formed on the great men who have been schoolmasters. We recommend the subject to Mr. D'Israeli. Among monarchs it would descend from Dionysius the tyrant, to the present King of France. (By this juxta-position we would not be thought to disparage the by no means least honourable, perhaps not the least happy, period in the life of Louis Philippe.) Among men of letters the times. of which we write offer us the names of Shirley, and that far greater blind old schoolmaster,' as Milton was denominated by the miserable scorn of his enemies.

The dedication to his very amusing comedy of the Sisters,' reprinted with several others at this period, may well be quoted here. It is, in the words of Mr. Gifford, singularly affecting, as a well expressed and striking picture of the times.'-The play is inscribed to the most worthily honoured Wm. Paulet, Esquire:

'Compositions of this nature have heretofore been graced by the acceptance and protection of the greatest nobility (I say not princes); but in this age, when the scene of dramatic poetry is changed into a wilderness, it is hard to find a patron to a legitimate muse. Many that were wont to encourage poems are fallen beneath the proverbial want of the composers, and, by their ruins, are only at leisure to take measure with their eye of what they have been. Some, extinguished with their fortune, have this happiness to be out of capacity of further shipwreck, while their sad remains peep out of the sea, and may serve as naked marks, and caution to other navigators' malignant stars the while. In this unequal condition of the times, give me leave to congratulate my own felicity that hath directed this comedy unto you, who wear your nobleness with more security than titles, and a name that continues bright and impassable among the constellations in our sphere of English honour.'-vol. v., p. 355.

But the fire of Shirley's invention was not yet completely extinguished either by the base use to which he had fallen, or by his chilling association with his old friend Ogilby. It is next to impossible to doubt that it was by the fall, if not by the death of Charles I., that the mind of the royalist poet was solemnized to the creation of those imperishable stanzas, which first appeared in his Contention of Ajax and Ulysses.Oliver Cromwell is said, on the recital of them, to have been seized with great terror and agitation of mind.' This is one of those stories which ought to be true; unfortunately, Zouch, who has published it in his notes on Walton's Lives, has given no authority. Frequently as this noble dirge has been quoted, it must not be omitted here:

'The glories of our mortal state

Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings:

Sceptre

Sceptre and crown

Must tumble down,

And in the dust be equal made

With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
Some men with swords may reap the field,
And plant fresh laurels where they kill;
But their strong nerves at last must yield;
They tame but one another still:
Early or late,

They stoop to fate,

And must give up their murmuring breath,
When they, pale captives, creep to death.
The garlands wither on your brow;

Then boast no more your mighty deeds;
Upon death's purple altar now,

See, where the victor-victim bleeds:
Your heads must come

To the cold tomb,

Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet, and blossom in their dust.'

vol. vi., pp. 396, 397.

At the Restoration Shirley had his full share in the benefits of the Act of Oblivion, passed, as it was humorously said, in favour of the king's friends. His plays were revived, but he remained toiling in his school, and drudging, in his ill-assorted partnership with Ogilby, in those vast volumes, the translations of Virgil and Homer, which tower in undisturbed dignity on the tallest shelves of our public libraries. The worthy ex-dancing master, it may be observed, had qualified himself for translating Homer by beginning Greek, in the year 1654, under the tuition of a Scotch usher of Shirley's. The fact of this literary copartnership must be borne in mind, as in some degree accounting for the contemptuous acrimony of the Macflecknoe :

'Heywood and Shirley are but types of thee,
Thou last great prophet of tautology.'
And again on the coronation of Shadwell-

• No Persian carpets spread the imperial way,
But scattered limbs of mangled poets lay.
From dusty shops neglected authors come,
Martyrs of pies

*

*

Much Heywood, Shirley, Ogilby there lay,

But loads of Shadwell almost chok'd the way.'

The Mezentian martyrdom by which Shirley bound his living self to the dead weight of old Ogilby-was thus all but fatal at the time. According to the general principle by which a poet, during his life, is often noted for his worst work, but is remem

bered

bered by posterity, if remembered at all, for his best-so Shirley's nobler flights, his dramatic invention, the graceful ease of his dialogue, were cast into the shade by the impenetrable obscurity of those huge folios, in which he was admitted to be an accomplice, and of which the unmitigated dulness could be known to no one better than to Dryden, who himself trod the same ground. Dryden, conscious of Shirley's immeasurable inferiority as a translator, was no doubt blinded by this, as well as by the false taste of his day for rhyming tragedy and profligate comedy, to his own no less undoubted inferiority, as a dramatist, to the last legitimate descendant of Shakspeare.

The death of Shirley was a tragic termination to a life of vicissitude. He and his second wife, Frances, were burnt out of their dwelling, near Fleet Street, in the memorable Fire of London. They fled to St. Giles's, then in the fields, and broken down with fright, exposure, and distress of mind at their losses, the unhappy old couple died in one day, and were buried in one grave in the churchyard of that parish.

Few poets have moralized more beautifully on death than Shirley; happy if in that sad hour the sentiment, embodied in the following exquisite verses, soothed and consoled his failing spirit:

I have not lived

After the rate to fear another world.

We come from nothing into life, a time

We measure with a short breath, and that often
Made tedious too, with our own cares that fill it,
Which like so many atoms in a sunbeam,
But crowd and jostle one another. All
From the adored purple to the haircloth,
Must centre in a shade, and they that have
Their virtues to wait on them, bravely mock

The rugged storms that so much fright them here,
When their soul's launch'd by death into a sea

That's ever calm.

Honoria and Mammon, vi. p. 78.

We are tempted to transcribe also the following beautiful lines :—

Hark! how chimes the passing bell!

There's no music to a knell:
All the other sounds we hear
Flatter, and but cheat the ear.
This doth put us still in mind
That our flesh must be resigned,
And, a general silence made,
The world be muffled in a shade.
Orpheus' lute, as poets tell,
Was but moral of this bell,

And

And the captive soul was she
Which they call Euridice,
Rescued by our holy groan,
A loud echo to this tone.
He that on his pillow lies
Tear-embalmed before he dies,
Carries, like a sheep, his life

To the sacrificer's knife.'-vol. vi., p. 452.

Shirley, as a dramatist, bears evident indications of being the last of a great, but almost exhausted school. It is the decline, though still the serene and beautiful decline of a glorious day. The royal race submits with tranquil dignity to its deposition, but the sceptre is passing into other hands. His poetic character is by no means so strongly marked as that of most of his predecessors. The distinctive peculiarities of genius were pre-occupied. Of course the ground where Shakspeare had trod was not merely sacred-it was unattainable; and Jonson-though in his Comedy of Manners he was followed by many of the later writers-in his profound learning, and not less in his full and elaborate delineation of character, stood also alone. Massinger had excelled in vigorous and masculine eloquence, and in a peculiar style of dark moral painting, such as we trace in his Luke and his Sir Giles Overreach. The infinite variety of Beaumont and Fletcher seemed to leave no character unattempted, no passion unexplored, no situation untried. Among the inferior writers, Ford had stretched the passions on the rack till they almost burst with agony. Webster, the Spagnolet of the old drama, had, in the same manner, overwrought the principle of terror, and thus too often marred the impressiveness of that sombre grandeur in which lies his true strength. Middleton had passages of a kind of homely pathos not easily surpassed. Thus, when Shirley came on the stage, he might seem to succeed to a mine, of which the wealth had been completely exhausted—a land, of which every nook and corner had been explored and cultivated to its utmost height of productiveness. Every source from which dramatic invention had drawn its materials might seem dried up. The history of every country had been dramatized every distinguished personage in ancient or modern times had appeared on the stage-even the novelists of Italy were well nigh run to their dregs: human nature itself might almost appear to have been worked outevery shade and modification of character had been variously combined, every incident placed in every possible light. Yet under all these disadvantages Shirley is an original writer: though he perpetually works up materials of the same kind as those of his predecessors, yet his forms are new; though we are constantly

reminded

reminded of the earlier writers, particularly of Fletcher, his plays are far from servile copies; the manner of composition is the same, yet his lights and shadows are so infinitely varied, that the impression is entirely different. Even his style is his own far inferior in force, in variety, in richness to his masters, it has an ease, a grace, sometimes an elegance, essentially his own. softened and more delicately-pencilled outlines of characters, with which we are familiar, meet us again in the volumes of Shirley-so his poetry is full of the same images;-yet passing, as it were, through the clear and pellucid medium of his mind, they appear as if they were the new-born creations of his own fancy.

If the character of Shirley's genius is less marked, he has escaped the mannerism of many of his predecessors; if there is no one qualification of the dramatist in which he is pre-eminent in the great school to which he belongs, yet he combines more than most, except the very first writers; and it is impossible not to admire the variety and versatility with which he ranges, if with a less vigorous and decided, yet with an easy and graceful step, through every province of the drama; rarely perhaps exciting any violent or profound emotion, yet rarely failing to awaken and keep alive the curiosity, to amuse and delight the imagination. For, after all, it is the life and activity of Shirley's mind, the fertility of his invention, which is the most extraordinary point in his poetic character. Among all the plays, which nearly fill the volumes before us, there are few in which the interest, however often strange and improbable, is not sustained to the end; few, in which we do not find scenes or speeches of easy and unlaboured beauty, which could only be poured forth in such profusion by a true poet.

As a tragic writer, Shirley betrays, perhaps with least disguise, that he is the last of his school. He seems to write for an audience accustomed to sup full of horrors. There is a prodigality of crime, a profuse pouring forth of blood, not altogether in the coarse and King Cambyses' manner of the older school, but still crowded together, as if nothing less than such strong stimulants would produce any effect; as if the poet were under the necessity of working up to an established standard of terror-to equal, if not to surpass, the awful scenes which were in full possession of the public imagination, In his two finest tragedies, The Traitor' and The Cardinal,' reminiscences more or less distinct of The Maid's Tragedy' of Fletcher and the Duchess of Malfy' of Webster involuntarily arise. As he would rival the passion and the sombre grandeur, so he seems to have thought it necessary to vie with his fearful models in the blackness of the crimes which he describes and in the lavish expenditure of blood. "The Traitor,' unfortunately, turns on a kind of interest in which our older

poets