But we dare not trust ourselves to quote. In Shakspeare the various excellences of the art are so wonderfully mingled, that it is seldomeasy to quote one passage as a specimen of mere beautiful imagery, another of grand declamation, another of wit, another of humour, and so on. Admirable as the passages are in themselves, they are still more so in their places, forming strokes of character and touches of truth and nature.

Of all authors Shakspeare is the one who has least imitated or repeated himself. All other dramatists-nay, all other menconscious of successful power in some particular line of development, have failed to resist the natural temptation which leads us to do often what we know we do well. Let us imagine any other dramatist capable of conceiving such a character as Hamlet, as Lear, as Othello, or as Falstaff. Would he not assuredly have delighted to repeat such grand creations, and show us these admirable figures in different lights and attitudes? Yet in Shakspeare, when once these terrible or humorous personages have quitted the scene, and finished that long life of woe or of merriment, condensed, by the poet's art, into the three short hours of dramatic existence, they disappear for ever—we hear no more of them-they vanish as completely as real men would have done, and leave, like real men, no exactly similar beings behind them.

Dealing with the universal sentiments and passions of mankind, this author has given us, in many places, different portraits of the same passion; but these delineations are as distinct and as dissimilar in Shakspeare as they are in nature.

How many portraits have we of jealousy, for example! Yet who cannot distinguish the jealousy of Othello from that of Leontes, that of Posthumus from that of Ford, and a thousand other instances? The jealousy is as different as the man, yet always as true to reality. What an infinite multitude of fools are to be found in Shakspeare! yet no two are the least alike. We may follow an ascending scale of silliness through as many gradually and imperceptibly rising varieties of the genus, extending from almost complete imbecility to the highest degree of intellect, tinctured with that slight shade of fantastic mental distortion from which the human mind is hardly ever free. What a range of character from Audrey, Aguecheek, or Silence, to Jaques! And why stop here? Why not to Lear himself, to Hamlet, to Falstaff? It is absolutely impossible to ascribe any important speech in Shakspeare to the wrong person: and this is perhaps one of the most difficult points of the dramatic art-a point which has never been reached by any author but Shakspeare, and sometimes by Molière.

Wonderful, too, as is the individuality and originality of the more passionate or humorous characters, Shakspeare has succeeded in giving, by light, imperceptible, infallible touches, quite as much reality and. personality to a class of personages which in the works of all other writers of fiction are generally found uniform, and even fade- we mean the delineations of young men and women,

the heroes and heroines of comic or romantic adventures. Even Fielding, Scott, and Dickens, though possessing the far greater facilities afforded by narrative fiction, have seldom succeeded in rendering such characters interesting in themselves; that is, independently of the circumstances which surround them. Compare the Sophia and the Tom Jones of the first, the Waverley and the Miss Wardour of the second, the Nicholas Nickleby and the Miss Maylie of the third, with Rosalind and Orlando, with Helena, with Heronay, even with such secondary characters as Margaret, as Mariana, as Laertes, as Lorenzo-and we shall see that, while the elegant, and sometimes even delicate, creation of the romancer owes all its hold on our sympathies to the trials to which it is exposed, and to the patience and energy with which it undergoes them, the characters of the greatest of dramatists possess a real and distinct individuality, as subtly though not as strongly marked as that which divides Lear from Falstaff, or Isabella from Beatrice.

The great art of Shakspeare, as a portrayer of character and passion, seems to consist in his manner of making his personages, accidentally, involuntarily, nay, even in spite of themselves, express their own character, and admit us, as it were, into the inmost recesses of their hearts. And this is especially true of his passion. In the dramatists of the French classical school, in particular, the characters are very apt to give us - in noble and sounding verse, it is true, admirably reasoned and majestically harmonized-a description of the feelings which affect them. They, in short, say "I am terrified," "I am angry," "I am in love." This Shakspeare's men and women, like real men and women, never do. Hamlet, asked by his mother what is the dreadful object on which his eyes are fixed, does not break out into a long tirade descriptive of it, but paints his own terror, and the spectre which causes it, in one line:

"On him, on him! Look you, how pale he glares!"

And this method (if it be not rather an intuition) is perceivable in every scene and every character: it is found in the lightest as in the most solemn, in the most splendid as in the most pathetic scenes.

The development of the fable in Shakspeare is generally conducted with that natural yet unrestrained coherence which is found in the real dramas of human life. The events, it is true, are often hurried towards the close of the drama, and trifling and unexpected circumstances, arising in the course of the action, often completely chango

what we should imagine had been the author's previous plan. But does not the same thing perpetually happen in the world? Is it not a profound truth that the most insignificant events perpetually modify the most important actions? Does not experience show us that truth is stranger than fiction, that no event can be called unimportant excepting according to its consequences, and that no intellect is sufficiently vast and penetrating to trace all the consequences springing from even the most trivial act of our lives?

In point of art, it cannot be denied that Shakspeare has sometimes hurried over the latter part of his dramas, and cut, with violence and improbability, the Gordian knot of an intrigue which he had not time or perhaps patience to untie; but this defect is principally observable in those plays which internal evidence induces us to assign to the early period of his career. In many of the greatest works the dramatic complexity is as skilfully and completely resolved as the catastrophe is morally complete. What, for example, can be more complete than the resolution of the fable in 'Lear' and in 'Othello'? The latter play, indeed, may be considered as a miracle of consummate constructive skill. There is not a scene, a speech, a line, which does not evidently bear upon and contribute to the catastrophe; and that catastrophe is in the highest degree terrible and pathetic.

Of all the thousand errors prevalent respecting the genius and the works of Shakspeare, and which the industry of a respectful and affectionate and loving criticism has not yet entirely dispelled, perhaps the most fatal was a spirit of patronizing admiration and wondering approval, which seemed to consider his dramas as astonishing productions of an irregular and barbarous genius. Let it be to the eternal honour of Coleridge that he was the first to lead the way to a truer and more just appreciation of the poet of humanity, and to have shown his countrymen that the criticism which considered these wonderful creations as the work of accidental genius (absurd and contradictory as must appear such a collocation of the two words) was the mere dream of pedantry and ignorance. "What!" he says with a noble indignation, "does God perform miracles in sport?" Is it conceivable that these wonders of intellect and imagination-these worlds of fancy, redolent of beauty, of life, of a glorified reality—

"All that is most beauteous -- imaged there

In happier beauty; more pellucid streams,

An ampler ether, a diviner air,

And fields invested with purpureal gleams;

Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day
Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey".

that all this subtle music of humanity, all this deep knowledge of the human heart-its passions, its powers, its aspirations-could be the result of accident of a happy genius in an age of barbarism? --that the woolstapler's son of Stratford could have created, by acci

dent, Juliet and Cordelia, Imogen and Miranda, Katherine and Cleopatra, Perdita and Ophelia ?-that it was accident which reflected on the never-dying page of the dramatist of the Blackfriars the thunderous gloom of Lear's moral atmosphere, the fairy-peopled sunshine of Prospero's enchanted isle, the moonlit stillness of the garden at Belmont, the merry lamp-light of the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, or the warm English daylight of Windsor? No! such an opinion would be no less absurd (we had almost written blasphemous) than the sceptic's fancy that this earth was the result of blind chance and a fortuitous concourse of atoms.

From the works of Shakspeare may be gleaned a complete collection of precepts adapted to every condition of life and to every conceivable circumstance of human affairs. The wisest and best of mankind have gone to him for maxims of wisdom and of goodness -maxims expressed with the artlessness and simplicity of a casual remark, but pregnant with the thought of consummate experience and penetration: from him the courtier has learned grace, the moralist prudence, the theologian divinity, the soldier enterprise, the king royalty his wit is unbounded, his passion inimitable, his splendour unequalled; and over all these varied glories he has thrown a halo of human sympathy no less tender than his genius was immeasurable and profound, a light reflected from the most gentle, generous, loving spirit that ever glowed within a human heart: the consummate union of the Beautiful and the Good.

CHAPTER VII.

THE SHAKSPEARIAN DRAMATISTS.

Ben Jonson: The Humours-His Roman Plays-Comedies--Plots. Beau mont and Fletcher-Massinger-Chapman-Dekker-Webster-Middleton -Marston-Ford- Shirley.

WE now come to a galaxy of great names, whose splendour, albeit inferior to the unmatched effulgence of Shakspeare's genius, yet conspires to glorify the reigns of Elizabeth and James. The literary triumphs of this wonderful epoch are principally confined to the drama, which "heaven of invention" was, to use the beautiful expression of one of these playwrights, "studded as a frosty night with stars;" and deeply indeed do we regret that our space will only permit us to give a very short and cursory notice of the individual members of this admirable class of writers

"those shining stars, that run

Their glorious course round Shakspeare's golden sun."

The first of these illustrious dramatists whom we shall notice is Ben Jonson, a mighty and solid genius, whose plays bear an impress of majestic art and slow but powerful elaboration, distinguishing them from the careless ease and unpremeditated abundance so strongly characterising the drama of this period. He was born in 1574, ten years after Shakspeare, who honoured him with his close friendship and well-merited protection. He was undoubtedly one of the most learned men of this or indeed any age of English literature; and he brought to his dramatic task a much greater supply of scholastic knowledge than was possessed by any of his contemporaries. Educated at Cambridge, he adopted the stage as his profession when about twenty years of age, and when he had already acquired very extensive knowledge of the world, and experience in various scenes of "many-coloured life," in the university and even in the camp: for Ben had served with distinguished bravery in the wars of the Low Countries. As an actor he is reported to have completely failed, but it was at this period that he began to exhibit, in the literary department of his profession, that genius which has placed his name next to that of the greatest. Like all his contemporary dramatists, Jonson began by repairing and adapting older plays, and his name is connected, like that of so many of the dramatic débutans of this period, with several of such recastings; for example, with that of Hieronymo,' &c. It was not till 1596 that he produced his first original piece, the admirable comedy of 'Every Man in his Humour,' which gave infallible proof that a new and powerful genius had risen on the English stage. This comedy was brought out (considerably altered from its first sketch,) at the Globe theatre, in 1598, and in some degree, it is related, through the instrumentality of Shakspeare, who acted a principal part in the piece. It was soon evident that Jonson had cut out for himself a new path in the drama; and he rapidly attained, and steadily preserved, the highest reputation for genius and for art. In fact, Jonson, during the whole of his life, occupied a position at the very head of the dramatists of the day-a position perhaps even superior to that of Shakspeare himself. Nor is this wonderful. The qualities of Jonson's peculiar excellence were more obvious and appreciable than the delicate and, as it were, coy merits of the great poet, whose works, possessing all the depth and universality of nature, require no less study, subtlety, and discrimination in him who would understand them as they deserve. All, on the contrary, could admire Jonson's wonderful knowledge of real life, his vast and accurate observation of human vices and follies, his somewhat rough but straightforward and vigorous delineations of character, and the epigrammatic condensation of a strong and masculine style, armed with all the weapons of classic rhetoric, and decorated with the splendours of unequalled learning. Jonson was, in short, a great comic dramatit; and it will be found that the chief excellence even of his two