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From Blackwood's Magazine.

TWO ACTS OF SELF-DEVOTION.

the journey feels like, and yet we are as-
sured that where we see him now stand-

ing we shall one day stand ourselves: no
wonder, then, that we watch his every
That last march admits,
movement.
properly speaking, of no rehearsals; if ill
executed it cannot be recommenced with
a view to its better performance; and so
we like to rehearse it in imagination, and
feel a strange excitement in studying our
part beforehand.

No writer of fiction gratifies this desire
with sounder judgment than Shakespeare.
Grave, manly, yet full of human pity, his
death-scenes arouse no maudlin sensibil-
ity; they instruct while they affect us.
In them we study the emotions called
forth by death's approach in very various
characters - the dull and common-place
man and the genius the unusually guilty
and the singularly good. We mark how,
as the great teacher draws near him, the
rude and thoughtless Hotspur becomes
suddenly enlightened; how Hamlet's over-
weighted mind is cleared of its perplexi-
ties by his touch. Who can read many
of Shakespeare's finest passages without
being reminded of his own words -
The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets is sweetest last-
Writ in remembrance, more than things long
past?

THERE is little need to explain at any length why death-scenes, so sad to witness, are so interesting to read of. The fact is at any rate well known, and has been abundantly traded on by second-rate poets and novelists. Their favourite plan of introducing us to an innocent young victim whose chief use (if rather tedious in life) is to beguile us of our tears on a sentimental death-bed, has been often justly censured. This device, too, defeats its own end; for a thing which has scarcely lived cannot with any propriety of language be said to die. But when we are reading the description of a statesman's demeanour on the scaffold, or of a warrior breathing his last on a hardly-conquered field, the added interest with which we view the close of that career which we have been surveying throughout its progress, is perfectly legitimate. Nor can historian or biographer engrave their words at any time more deeply on our memories than when they are placing before us a man who is about (as Plutarch says*) to flee from that altar of Life which has ceased to afford him protection, in order to seek shelter at the more awful inner shrine of Death. This interest we do right to extend to similar passages in great works of fiction, whether prose or verse, because they are as true to the facts of nature as history and biography, — often far truer. Thus most men could sooner forget the stirring fights of the Iliad than the death of Hector, the gar-free-will offering of a life on the altar of dens of Armida than the baptism of the dying Clorinda. For a death scene, not sentimentally tricked out with affected prettinesses, but truthfully and powerfully painted, stirs in us that sense of the sublime which belongs to the terrible when not near enough to alarm; it awakens reverential pity in our breasts; above all, it makes its appeal to one of man's strongest desires, his insatiable curiosity about the unknown. As we read we pursue with our eyes a traveller along that road where every footprint points forward; we know that he cannot turn back to tell us what

Life of Demosthenes.

And yet there is one omission in Shakespeare's death-scenes which, when we come to think of it, strikes us as hard to account for. None of his plays represents to us the noblest death of all-the

faith, home, or country. His plays abound with fair types of maiden modesty and grace; but he neither emulates Euripides by making one of his young girls stand forth, timid yet resolute, to die for her fatherland, nor yet does he lead the way in which Calderon and Massinger were to follow, by picturing a virgin's readiness to die for her God. Shakespeare's wives are models, many of them, of submissive and loving devotion to their husbands; but there is among them no Alcestis who ransoms her lord's life with her own. Lady Macbeth by her fierce and unscrupulous courage, Hamlet by the task of vengeance imposed upon him, recall to

ma.

us the Clytemnestra and the Orestes of him beware how he trespassed there, as Eschylus; but Prometheus, the willing profaner feet have since? Besides, is it sufferer for the benefit of mankind, finds not possible that even Shakespeare's no counterpart in the Shakesperian dra- knowledge of human nature failed him Lear and Cordelia remind us of the when he tried to picture to himself the blind king at Colonos and his dutiful unfolding of the aloe-blossoms of the daughter, but there the resemblance world's garden, the feelings of nobly exstops; the Antigone of Sophocles has no ceptional men and women in hours which parallel among Shakespeare's tragedies. were exceptional even in their own good Nor has our great dramatist conceded to lives? Not content with such a compara man's brow the crown which he has re-atively external delineation as would have fused to place upon a woman's. The for- satisfied the Greek stage, may not Shakegotten Latin bards, whose ballads survive speare, with the modesty of true genius, for us in Livy's exquisite prose, fired the have owned to himself that he did not yet young Roman's imagination by many a possess the materials requisite for the fullstory of how his ancestors had devoted er portraiture? Let us hope that to the themselves to death for their country. greatest uninspired student of human naBut the tale of early Rome which Shake-ture such rare instances of its excellence speare dramatizes is a history of selfish- did not seem incredible. Let us feel asness rather than of self-sacrifice; he de-sured that he did not deliberately reject picts to us Coriolanus marching against them as subjects for his art, because he his country, not Regulus calmly going to thought them uninteresting compared certain death at Carthage for its sake. with creatures

It is impossible to assign with any cerNot too bright or good tainty the reason why the greatest of For human nature's daily food; dramatists thus turns away from what since, had Shakespeare undertaken the would seem the noblest of tragic sub- task, he would have performed it with jects. Shall we say that it was a mere such due regard to the mingling of weakaccident; that conspicuous acts of self-ness with man's strength as to retain our sacrifice were infrequent in those popular fellow-feeling for a being still, however histories and tales of Shakespeare's day exalted, "of like passions with ourwhich were selected by circumstances selves." But be the cause what it may, rather than by his own deliberate choice the fact is certain, that none of Shakeas the groundwork of his plays? so judg-speare's plays turns on a death voluntaing, shall we deem that had the poet in rily endured for some great object; the his retirement at Stratford seen the years English tragedies on such subjects are by of the two great Greek tragedians, his inferior hands to his. lengthened leisure might (among other precious fruits) have rivalled or outdone their two masterpieces? Or shall we look deeper for a reason, and say instead, that self-devotion in its noblest form had been exemplified in England too recently when Shakespeare wrote for him to find pleasure in depicting its lower manifestations; while those fires which his father may have seen blazing in Smithfield, had consumed sacrifices too holy to be represented on the English stage? and that thus it was that innate reverence of the poet for sacred things which his readers must thankfully acknowledge, which fenced round from him the most awful grove of all the Muses' haunts, and bade

Not such has been the fate of themes of self-sacrifice in the two other great national European dramas, the Greek and the Spanish. In them they have engaged the attention of the greatest poets. As we have already said, of the few surviving tragedies of Eschylus and Sophocles, in each case one represents an act of self-devotion. In the more numerous remains of Euripides, such subjects are only too common; they are made cheap by frequent repetition.

Like the Greek, the Spanish stage was founded on its country's religion. Each alike does not shrink from presenting to its spectators the most sacred personages of its creed. What Shakespeare gener