his marriage that the ardour of his temperament had involved him in irre gularities and imprudencies. He married at the age of eighteen, Anne Hathaway, a young woman seven or eight years older than himself, the daughter of a "substantial yeoman" in the neighbourhood. Two or three years after his marriage he removed to London, having possibly perceived the incipient tendencies of his genius during the occasional visits of the metropolitan players to Stratford. In London we soon find the poet in comparative opulence. He rapidly acquired a large property in more than one theatre. The order in which he produced his dramatic compositions has been a subject of keen inquiry; but the minute researches of Malone elicit no satisfactory result. In whatever order his dramas were produced, he soon vindicated the immense superiority of his genius by universal popularity. He was the companion of the nobles and the wits of the time, and a favourite of Elizabeth herself, at whose request some of his pieces were written. The wealth which his genius realized enabled him, comparatively early in life, to retire from his professional career. He had purchased an estate in the vicinity of his native town; but his tranquil retirement was of no long duration. He enjoyed it only four years. He died in 1616, and was buried "on the north side of the chancel in the great church of Stratford." His bust is placed in the wall over his grave: on the stone beneath is the following epitaph.

Good Friend, for Jesus' sake, forbear

To dig the dust inclosed here.

Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.

His only son had died early; all the children of his married daughters died without issue.

The works of Shakespeare consist of thirty-seven plays, tragedies, comedies, and histories; the poems "Venus and Adonis," and "Tarquin and Lucrece," with a collection of sonnets. Of the thirty-seven plays, Titus Andronicus, Pericles, and I. Henry VI., with portions of some others, have been doubted by critics to be authentically Shakespeare's; and some have claimed for him other authorless pieces of the period. The total want of care to preserve and to authenticate the productions of his genius before his death, has been supposed to indicate the poet's perfect indifference to fame.

The worship with which Shakespeare is universally regarded in this country disposes us to love him on trust. The estimation of his contemporaries and rivals proves him not undeserving of this regard. The "gentle Shakespeare" was universally beloved. Gifford has extracted the gall even from expressions that were esteemed as the sarcasm of Ben Jonson's surly ingratitude.

The subject of Shakespeare's dramatic and poetical character is so vast that it would be idle here to attempt its analysis. The variety of its attributes has, as might have been expected, drawn both censure and applause from different tastes and ages. Voltaire could see in Hamlet only the work of a "drunken savage." The mechanical pedantry of Rymer sees in Othello only "a bloody farce:" "a tragedy of a pocket handkerchief." We shall quote the celebrated passage of Dryden, eulogised by Johnson as "a perpetual model of encomiastic criticism; exact without minuteness, and lofty without exaggeration."-" He (Shakespeare) was the man, who of all modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously but luckily. When he describes anything you more than see it, you feel it too, Those who accuse him to have wanted learning give

him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clinches, his serious into bombast. But he is always great, when great occasion is presented to him ; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets

Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi."

This "epitome of excellence," as Johnson terms the above criticism, must constitute our sole tribute to Shakespeare's merits. The voluminous admiration of more modern times does not contain a very great deal more than is compressed into the vigour of Dryden's remarks. We would simply invite attention to the higher views of the philosophy of Shakespeare's literature suggested by the fine imagination of Coleridge. Poets have always been Shakespeare's best critics.

FROM THE MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

ACT II. SC. 2.

OBERON'S VISION.

Ob. My gentle Puck, come hither; thou remember'st
Since once I sat upon a promontory,

And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song;
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid's music.

Puch. I remember.

Ob. That every time I saw, but thou could'st not,
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all-armed: a certain aim he took

At a fair vestal, thronéd by the west,

And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow,

As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts;

But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quench'd in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon,
And the imperial votaress passéd on,

In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell,

It fell upon a little western flower,i

1 This celebrated vision is elaborately interpreted by Warburton: the "fair vestal" being, of course, Elizabeth; the Mermaid, Mary Queen of Scots; the Dolphin, the French Dauphin, to whom she was married; the shot stars, the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland, who fell in her quarrel. An interpretation totally different is ingeniously attempted by the Rev. N. J. Halpin from a comparison with various contemporary writ ings, and especially with Lily's Endymion.-See the Shakespeare Society's publications,

1843.

Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound;
And maidens call it Love in idleness.

Fetch me that flow'r; the herb I shew'd thee once;
The juice of it, on sleeping eyelids laid,
Will make or man or woman madly doat
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb, and be thou here again,
Ere the Leviathan can swim a league.

Puck. I'll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.
[Exit.

FROM MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

ACT III. SC. 1.

THE DUKE TO CLAUDIO.

Reason thus with life;

If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing

That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skiey influences

That do this habitation, where thou keep'st,

Hourly afflict; merely thou art death's fool;1
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun,

And yet runn'st tow'rd him still. Thou art not noble ;
For all th' accommodations that thou bear'st

Are nurs'd by baseness: thou'rt by no means valiant;
For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork

Of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep,

And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st

Thy death, which is no more. Thou'rt not thyself;
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains,
That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get;
And what thou hast forget'st. Thou art not certain;
For thy complexion shifts to strange affects,
After the moon. If thou art rich, thou'rt poor;

For, like an ass, whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloadeth thee.

Thou hast nor youth, nor age;

But as it were an after-dinner sleep,

Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms

1 An allusion to the shows of the early stage in which the "Fool" was represented as avoiding "Death" or "Fate," by stratagems which brought him "more immediately into the jaws of it." In a similar allusion Hamlet calls his uncle a Vice of Kings.-Act III. Sc. 4.

2 Johnson censures Shakespeare for this representation of death, especially from the lips of a Friar (the Duke is so disguised,) to a man on the eve of execution.-Compare this passage with Hamlet's Soliloquy on Death, Act III. Sc. I.

Of palsied Eld; and when thou'rt old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this,
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life

Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear,
That makes all these odds even.

FROM THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.

ACT III., SC. 2.

THE WORLD DECEIVED WITH "ORNAMENT.”
THE world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But being season'd with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damnéd error, but some sober brow
Will bless it, and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple,2 but assumes
Some mark of virtue on its outward parts.
How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false
As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins
The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars;
Who, inward searched, have livers white as milk?
And these assume but valour's excrement,*
To render them redoubted. Look on beauty,
And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight,
Which thereon works a miracle in nature,
Making them lightest that wear most of it.
So are those crispéd snaky golden locks,

Which make such wanton gambols with the wind,
Upon supposéd fairness, often known

To be the dowry or a second head,

The skull, that bred them, in the sepulchre.

Thus ornament is but the guiléd' shore

To a most dang'rous sea; the beauteous scarf

Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word,

The seeming truth which cunning times put on
T'entrap the wisest.

MERCY.-PORTIA TO SHYLOCK.

THE quality of Mercy is not strained,

It droppeth, as the gentle rain from heaven,

1 This is exquisitely imagined. Johnson. External dress (from Lat. cresco, I grow,); See Hamlet, Act III. Sc. 4.

Alluding to false hair, paint, &c.

2 Foolish.

3 See note 10, p. 13. often used in Shakespeare for the hair.

Not the native product.

Beguiling. Shakespeare often uses passive participles in an active sense; so in Othello, Act 1. c. 3." If virtue no delighted beauty lack," for delighting. By a similar exchange of sense the active adjective in ive is used for the passive in ble.

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed;
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shews the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of Kings;
But mercy is above this sceptered sway,
It is enthronéd in the hearts of Kings;
It is an attribute to God himself;

And earthly power doth then shew likest God's,
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That in the course of justice none of us

Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

ACT. V. SC. 1.

MUSIC.-Lorenzo and Jessica.

Lor. How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
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 patines1 of bright gold;

There's not the smallest orb, which thou behold'st,
But in his motion like an angel sings,2

Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubims:

Such harmony is in immortal souls!

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it.
Come, ho, and wake Diana3 with a hymn;
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear,
And draw her home with music.

Jes. I'm never merry, when I hear sweet music.

Lor. The reason is, your spirits are attentive:
For do but note a wild and wanton herd,

Or race of youthful and unhandled colts,

Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood,

If they perchance but hear a trumpet sound,

Or any air of music touch their ears,

You shall perceive them make a mutual stand d;
Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze,

[Music.

1 "A patine is the small flat plate used as a cover to the chalice, during the administration of the papal sacrament. Lat. patina. Compare Milton, "the road of heaven starpaved." 2 Allusion to the Pythagorean astronomy. Compare Job xxxviii. 7. The moon.