[The curtain falls.

Ir it be allowable to entertain towards any writer that partial and affectionate admiration, which, if it does not altogether deny, yet refuses to take cognisance, of any blemish or defect that writer is Shakspeare. From verbal criticism he seems to enjoy an immunity. His faults of style are so obvious, and of a kind so little likely to obtain imitators in the present age, that there appears to be no necessity for dwelling on them. Having once admitted that he has a hasty, headstrong way of entangling a plain meaning in abstruse and elliptical expressions, of huddling and crushing together all kinds of metaphors, with no sort of respect for their delicate fabric; and that he has an obstinate habit of sporting in the strongest conjunctures with riddling conceits-having once settled and allowed all this, which dulness itself could discover, and dulness is least likely to forgive-we care not to have it repeated, but pass on to that endless fund of every species of poetic enjoyment which his works afford. Criticism, moreover, is disarmed by the intimate persuasion we feel, that, in the dramas of Shakspeare, there are many things not his, and which never came there by any legitimate process of authorship. His plays, unpublished and unprinted, werelying for some time amidst others, the property of a theatre; and from this agitated mass they seem to have acquired a certain alluvial deposit, which the detergent care of the critic can never entirely remove. The players and the playwright have made sad com

mixtures and confusion amongst them. Who can read the play of Julius Cæsar without a conviction that the character of Cæsar has received damage at the hands of these gentry? It is out of nature that the same man who drew Cassius and Brutus, and gave to Mark Antony an eloquence surpassing any the Roman forum ever echoed with, should have set down in the same play that pompous and starched puppet, that rodomontade figure, which stalks through it under the name of Julius Cæsar. This portrait of the Dictator, if it were at all like the original, would decide for ever the famous question of the propriety of his assassination. Such a Cæsar assuredly deserved extermination, but hardly by the hand of the noble Brutus. Besides which, some few of Shakspeare's plays were themselves adaptations of oid pieces, belonging, like its wardrobe to the theatre for which he was engaged to write, and which, by additions of his own, and touches throughout of his pencil, he seems to have fitted for reproduction. Such is the conjectural account given of Pericles, Titus Andronicus, and some others; and this account, we think, might be extended to some plays of a still higher order than these. There is one which abounds in passages of poetic beauty, which nevertheless, if we might venture to deal in such conjectures, we should pronounce to have been fashioned on the stock or framework of some older piece. In Troilus and Cressida we see remnants, if we are not mistaken, of some previous work. There was, we suspect, an older drama, written on the tale of Troy, and having for its chief subject, in imitation of the Iliad, the wrath of Achilles, which Shakspeare made the groundwork of his own;-adding, or greatly enlarging, the parts of Troilus and Cressida, re-writing that of Thersites, and mingling throughout his own genius. He built upon and around the riginal edifice till he quite obscured it; but here and there a portion of the old wall is visible, and its existence may be traced in the want of unity which the whole plan betrays. There is no keeping between the events of the plot and prominence given to the characters of Troilus and Cressida. Compare the style of the language, and the movement of the verse, where the love tale is carried on with some other portions of the drama-especially with that part (act 2, sc. 2) where a debate is held before Priam on the propriety of continuing the war. If the whole of this play were written by the same man, it was certainly not written by the same man at the same period of his life.

So

Considerations such as these, make us unwilling listeners to any severe criticism on the style and language of Shakspeare. Though all is not admirable, we feel that we have nothing to do but to admire; and may here leave behind, as too easy, or ungenerous, or altogether needless, the less grateful and less profitable task of censure. In this feeling we so far partake, as to think that a verbal criticism of Shakspeare (unless to elucidate his meaning, or point out felicities of expression) would be wasted labour. far we acquiesce; but we beg to enter our protest against those who, not satisfied with this abstinence from censure, strive to convert his very vices of style into a species of excellence, and to excuse and justify all manner of writing, on the plea of its dramatic propriety. A style unpardonable in itself, cannot become laudable on the ground of dramatic propriety. If a contrary rule, if an opposite canon of criticism is to be laid down if that which manifestly shocks our taste is afterwards to be approved of, on the reflection that just such extravagances occur in real life-then the drama is at once given over to whatever bombast or folly, the ignorance and passion of men, are likely to blurt forth,

The beauty of the art is entirely sacrificed. The distinction between farce and the serious drama is obliterated. When Juliet talks of her Romeo being cut up into little stars, and so making the heavens wonderfully bright, the absurdity of the passage is not to be excused; nor is it to be transmuted into good writing, because it is notorious that a lovesick girl talks all imaginable nonsense. The task of the poet is indeed to depict the character of the lovesick personage, but so as to give pleasure by his delineation, and to enlist our sympathies in its behalf. Unless he intends to throw ridicule on the passion of the lover-to treat it as a subject of comedy or burlesque he must confine it within such limits of folly or caprice as the majority of mankind can tolerate, excuse, or commiserate.

With regard to the style of Shakspeare, it is a more just observation and more conciliatory, to remark the connexion that subsists between that license he allowed himself in composition, and which the times and his position in the literary history of this country enabled him to take, and the peculiar ease and dramatic excellence of his dialogue. We could hardly have had the one without the other. Shakspeare wrote for a people whose ears were not yet accustomed to finished models of composition--to whom thought was fresh-whose minds had been informed and incited, but not encumbered by what had transpired to them, chiefly through translations, of the revived literature of the ancients, and who were not a little prompted to intellectual exertion by the religious revolutions of the period. While, therefore, there was no lack of knowledge in the country-while there existed much matter for reflection and poetry, and much aptitude for mental excitement there was yet in the writer a natural boldness and hardihood, which, in more settled periods of literature, it is impossible for him to retain. This spirit of freedom this daring to say all-to appropriate all-was indispensable to the production of that surprising dialogue of Shakspeare, which SO frequently unites the utmost beauty of poetic utterance with the very carelessness of unpremeditated speech, the very impetuosity of passion itself. When the work, with its mingled tissue of most diverse materials, is accomplished, the reader of correct taste may separate what is crude and preposterous from what is singularly and daringly excellent; but he must acknowledge that the same boldness which seduced into the first was necessary to the creation of the second. A dialogue so faithful to the passions, humours, and caprices-and, what is more, to the common sense of mankind-must have been written without the perpetual fear of critical censure, and with a freedom from the dreaded charge of plagiarism. When models of correct composition have formed the taste of the people, the poet be. comes bound by them; even the very struggle to throw off his restraint leads him into artifice, and converts courage into bravado; nor can he who comes after others, afford to let his characters say that which is most natural and probable, but must find for them sentiments, which, in proportion as they are new, will in all likelihood be forced and constrained. The genius of Shakspeare, so singularly dramatic, was developed under circumstances as singularly favourable to dramatic composition-so favourable, that some of his contemporaries, merely by sharing in them, have earned a celebrity as dramatists which is due only to their manner, not to their genius. His lifelike drama, mingling all the characters and all the faculties of man as the world mingles them, could not be repeated unless the same genius could again write with the same fearlessness, the same spontaneous movement, the same utter abandonment to its own great and varied powerscould again write as if it stood apart, unseen and irresponsible, in its mimic work of creation. But why speak of a repetition ? Such great national writers as he so entirely preoccupy their ground, that there is no room in the same language for an equal to themselves. You must overthrow them by one of those revolutions that sink the language itself in which they stand you must bury them, like huge fossils, in their own buried soil-before the earth is free, and the air open, for such another outgrowth. There must come a second deluge over all literature, and a second time the green earth must appear above the waters, before another Shakspeare can have place.

But our veneration for our great dramatist has not only led us to an utter oblivion in his favour of verbal criticism, it has disposed us to look with a marvellous pertinacity for nature and consistency in all the characters he portrays. We study the creatures of his imagination with the same faith that we investigate the character of a historical personage, confident that, however intricate or self-contradictory they may appear, we shall find, if we do but ponder steadily enough, that all is true and appropriate. It is made quite a study of, this investigation of Shakspeare's characters; and, as an exercise for powers of discrimination in the field of human nature, it has this advantage over an examination of the real characters of history that the facts on which we are to form our judgment are here all given, are settled data; whereas, in solving any difficulty in the historic personage in accounting for the apparent inconsistencies of his conduct a doubt is always ready to arise, whether the facts themselves are all stated, whether all the circumstances are before us, whether the story might not be so told as to explain the whole difficulty; and thus the mind is perpetually called off from the investigation of character to the completion or moulding of the narrative. This study has doubtless led to some super-refinement, and to speculations somewhat wide of the sober realities of the case. The poet's freedom, the poet's necessity-at one time his unfettered utterance, at another his adherence to a plot given to him by his story-have betrayed the obsequious critic into no little difficulty, as he laboured with devoted zeal to make a crooked path look straight. But, in the main, we agree here also with the more enthusiastic admirers of Shakspeare. The consummate art which he has displayed in his masterpieces, justifies a patient study of his characters; and there is, in the more mature productions of his genius-such as his Othello and Macbeth - so full and complicated a development, that there is full scope for some subtlety of interpretation. His Othello is not only the jealous man and the jealous soldier, but the jealous Moor. You could not transplant his passion from that Eastern bosom in which it grew, without destroying in great measure the propriety of the description.