul; but then he is " subject to all the skyey influences." He is sure of nothing. All is left at issue. He runs a tilt with fortune, and is baffled with preternatural riddles. The agitation of his mind resembles the rolling of the sea in a storm, or he is like a lion in the toils,-fierce, impetuous, and ungovernable. Richard, in the busy turbulence of his projects, never loses his self-possession, and makes use of every circumstance that occurs as an instrument of his long-reaching designs. In his last extremity we can only regard him as a captured wild-beast; but we never entirely lose our concern for Macbeth, and he calls back all our sympathy by that fine close of thoughtful melancholy,

"My May of life

Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf:
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but in their stead,
Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, but dare
not."

Characters of Shakspeare's Plays.

JAMES KIRKE PAULDING,

born at Pawling, New York, 1788, Navy Agent for the port of New York for twelve years, until 1837, and Secretary of the Navy, 1837-1841; died 1860. He was the author Diverting History of John Bull and Brother of the following among other works: The Jonathan, N. York, 1813, 18mo, new edit., 1835, 12mo; Letters from the South, etc., N. York, 1817, 2 vols. 12mo, new edit., 1835, 2 vols. 12mo; A Sketch of Old England, by a New England Man, N. York, 1822, 2 vols. 12mo; Koningsmarke, The Long Finne, N. York, 1823, 2 vols. 12mo, 2d edit., entitled Old Times in the New World, 1835, 2 vols.

12mo, Lond., 1843, 2 vols. 12mo; John Bull in America; or, The New Munchausen, N. York, 1824, 12mo; Merry Tales of the Three Wise Men of Gotham, 1826, 12mo; The Book of St. Nicholas, 1827, 8vo; The New

Mirror for Travellers and Guide to the

Springs, 1828, 12mo; Tales of the Good 8vo; Chronicles of the City of Gotham, 1830, Woman, by a Doubtful Gentleman, 1829, 12mo; The Dutchman's Fireside, a Tale, N. also in French and Dutch; Westward Ho! York, 1831, 12mo, Lond., 1831, etc., 12mo, a Tale, N. York, 1832, 2 vols. 12mo; The Life of George Washington, N. York, 1835, 2 vols. 18mo, Aberdeen, Scotland, 1836, schools in the United States); Affairs and 18mo (5000 copies purchased for public

Men of New Amsterdam in the Times of Governor Peter Stuyvesandt, N. York, 1843, 12mo; The Old Continental; or, The Price of Liberty, N. York, 1846, 12mo'; American Comedies, by J. K. Paulding and [his son] William Irving Paulding, Phila., 1847, 8vo; The Puritan and his Daughter, N. York, 1849, 12mo. His son, W. I. Paulding, published an account of his father's life in 1867, and four volumes of his works were republished, N. York, 1867-68. He was co-author (who married his sister) of Salmagundi, with Washington Irving and William Irving first series, 1807, and sole author of the

second series, 1819.

"There is no better literary manner than the manner of Mr. Paulding. Certainly no American, and possibly no living writer of England, has more of those numerous peculiarities which go to the formation of a happy style. It is questionable, we think, whether any writer of any country combines as many of these peculiaritics with as much of that essential negative virtue, the absence of affectation."-EDGAR A. POE: Literati, 1850, 574.

"His works are exclusively and eminently national, and his descriptions of natural scenery are often singularly beautiful."-Lon. Athenæum: Lit. of the Nineteenth Century: America.

THE QUARREL OF SQUIRE BULL AND HIS

SON.

John Bull was a choleric old fellow, who

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