acter of Cleopatra is profound; in this, especially, that the sense of criminality in her passion is lessened by our insight into its depth and energy, at the very moment that we can not but perceive that the passion itself springs out of the habitual craving of a licentious nature, and that it is supported and reinforced by voluntary stimulus and sought-for associations, instead of blossoming out of spontaneous emotion.

Of all Shakspeare's historical plays, Antony and Cleopatra is by far the most wonderful. There is not one in which he has followed history so minutely, and yet there are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic strength so much ;-perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly. This is greatly owing to the manner in which the fiery force is sustained throughout, and to the numerous momentary flashes of nature counteracting the historic abstraction. As a wonderful specimen of the way in which Shakspeare lives up to the very end of this play, read the last part of the concluding scene. And if you would feel the judgment as well as the genius of Shakspeare in your heart's core, compare this astonishing drama with Dryden's All For Love. Act i. sc. 1. Philo's speech:

His captain's heart

Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper-

It should be 'reneagues,' or 'reniegues,' as fatigues,' &c.

Ib.

Take but good note, and you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transform'd
Into a strumpet's fool.

Warburton's conjecture of 'stool' is ingenious, and would be a probable reading, if the scene opening had discovered Antony with Cleopatra on his lap. But, represented as he is walking and jesting with her, 'fool' must be the word. Warburton's objection is shallow, and implies that he confounded the dramatic with the epic style. The 'pillar' of a state is so common a metaphor, as to have lost the image in the thing meant to be imaged.

Ib. sc. 2.

Much is breeding;

Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life,
And not a serpent's poison.

This is so far true to appearance, that a horse-hair, laid,' as Hollinshed says, 'in a pail of water,' will become the supporter of seemingly one worm, though probably of an immense number of small slimy water-lice. The hair will twirl round a finger, and sensibly compress it. It is a common experiment with school-boys in Cumberland and Westmoreland. Act ii. sc. 2. Speech of Enobarbus:

Her gentlewomen, like the Nereids,

So many mermaids, tended her i̇' th' eyes,

And made their bends adornings. At the helm
A seeming mermaid steers.

I have the greatest difficulty in believing that Shakspeare wrote the first 'mermaids.' He never, I think, would have so weakened by useless anticipation the fine image immediately following. The epithet seeming' becomes so extremely improper after the whole number had been positively called ' mermaids.'

so many

TIMON OF ATHENS,

Act i. sc. 1.

Tim. The man is honest.

Old Ath. Therefore he will be, Timon.

His honesty rewards him in itself.

WARBURTON's comment- If the man be honest, for that reason he will be so in this, and not endeavor at the injustice of gaining my daughter without my consent'-is, like almost all his comments, ingenious in blunder; he can never see any other writer's thoughts for the mist-working swarm of his own. The meaning of the first line the poet himself explains, or rather unfolds, in the second. The man is honest!'-True;-and for that very cause, and with no additional or extrinsic motive, he will be so. No man can be justly called honest, who is not so for honesty's sake, itself including its own reward. Note, that honesty' in Shakspeare's age retained much of its old dignity, and that contradistinction of the honestum from the utile, in which its very essence and definition consist. If it be honestum, it can not depend on the utile.

Ib. Speech of Apemantus, printed as prose in Theobald's edition :

So, so! aches contract, and starve your supple joints!

I may remark here the fineness of Shakspeare's sense of musical period, which would almost by itself have suggested (if the hundred positive proofs had not been extant) that the word 'aches' was then ad libitum, a dissyllable—aitches. For read it,aches,' in this sentence, and I would challenge you to find any period in Shakspeare's writings with the same musical, or rather dissonant, notation. Try the one, and then the other, by your ear, reading the sentence aloud, first with the word as a dissyllable and then as a monosyllable, and you will feel what I mean.* Ib. sc. 2. Cupid's speech: Warburton's correction of—

There taste, touch, all pleas'd from thy table rise

Th' ear, taste, touch, smell, &c.

This is indeed an excellent emendation.

Act ii. sc. 1. Senator's speech :

--nor then silenc'd with

"Commend me to your master"--and the cap
Plays in the right hand, thus :—

C

Either, methinks, 'plays' should be 'play'd,' or 'and' should be changed to while.' I can certainly understand it as a parenthesis, an interadditive of scorn; but it does not sound to my ear as in Shakspeare's manner.

And that unaptness made you minister,
Thus to excuse yourself.

Read your;-at least I can not otherwise understand the line. You made my chance indisposition and occasional unaptness your minister—that is, the ground on which you now excuse your

* It is, of course, a verse,

Achès contract, and starve your supple joints,

and is so printed in all later editions. But Mr. C. was reading it in prose in Theobald; and it is curious to see how his ear detected the rhythmical necessity for pronouncing "aches" as a dissyllable, although the metrical necessity seems for the moment to have escaped him.-Ed.

self. Or, perhaps, no correction is necessary, if we construe 'made you' as did you make;' and that unaptness did you make help you thus to excuse yourself.' But the former seems more in Shakspeare's manner, and is less liable to be misunderstood.*

Act iii. sc. 3. Servant's speech :

How fairly this lord strives to appear foul!-takes virtuous copies to be wicked; like those that under hot, ardent zeal would set whole realms on fire. Of such a nature is his politic love.

This latter clause I grievously suspect to have been an addition of the players, which had hit, and, being constantly applauded, procured a settled occupancy in the prompter's copy. Not that Shakspeare does not elsewhere sneer at the Puritans; but here it is introduced so nolenter volenter (excuse the phrase) by the head and shoulders !—and is besides so much more likely to have been conceived in the age of Charles I.

Act iv. sc. 2. Timon's speech :—

Raise me this beggar, and deny't that lord.—

Warburton reads 'denude.'

I can not see the necessity of this alteration. The editors and commentators are, all of them, ready enough to cry out against Shakspeare's laxities and licenses of style, forgetting that he is not merely a poet, but a dramatic poet; that, when the head and the heart are swelling with fulness, a man does not ask himself whether he has grammatically arranged, but only whether (the context taken in) he has conveyed, his meaning. 'Deny' is here clearly equal to 'withhold;' and the 'it,' quite in the genius of vehement conversation, which a syntaxist explains by ellipses and subauditurs in a Greek or Latin classic, yet triumphs over as ignorances in a contemporary, refers to accidental and artificial rank or elevation, implied in the verb 'raise.' Besides, does the word 'denude' occur in any writer before, or of, Shakspeare's age?

*Your' is the received reading now.-Ed.

ROMEO AND JULIET.

I HAVE previously had occasion to speak at large on the subject of the three unities of time, place, and action, as applied to the drama in the abstract, and to the particular stage for which Shakspeare wrote, as far as he can be said to have written for any stage but that of the universal mind. I hope I have in some measure succeeded in demonstrating that the former two, instead of being rules, were mere inconveniences attached to the local peculiarities of the Athenian drama; that the last alone deserved the name of a principle, and that in the preservation of this unity Shakspeare stood pre-eminent. Yet, instead of unity of action, I should greatly prefer the more appropriate, though scholastic and uncouth, words homogeneity, proportionateness, and totality of interest,-expressions, which involve the distinction, or rather the essential difference, betwixt the shaping skill of mechanical talent, and the creative, productive, life-power of inspired genius. In the former each part is separately conceived, and then by a succeeding act put together;—not as watches are made for wholesale-(for there each part supposes a pre-conception of the whole in some mind),-but more like pictures on a motley screen. Whence arises the harmony that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes,—in the relative shapes of rocks, the harmony of colors in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the oak, the stems and rich brown branches of the birch and other mountain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring,-compared with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial plantations ?-From this, that the natural landscape is effected, as it were, by a single energy modified ab intra in each component part. And as this is the particular excellence of the Shaksperian drama generally, so is it especially characteristic of the Romeo and Juliet.

The groundwork of the tale is altogether in family life, and the events of the play have their first origin in family feuds. Filmy as are the eyes of party-spirit, at once dim and truculent, still there is commonly some real or supposed object in view, or principle to be maintained; and though but the twisted wires on the plate of rosin in the preparation for electrical pictures, it is still a guide in some degree, an assimilation to an outline. But in