is not a virtue but by accident; good nature makes friendship, but effeminacy love. Shakspeare had an universal mind, which comprehended all characters and passions; Fletcher, a more confined and limited; for though he treated love in perfection, yet honour, ambition, revenge, and generally all the stronger passions, he either touched not, or not masterly. To conclude all, he was a limb of Shakspeare." DRYDEN AND POPE. [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1845.] SPECIMENS of the British Critics are unavoidably an irregular history of Criticism in this island; and such a history of our Criticism is unavoidably one, too, of our Poetry. The first name in our series is DRYDEN. See what we have written, and you find half our paper is on Shakspeare. POPE is our next worthy; and of three or four pillars on which his name as a critic rests, one is his character of the Protagonist. Thus, for this earlier part of a new Age, the Presidents of Criticism are the two Kings of Verse. When the poet is a critic, how shall we sever in him the two arts? If his prose is explicit, his verse is implicit criticism; and there was thus a reason for speaking somewhat especially of Dryden's character as a tragedian in drawing his character as a critic. But indeed the man, the critic, and the poet are one, and must be characterized as a whole; only you may choose which aspect shall be principal. In studying his works you are struck, throughout, with a mind loosely disciplined in its great intellectual powers. In his critical writings, principles hastily proposed from partial consideration, are set up and forgotten. He intends largely, but a thousand causes restrain and lame the execution. Milton, in unsettled times, maintained his inward tranquillity of soul-and "dwelt apart." Dryden, in times oscillating indeed and various, yet quieter and safer, discloses private disturbance. His own bark appears to be borne on continually on a restless, violent, whirling and tossing stream. It never sleeps in brightness on its own calm and bright shadow. An unhappy biography weaves itself into the history of the inly dwelling Genius. His treatment of "The Tempest" shows that he wanted intelligence of highest passions and imagination. One powerful mind must have discernment of another; and he speaks best of Shakspeare when most generally. Then we might In believe that he understood him in all the greatness of his might; but our belief cannot support itself among the many outrages offered by him to nature, in a blind or wanton desecration of her holiest revealments to her inspired priest. the sense stated above, his transformation of "The Tempest," is an implicit criticism of "The Tempest." And, assuredly, there is no great rashness of theorizing in him who finds in this barbarous murder, evidence to a lack of apprehension in Dryden, for some part of the beauty which he swept away. It would be unjustifiable towards the man to believe that, for the lowest legitimate end of a playright-money-or for the lower, because illegitimate end, the popular breath of a day amongst a public of a day-he voluntarily ruined one of the most delicate amongst the beautiful creations with which the divine muse, his own patroness, had enlarged and adorned the bright world of mind-ruined it down to the depraved, the degraded, the debased, the groveling, the vulgar taste of a corrupt court and town. "The Inchanted Island" is a dolorous document ungainsayable, to the appreciation, in particulars, by that Dryden who could, in generals, laud Shakspeare so well-of that Shakspeare. And, if by Dryden, then by the age which he eminently led and for which he created, and for which he destroyed. There "The Inchanted Island," and "The State of Innocence," come under no criticism. They are literally FACINORA. No rational account-no theory of them can be given. they are melancholy, but instructive facts. They express the revolution of the national spirit, on the upper degrees of the social scale. That which thirty, twenty, ten years before was impossible, happens. The hewing in pieces of Shakspeare, to throw him into the magical cauldron, to reproduce him, not in youth but in dotage, shows a death, but not yet the consequent life. Stupendous and sweet Nature whom we possessed, has vanished-fled heavenward-resolved into a dew-gone, into the country. At least, she is no longer in town! It may safely be averred, that no straining of the human intellect can compute the interval overleaped betwixt those originals, and these transcriptions. It is no translation, paraphrase, metaphrase. It is as if we should catch a confused and misapprehending glimpse of something that is going on in Jupiter. It is a transference from one order of beings to another: who have some intellectual processes in common, but are allied by no sympathy. The sublime is gone! The beautiful is gone! The rational is gone! The loving is gone! The divine is not here! Nor the angelical! Nor the human! Alas! not even the diabolical! All is corrupted! banished! obliterated! We have seen Dryden complaining of Shakspeare's language and style—of the language as antiquated from the understanding of an audience in his own day-of the whole style as being "so pestered with figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure." And we were aware of the modest self-attribution, "I have refined the language," in Drydenising Troilus and Cressida, "which before was obsolete." And Samuel Jonson corroborates and enlarges the self-praise. "Dryden was the first who refined the language of poetry." At this day, such expressions fill the younger votarycreative or critical-of our vernacular muse with astonishment and perplexity, and set an older one upon thinking. Such assertions, it must be said, are "unintelligible" now, because a nobler unfolding of time, a happy return of our educated mind to the old and to the natural, has "antiquated” the literary sentiment, which Dryden and Jonson shared, and which they so confidently proposed to fitly-prepared readers. Shakspeare obsolete! There is not a writer of to-daywhose words are nearer to our hearts. OUR OWN are hardly as intimate there, as HIS are "You are my true and honourable wife says the troubled Brutus to Portia, who has expressed a misdoubting of his true and clear affection for her. Is this" antiquated" English, and thence "unintelligible?" "Viola.-My father had a daughter loved a man, As it might be, perhaps, WERE I A WOMAN, I should your lordship. Duke. And what's her history? Viola.-A blank my lord. She never told her love. Duke. But died thy sister of her love, my boy? "Miranda.-I am a fool To weep at what I am glad of. Ferdinand.-Where should this music be? I' th' air?-or th' earth? It sounds no more; and sure it waits upon Some god o' th' island. Sitting on a bank, The ditty does remember my drown'd father. That the earth owes.-I hear it now above me." Here we have an "antiquated" touch or two that would have distressed Dryden." PASSION" is used in the old strong general sense of powerful, possessing emotion-in this example, filial sorrow; and lower down, we have the obsolete "owES" for the modern "owns," which two vitiating reliques of antiquity, along with that "pestering," "affected," and "obscure" figure, "crept by me upon the waters," would explain, without doubt, the impossibility which the reader feels himself under, of deriving any pleasure from the passage, and, to speak strictly, of discovering any signification in it!! Assuredly we do not design transcribing whole Shakspeare, in order to contradicting a rash word of Dryden's. It might not be politic, either; for we should now and then meet with hard sentences, which might seem, like unlucky witnesses, to give evidence against the party that brings them before the tribunal. They would not. It is not in twenty places, or not in a hundred, that the obsoleteness of a word or phrase makes Shakspeare hard, nor anything in the world but his wit, his intellect in excess, that occasionally runs away with him, and wraps up his meaning in a phraseology of his own creating; enigmas that are embarrassing to disinvolve again —which might, indeed, be an antiquated manner of his age, but not an obsolete dictionary and grammar. Neither is it required of us to convince the reader, by copious extracts, that he really understands Shakspeare, one or other of whose volumes he has always in his pocket, and whose English he sits hearing by the hour, lisped, mouthed, and legitimately spoken upon the stage, and still fancying that he understands what he hears. But it seems not altogether out of place, when the criticism of style is removed, and Shakspeare's English challenged, to recall into the liveliest consciousness of the reader, for a moment, the principal feature of the case, which is, without doubt, that Shakspeare is, in all our litera |