Act ii., scene 1, where she persuades him to make trial of her remedy:

[20] Page 190 of this volume.

"The great'st Grace lending grace, Ere twice the horses of the Sun shall bring Their fiery torcher his diurnal ring; Ere twice in murk and occidental damp Moist Hesperus hath quench'd his sleepy lamp; Or four-and-twenty times the pilot's glass Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass; What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly, Health shall live free, and sickness freely die."

Here we have the special traits of Shakespeare's youthful style,--an air of artifice and studied finery, a certain self-conscious elaborateness and imitative rivalry,--which totally disappear in, for instance, the blessing the Countess gives her son as he is leaving for the Court:

"Be thou blest, Bertram! and succeed thy father In manners, as in shape! thy blood and virtue Contend for empire in thee, and thy goodness Share with thy birthright! Love all, trust a few, Do wrong to none; be able for thine enemy Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend Under thy own life's key; be check'd for silence, But never tax'd for speech. What Heaven more will, That thee may furnish, and my prayers pluck down, Fall on thy head!"

I the rather quote this latter, because of its marked resemblance to the advice Polonius gives his son in _Hamlet_. Mr. White justly observes that "either the latter is an expansion of the former, or the former a reminiscence of the latter"; and I fully concur with him that the second part of the alternative is the more probable. It is hardly needful to add that the passage here quoted breathes a higher and purer moral tone than the resembling one in _Hamlet_; but this I take to be merely because the venerable Countess is a higher and purer source than the old politician. For a broader and bulkier illustration of the point in hand, the student probably cannot do better than by comparing in full the dialogue from which the first of the forecited passages is taken with the whole of the second scene in Act i. These seem to me at least as apt and telling examples as any, of the Poet's rawest and ripest styles so strangely mixed in this play; and the difference is here so clearly pronounced, that one must be dull indeed not to perceive it.

As regards the notion of Mr. Hunter before referred to, it is indeed true, as he argues, that the play twice bespeaks its present title; but both instances occur in just those parts which relish most of the Poet's later style. And the line in the epilogue,--"_All is well ended_, if this suit _be won_,"--may be fairly understood as intimating some connection between the two titles which the play is supposed to have borne.

* * * * *

The only known source from which the Poet could have borrowed any part of this play is a story in Boccaccio, entitled _Giletta di Nerbona_. In 1566 William Paynter published an English version of this tale in his _Palace of Pleasure_. Here it was, no doubt, that Shakespeare got his borrowed matter; and the following outline will show the nature and extent of his obligations.

Isnardo, Count of Rousillon, being sickly, kept in his house a physician named Gerardo of Nerbona. The Count had a son named Beltramo, and the physician a daughter named Giletta, who were brought up together. The Count dying, his son was left in the care of the King and sent to Paris. The physician also dying some while after, his daughter, who had loved the young Count so long that she knew not when her love began, sought occasion of going to Paris, that she might see him; but, being diligently looked to by her kinsfolk, because she was rich and had many suitors, she could not see her way clear. Now the King had a swelling on his breast, which through ill treatment was grown to a fistula; and, having tried all the best physicians and being only rendered worse by their efforts, he resolved to take no further counsel or help. Giletta, hearing of this, was very glad, as it suggested an apt reason for visiting Paris, and offered a chance of compassing her secret and cherished wish. Arming herself with such knowledge in the healing art as she had gathered from her father, she rode to Paris and repaired to the King, praying him to show her his disease. He consenting, as soon as she saw it she told him that, if he pleased, she would within eight days make him whole. He asked how it was possible for her, being a young woman, to do that which the best physicians in the world could not; and, thanking her for her good-will, said he was resolved to try no more remedies. She begged him not to despise her knowledge because she was a young woman, assuring him that she ministered physic by the help of God, and with the cunning of Master Gerardo of Nerbona, who was her father. The King, hearing this, and thinking that peradventure she was sent of God, asked what might follow, if she caused him to break his resolution, and did not heal him. She said, "Let me be kept in what guard you list, and if I do not heal you let me be burnt; but, if I do, what recompense shall I have?" He answered that, since she was a maiden, he would bestow her in marriage upon a gentleman of right good worship and estimation. To this she agreed, on condition that she might have such a husband as herself should ask, without presumption to any member of his family; which he readily granted. This done, she set about her task, and before the eight days were passed he was entirely well; whereupon he told her she deserved such a husband as herself should choose, and she declared her choice of Beltramo, saying she had loved him from her childhood. The King was very loth to grant him to her; but, because he would not break his promise, he had him called forth, and told him what had been done. The Count, thinking her stock unsuitable to his nobility, disdainfully said, "Will you, then, sir, give me a physician to wife?" The King pressing him to comply, he answered, "Sire, you may take from me all that I have, and give my person to whom you please, because I am your subject; but I assure you I shall never be contented with that marriage." To which he replied, "Well, you shall have her, for the maiden is fair and wise, and loveth you entirely; and verily you shall lead a more joyful life with her than with a lady of a greater House"; whereupon the Count held his peace. The marriage over, the Count asked leave to go home, having settled beforehand what he would do. Knowing that the Florentines and the Senois were at war, he was no sooner on horseback than he stole off to Tuscany, meaning to side with the Florentines; by whom being honorably received and made a captain, he continued a long time in their service.

His wife, hoping by her well-doing to win his heart, returned home, where, finding all things spoiled and disordered by reason of his absence, she like a sage lady carefully put them in order, making all his people very glad of her presence and loving to her person. Having done this, she sent word thereof to the Count by two knights, adding that, if she were the cause of his forsaking home, he had but to let her know it, and she, to do him pleasure, would depart thence. Now he had a ring which he greatly loved, and kept very carefully, and never took off his finger, for a certain virtue which he knew it had. When the knights came, he said to them churlishly, "Let her do what she list; for I purpose to dwell with her when she shall have this ring on her finger, and a son of mine in her arms." The knights, after trying in vain to change his purpose, returned to the lady, and told his answer; at which she was very sorrowful, and bethought herself a good while how she might accomplish those two things. She then called together the noblest of the country, and told them what she had done to win her husband's love; that she was loth he should dwell in perpetual exile on her account; and therefore would spend the rest of her life in pilgrimages and devotion; praying them to let him know she had left, with a purpose never to return. Then, taking with her a maid and one of her kinsmen, she set out in the habit of a pilgrim, well furnished with silver and jewels, told no one whither she was going, and rested not till she came to Florence. She put up at the house of a poor widow; and the next day, seeing her husband pass by on horseback, she asked who he was. The widow told her this, and also that he was marvellously in love with a neighbour of hers, a gentlewoman who was poor, but of right honest life and report, and dwelt with her mother, a wise and honest lady. After hearing this, she was not long in deciding what to do. Going secretly to the house, and getting a private interview with the mother, she told her whole story, and how she hoped to thrive in her undertaking, if the mother and daughter would lend their aid. In recompense she proposed to give the daughter a handsome marriage portion; and the mother replied, "Madam, tell me wherein I may do you service; if it be honest, I will gladly perform it; and, that being done, do as it shall please you." So an arrangement was made, that the daughter should encourage the Count, and signify her readiness to grant his wish, provided he would first send her the ring he prized so highly, as a token of his love. Proceeding with great subtlety as she was instructed, the daughter soon got the ring; and at the time fixed for the meeting the Countess supplied her place; the result of which was, that she became the mother of two fine boys, and so was prepared to claim her dues as a wife upon the seemingly-impossible terms which the Count himself had proposed.

Meanwhile her husband, hearing of her departure, had returned to his country. In due time the Countess also took her journey homeward, and arrived at Montpellier, where, hearing that the Count was about to have a great party at his house, she determined to go thither in her pilgrim's weeds. Just as they were on the point of sitting down to the table, she came to the place where her husband was, and fell at his feet weeping, and said, "My lord, I am thy poor unfortunate wife, who, that thou mightest return and dwell in thy house, have been a great while begging about the world. Therefore I now beseech thee to observe the conditions which the two knights that I sent to thee did command me to do; for behold, here in my arms, not only one son of thine, but twain, and likewise the ring: it is now time, if thou keep promise, that I should be received as thy wife." The Count knew the ring, and the children also, they were so like him, and desired her to rehearse in order how all these things came about. When she had told her story, he knew it to be true; and, perceiving her constant mind and good wit, and the two fair young boys, to keep his promise, and to please his people, and the ladies that made suit to him, he caused her to rise up, and embraced and kissed her, and from that day forth loved and honoured her as his wife.

* * * * *

From this sketch it will be seen that the Poet anglicized Beltramo into Bertram, changed Giletta to Helena, and closely followed Boccaccio in the main features of the plot so far as regards these persons and the widow and her daughter. Beyond this, the novel yields no hints towards the play, while the latter has several judicious departures from the matter of the former. Giletta is rich, and has a fine establishment of her own; which so far reduces the social inequality between her and the Count: Helena is poor and dependent, so that she has nothing to stand upon but her nobility of nature and merit. Beltramo, again, has no thought of going to Florence till after his compelled marriage; so that his going to the war is not from any free stirring of virtue in him, but purely to escape the presence of a wife that has been forced upon him. With Bertram, the unwelcome marriage comes in only as an additional spur to the execution of a purpose already formed. Before Helena makes her appearance at the Court, his spirit is in revolt against the command which would make him

"stay here the forehorse to a smock, Creaking his shoes on the plain masonry, Till honour is bought up, and no sword worn But one to dance with."

He therefore resolves to "steal away" to the war along with other brave and enterprising spirits; and we have some lords of the Court ministering fuel to this noble fire burning within him. These stirrings of native gallantry, this brave thirst of honourable distinction, go far to redeem him from the rank dishonours of his conduct, as showing that he is not without some strong and noble elements of manhood. Here we have indeed no little just ground of respect; and that his purpose is but quickened into act by the thought of finding a refuge in such manly work from the thraldom of a hated marriage, operates as further argument in the same behalf. And this purpose, springing as it does from the free promptings of his nature, has the further merit, that it involves a deliberate braving of the King's anger; thus showing that he will even peril his head rather than leave what is best in him to "fust unused." All which plainly infers that he has at least the right virtues of a soldier. And the promise thus held out from the start is made good in the after-performance. He proves a gallant, a capable, a successful warrior, and returns with well-won laurels. In all these points, the play is a manifest improvement on the tale. And I suspect the Poet took care to endow his hero with this streak of nobility, because he felt that there was some danger lest Helena's pursuit of Bertram should rather have the effect of lowering her than of elevating him in our thoughts.

But the crowning innovation upon the matter of the tale lies in the characters of Lafeu, the Countess, the Clown, and Parolles, and in the comic proceedings; all which, so far as is known, are entirely of the Poet's invention. And it is quite remarkable what an original cast is given to his development of the borrowed characters by the presence of these; and how in the light of their mutual interaction the conduct of all becomes, not indeed right or just, but consistent and clear. Helena's native force and rectitude of mind are approved from the first in her just appreciation of Parolles; and her nobility of soul and beauty of character are reflected all along in the honest sagacity of Lafeu and the wise motherly affection of the Countess, who never see or think of her but to turn her advocates and wax eloquent in her behalf. The thoughtful and benevolent King also, on becoming acquainted with her, is even more taken with her moral and intellectual beauty than with her service in restoring him to health. The Countess regards her as "a maid too virtuous for the contempt of empire"; and, on bearing Bertram's "dreadful sentence" against her, she is prompt to declare, "He was my son, but I do wash his name out of my blood, and thou art all my child"; and it is her very heart that speaks,--

"What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? he cannot thrive, Unless her prayers, which Heaven delights to hear, And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice."

To the King she is "all that is virtuous"; "young, wise, fair"; "virtue and she is her own dower." Lafeu remembers her at the close as "a sweet creature," and as one

"Whose beauty did astonish the survey Of richest eyes; whose words all ears took captive; Whose dear perfection hearts that scorn'd to serve Humbly call'd mistress."

Thus she walks right into all hearts that have any doors for the entrance of virtue and loveliness. And her modest, self-sacrificing worth is brought home to our feelings by the impression she makes on the good; while in turn our sense of their goodness is proportionably heightened by their noble sensibility to hers.

Parolles, again, is puffed up into a more consequential whiffet than ever, by being taken into the confidence of a haughty young nobleman; while, on the other side, the stultifying effects of Bertram's pride are seen in that it renders him the easy dupe of a most base and bungling counterfeit of manhood. It was natural and right, that such a shallow, paltry word-gun should ply him with impudent flatteries, and thereby gain an ascendency over him, and finally draw him into the crimes and the shames that were to whip down his pride; and it was equally natural that his scorn of Helena should begin to relax, when he was brought to see what a pitiful rascal, by playing upon that pride, had been making a fool of him. He must first be mortified, before he can be purified. The springs of moral health within him have been overspread by a foul disease; and the proper medicine is such an exposure of the latter as shall cause him to feel that he is himself a most fit object of the scorn which he has been so forward to bestow. Accordingly the embossing and untrussing of his favourite is the starting of his amendment: he begins to distrust the counsels of his cherished passion, when he can no longer hide from himself into what a vile misplacing of trust they have betrayed him. Herein, also, we have a full justification, both moral and dramatic, of the game so mercilessly practised on Parolles: it is avowedly undertaken with a view to rescue Bertram, whose friends know full well that nothing can be done for his good, till the fascination of that crawling reptile is broken.

Finally, Helena's just discernment of character, as shown in the case of Parolles, pleads an arrest of judgment in behalf of Bertram. And the fact that with all her love for him she is not blind to his faults, is a sort of pledge that she sees through them into a worth which they hide from others. For, indeed, she has known him in his childhood, before his heart got pride-bound with conceit of rank and titles; and therefore may well have a reasonable faith, that beneath the follies and vices which have overcrusted his character, there is still an undercurrent of sense and virtue, a wisdom of nature, not dead but asleep, whereby he may yet be recovered. So that, in effect, we are not unwilling to see him through her eyes, and, in the strength of her well-approved wisdom, to take it upon trust that he has good qualities which we are unable of ourselves to discover.

Thus the several parts are drawn into each other, and thereby made to evolve a manifold rich significance; insomuch that the characters of Helena and Bertram, as Shakespeare conceived them, cannot be rightly understood apart from the others with which they are dramatically associated.

It is indeed curious to observe how much care the Poet takes that his heroine may come safe and sweet through the perils of her course. For instance, at the very outset, when she first learns of the King's disease, in the dialogue about her father, the Countess says in her hearing, "Would, for the King's sake, he were living! I think it would be the death of the King's disease"; and Lafeu replies, "The King very lately spoke of him admiringly and mourningly." This serves as a pregnant hint to her for what she afterwards undertakes. She now remembers the special instructions of her father touching that disease; and the hint combining with her treasured science, her loyalty, and affection, works her into the strong confidence of being able to help the King. Thus the main point of her action is put into her mind incidentally by the speech of others. And she goes to Paris, with the full approval and blessing of her foster-mother, _mainly_ with the view of securing to one whom she highly reveres the benefit of her father's skill. It is true, a still deeper and dearer hope underlies and supports her action; which hope however springs and grows, not because she foresees at all how things are to turn, but merely from a pious trust, which is in her case both natural and just, that her father's "good receipt" will somehow, "for her legacy, be sanctified by the luckiest stars in heaven."

The same delicate care for her honour, as if this were indeed sacred and precious in the Poet's regard, is shown at various other points. It is very note-worthy how, all along, she shapes her action from step to step, not by any long-headed planning, but merely as events suggest and invite her onward. Helena is indeed brave, wise, prudent, sagacious, quick and clear of perception, swift and steadfast in resolution, prompt, patient, and persevering in action; but there is nothing of a crafty or designing mind in what she does. She displays no special forecast, no subtle or far-sighted scheming; though quick and apt at seizing and using opportunities, she does not make or even seek them. So it is in the strange proceedings at Florence, whereby she manages to fulfil the hard conditions imposed by her husband. Here, as elsewhere, she has her fine penetrative faculties all wide-awake, but there is no contriving or forcing of occasions: when she sees a way open before her, she strikes into it promptly, and pursues it with quiet yet energetic constancy; and whatever apt occasions emerge to her view, she throws herself into them at once, and, with a sort of divine tact, turns them to the best possible account in furtherance of her cherished hope. In this way the Poet manages to bring her character off clean and fragrant in our thoughts, by making us feel that in whatever blame might else attach to her acts, the circumstances only are responsible, while to her belongs the credit of using those circumstances purely, wisely, and well.

It is further observable, and a very material point too, that Helena seems to think the better of Bertram for his behaviour towards her: she takes it as evidence at least of honesty in him, and of a certain downrightness of character, that shrinks from a life of appearances, and knows not how to affect what he does not feel. So far from blaming his indifference, she rather blames herself as having brought him into a false position. She loves him simply because she cannot help it; she wants him to love her for the same reason; and the point she aims at is so to act and be and appear, that he cannot help loving her. She knows right well that the choice must be mutual, else marriage is rather a sacrilege than a sacrament; and the great question is, how she may win him to reciprocate her choice: nothing less than this will suffice her; and she justly takes it as her part to _inspire_ him with the feeling, understanding perfectly that neither talk nor force can be of any use to that end. Even a love that springs from a sense of duty is not what she wants: her own love did not spring from that source. So she "would not have him till she does deserve him," yet knows not how that desert should ever be: still she cannot put off the faith that love will sooner or later triumph, if worthily shown by deeds. He is much noted as a fine instance of manly beauty: all are taken with his handsome person. It is not, probably ought not to be, in womanhood, to be proof against such attractions. In the sweetness of their youthful intercourse, this has silently got the mastery of her thoughts, and penetrated her being through and through:

"Twas pretty, though a plague, To see him every hour; to sit and draw His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls, In our heart's table."

And now she must needs strive with all her might, by loving ways, by kind acts, by self-sacrificing works, to catch his heart, as he has caught hers. Then too a holy instinct of womanhood teaches her that a man must be hard indeed, to resist the wedded mother of his children, and most of all, to keep his heart untouched by the power of a wife when burdened with a mother's precious wealth. Therewithal she rightly apprehends the danger Bertram is in from the wordy, cozening squirt, the bedizened, scoundrelly dandiprat, who has so beguiled his youth and ignorance. She must bless and sweeten him out of that contagion into the religion of home; and she feels that nothing but an honourable love of herself can save him. This she aims at, and finally accomplishes.

Coleridge incidentally speaks of Helena as "Shakespeare's loveliest character." And Mrs. Jameson, from whose judgment I shall take no appeal, sets her down as exemplifying that union of strength and tenderness which Foster, in one of his _Essays_, describes as being "the utmost and rarest endowment of humanity";--a character, she adds, "almost as hard to delineate in fiction as to find in real life." Without either questioning or subscribing these statements, I have to confess that, for depth, sweetness, energy, and solidity of character, all drawn into one, Helena is not surpassed by more than two or three of Shakespeare's heroines. Her great strength of mind is well shown in that, absorbed as she is in the passion that shapes her life, hardly any of the Poet's characters, after Hamlet, deals more in propositions of general truth, as distinguished from the utterances of individual sentiment and emotion. We should suppose that all her thoughts, being struck out in such a glowing heat, would so cleave to the circumstances as to have little force apart from them; yet much that she says holds as good in a general application as in her own particular. Which rightly infers that she sees things in their principles; that is, her thoughts touch the pith of whatever matter she takes in hand; while at the same time broad axiomatic notes of discourse drop from her with an ease which shows that her mind is thoroughly at home in them. For this cause, her feelings, strong as they are, never so get the upper hand as to beguile her into any self-delusion; as appears in the unbosoming of herself to the Countess, where we have the greatest reluctance of modesty yielding to a holy regard for truth. It is there manifest that she has taken a full and just measure of her situation: she frankly avows the conviction that she "loves in vain," and that she "strives against hope"; that she "lends and gives where she is sure to lose"; nevertheless she resolves to "venture the well-lost life of hers on his Grace's cure," and leave the result in other hands.

In her condition, both there and afterwards, there is much indeed to move our pity; yet her behaviour and the grounds of it are such that she never suffers any loss of our respect; one reason of which is, because we see that her sound faculties and fine feelings are keenly alive to the nature of what she undertakes. Thus she passes unharmed through the most terrible outward dishonours, firmly relying on her rectitude of purpose; and we dare not think any thing to her hurt, because she looks her danger square in the face, and nobly feels secure in that apparelling of strength. Here, truly, we have something very like the sublimity of moral courage. And this precious, peerless jewel in a setting of the most tender, delicate, sensitive womanhood! It is a clear triumph of the inward and essential over the outward and accidental; her character being radiant of a moral and spiritual grace which the lowest and ugliest situation cannot obscure.

There certainly needs no scruple that the delineation is one of extraordinary power: perhaps, indeed, it may stand as Shakespeare's masterpiece in the conquest of inherent difficulties. And it is observable that here, for once, he does not carry his point without evident tokens of exertion. He does not outwrestle the resistance of the matter without letting us see that he is wrestling. Of course the hardness of the task was to represent the heroine as doing what were scarce pardonable in another; yet as acting on such grounds, from such motives, and to such issues, that the undertaking not only is, but is felt to be, commendable in her. Lamb puts it just right: "With such exquisite address is the dangerous subject handled, that Helena's forwardness loses her no honour: delicacy dispenses with its laws in her favour; and nature, in her single case, seems content to suffer a sweet violation." And the Poet seems to have felt that something like a mysterious, supernatural impulse, together with all the reverence and authority of the old Countess, and also the concurring voice of all the wise and good about her in hearty approval of her course and eloquent admiration of her virtue,--that all these were needful to bring her through with dignity and honour. Nor, perhaps, after all, could any thing but success fully vindicate her undertaking; for such a thing, to be proper, must be practicable: and who could so enter into her mind as to see its practicability till it is done? At the last we accept it as a sort of inspiration,--authenticated to us as such in the result,--when she frames her intent in the meditation,--

"Impossible be strange attempts to those That weigh their pains in sense, and do suppose What hath not been can't be."

Before leaving the subject, I am moved to add that, though Helena is herself all dignity and delicacy, some of her talk with Monsieur Words the puppy in the first scene is neither delicate nor dignified: it is simply a foul blot, and I can but regret the Poet did not throw it out in the revisal; sure I am that he did not retain it to please himself.

* * * * *

Almost everybody falls in love with the Countess. And, truly, one so meek and sweet and venerable, who can help loving her? or who, if he can resist her, will dare to own it? I can almost find it in my heart to adore the beauty of youth; yet this blessed old creature is enough to persuade me that age may be more beautiful still. Her generous sensibility to native worth amply atones for her son's mean pride of birth: all her honours of rank and place she would gladly resign, to have been the mother of the poor orphan left in her charge. Feeling as she does the riches of that orphan's soul,--a feeling that bespeaks like riches in herself,--all the factitious distinctions of life sink to nothing in her regard; and the only distinction worth having is that which grows by building honour out of one's own virtue, and not by inheriting it from the virtue of others. So, in her breast, "adoption strives with nature"; and, weighing the adopted and the native together in her motherly judgment, she finds "there's nothing here too good for him but only she"; and "which of them both is dearest to her, she has no skill in sense to make distinction." Withal she is a charming instance of youth carried on into age; so that Helena justly recognizes her as one "whose aged honour cites a virtuous youth." Thus her Winter inherits a soft warm robe of precious memories woven out of her Spring: when she first learns of the heroine's state of mind, the picture of her own May revives to her eye, the treasure of her maiden years blooms afresh; she remembers that "this thorn doth to our rose of youth rightly belong"; and has more than ever a mother's heart towards the silent sufferer, because she holds fast her old faith that

"It is the show and seal of nature's truth, Where love's strong passion is impress'd in youth."

Well might Campbell say of her, that "she redeems nobility by reverting to nature."

* * * * *

Johnson delivers his mind touching the young Count as follows: "I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram;--a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helena as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage; is accused by a woman he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness." A terrible sentence indeed! and its vigour, if not its justice, is attested by the frequency with which it has been quoted.

Now, in the first place, the Poet did not mean we should reconcile our hearts to Bertram, but that he should not unreconcile them to Helena; nay, that her love should appear the nobler for the unworthiness of its object. Then, he does not marry her as a coward, but merely because he has no choice; nor does he yield till he has shown all the courage that were compatible with discretion. She is forced upon him by a stretch of prerogative which seems strange indeed to us, but which in feudal times was generally held to be just and right, so that resistance to it was flat rebellion. And, as before observed, Bertram's purpose of stealing away to the war was bravely formed without any reference to Helena, and from a manly impulse or ambition to be doing something that might show him not unworthy of his House and his social inheritance. The King presses him with the hard alternative of taking Helena as his wife,

"Or I will throw thee from my care for ever Into the staggers and the cureless lapse Of youth and ignorance; both my revenge and hate Loosing upon thee, in the name of justice, Without all terms of pity."

Nor, when thus driven to make a show of mastering his aversion, is there any thing mean or cringing in the way he does it: his language is not only reluctant and reserved, but is even made severe with a dash of irony:

"When I consider What great creation and what dole of honour Flies where you bid it, I find that she, which late Was in my nobler thoughts most base, is now _The praisèd of the King_."

Marriage, in truth, is a thing that he has not begun to think of; the passion that rightly leads to it is yet dormant in him; to the proper charms of woman he is insensible, his heart being all set on other things. Then, again, he does not leave Helena as a profligate, but rather to escape from what is to him an unholy match, as being on his side without love; and his profligacy is not so much the cause as the consequence of his flight and exile. In the midst of his manlier work, he is surprised into a passion unfelt by him before; and the tie which has been strained upon him, and which his heart still disowns, is partly to blame for the profligate intrigue into which he plunges, because it shuts off the conditions of an honourable love.--Finally, he is not dismissed to happiness, but rather left where he cannot be happy, unless he shall have dismissed his faults. And, surely, he may have some allowance, because of the tyranny laid upon him,--this too in a sentiment where nature pleads loudest for freedom, and which, if free, yields the strongest motives to virtue; if not, to vice.

As for his falsehood, or rather string of falsehoods, this is indeed a pretty dark passage. The guilty passion with which he is caught betrays him into a course of action still more guilty: he is entangled, almost before he knows it, in a net of vile intrigue, from which there is no escape but by lying his way out; and the more he struggles to get free the more he gets engaged. It seems an earnest of "the staggers and the cureless lapse of youth" with which the King has threatened him. But he pays a round penalty in the shame that so quickly overtakes him; which shows how careful the Poet was to make due provision for his amendment. His original fault, as already noted, was an overweening pride of birth: yet in due time he unfolds in himself better titles to honour than ancestry can bestow; and, this done, he naturally grows more willing to recognize similar titles in another. It is to be noted further, that Bertram is all along a man of few words; which may be one reason why Parolles, who is all words, as his name imports, _burrs_ upon him and works his infection into him with such signal success. His habitual reticence springs mainly from real, inward strength of nature; but partly also from that same unsocial pride which lays him so broadly open to the arts of sycophancy, and thus draws him, as if spellbound, under the tainted breath of that strange compound of braggart, liar, and fop.

Thus Shakespeare purposely represents Bertram as a very mixed character, in whom the evil gains for some time a most unhopeful mastery; and he takes care to provide, withal, the canon whereby he would have him judged: "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipp'd them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues." A pregnant and subtile reflection indeed, which may sound strange to many; but the truth and wisdom of it are well approved by the grave and saintly Hooker, who was "not afraid to affirm it boldly," that proud men sometimes "receive a benefit at the hands of God, and are assisted with His grace, when with His grace they are not assisted, but permitted, and that grievously, to transgress; whereby, as they were in overgreat liking of themselves supplanted, so the dislike of that which did supplant them may establish them afterwards the surer."

* * * * *

Captain Parolles is verily Shakespeare's most illustrious _pronoun_ of a man. Several critics have somehow found it in their hearts to speak of him and Falstaff together. A foul sin against Sir John! who, whatever else he may deserve, certainly does not deserve that. Schlegel, however, justly remarks that the scenes where our captain figures contain matter enough for an excellent comedy. It is indeed a marvel that one so inexpressibly mean, and withal so fully aware of his meanness, should not cut his own acquaintance. But the greatest wonder about him is, how the Poet could so run his own intellectuality into such a windbag, without marring his windbag perfection. The character of Parolles is interpreted with unusual fulness in the piercing comments of the other persons. He seems indeed to have been specially "created for men to breathe themselves upon." Thus one describes him as "a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality"; and again, as having "outvillained villainy so far, that the rarity redeems him." And he is at last felt to be worth feeding and keeping alive for the simple reason of his being such a miracle of bespangled, voluble, impudent good-for-nothingness, that contempt and laughter cannot afford to let him die. But the roundest and happiest delivery of him comes from the somewhat waggish but high-spirited and sharpsighted Lord Lafeu, who finds him "my good window of lattice," and one whose "soul is in his clothes"; and who says to him, "I did think thee, for two ordinaries, to be a pretty wise fellow; thou didst make tolerable vent of thy travel; it might pass: yet the scarfs and the bannerets about thee did manifoldly dissuade me from believing thee a vessel of too great a burden." The play is choicely seasoned throughout with the good-humoured old statesman's spicery; and our captain is the theme that draws most of it out.

That the goddess whom Bertram worships does not whisper in his ear the unfathomable baseness of this "lump of counterfeit ore," is a piece of dramatic retribution at once natural and just. Far as the joke is pushed upon Parolles, we never feel like crying out, _Hold, enough_! for, "that he should know what he is, and be that he is," seems an offence for which infinite shames were hardly a sufficient indemnification. And we know right well that such a hollow, flaunting, strutting roll of effrontery and poltroonery cannot possibly have soul enough to be inwardly hurt by the utmost pressure of disgrace and scorn. And yet, strange as it may seem, Parolles represents a class of actual men; how truly, is well shown in that the delineation, in its main features, but especially as of "one that lies three thirds, and uses a known truth to pass a thousand nothings with," might almost be mistaken for a portrait of a very noted character of our time,--a man too--which is strangest of all--whose success with the voters has even beaten that of his dramatic prototype with Bertram.

* * * * *

Verplanck thinks, as he well may, that the Poet's special purpose in this play was to set forth the precedence of innate over circumstantial distinctions. Gervinus also takes the same view: "The idea that merit goes before rank is the soul of this piece and of the relation between Bertram and Helena." And this high moral centre is not only pronounced strongly in verbal discourse, but, which is still better, is silently placed in the characters themselves and in the facts of the play. Yet observe with what a catholic spirit the Poet teaches this great lesson; frankly recognizing the noble man in the nobleman, and telling us, in effect, that none know so well how to prize the nobilities of nature as those who, like the King and the Countess of this play, have experienced the nothingness of all other claims. To be sure, their generous superiority to adventitious distinctions is partly because of a certain regenerative efficacy flowing from the heroine: pride of birth is sweetly rebuked in her presence; a subtile inspiration from her seems to steal away whatever prejudice of rank they may have, and to cheat them into full sympathy with truth and virtue; and, with the exception of Bertram and the bescarfed coxcomb that spaniels him, all from the King downwards are won to the free worship of untitled merit directly they begin to converse with this meek and modest incarnation of Nature's eloquence.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

Measure for Measure, in its vein of thought and complexion of character, is the deepest of Shakespeare's comedies,--deeper even than some of his tragedies. The foundation principles of ethics are here explored far as the plummet of thought can sound; the subtleties and intricacies of the human heart are searched with an insight which the sharpest and most inquisitive criticism may strive in vain to follow. The mind almost loses itself in attempting to trace out through their course the various and complicated lines of reflection here suggested.

* * * * *

We have no authentic contemporary notice of the play whatever, till it appeared in the folio of 1623. I say _authentic_ notice; because the item which, some years ago, Mr. Peter Cunningham claimed to have found among some old records preserved at Somerset House, and which makes the play to have been acted at Court in December, 1604, has been lately set aside as a fabrication. Though printed much better than _All's Well that Ends Well_, still the text set forth in the folio gives us but too much cause to regret the lack of earlier copies; there being several passages that are, to all appearance, incurably defective or corrupt.

The strongly-marked peculiarities of the piece in language, cast of thought, and moral temper, have invested it with great psychological interest, and bred a strange desire among critics to connect it in some way with the author's mental history,--with some supposed crisis in his feelings and experience. Hence the probable date of the writing was for a long time argued more strenuously than the subject would otherwise seem to justify; and, as often falls out in such cases, the more the critics argued the point, the further they were from coming to an agreement. And, in truth, the plain matter-of-fact critics have here succeeded much better in the work than their more philosophical brethren; which aptly shows how little the brightest speculation can do in questions properly falling within the domain of facts.

In default of other data, the critics in question based their arguments upon certain probable allusions to contemporary matters; especially on those passages which express the Duke's fondness for "the life remov'd," and his aversion to being greeted by crowds of people. Chalmers brought forward also the very pertinent fact of a long-sleeping statute having been revived in 1604, which punished with death all divorced or divorcing persons who married again while their former husbands or wives were living. This circumstance, he thinks, might well have suggested what is said by the Duke:

"We have strict statutes and most biting laws,-- The needful bits and curbs to headstrong steeds,-- Which for this fourteen years we have let sleep; Even like an o'ergrown lion in a cave, That goes not out to prey."

Chalmers had the sagacity to discover also a sort of portrait-like resemblance in the Duke to King James the First. As the King was indeed a much better theologian than statesman or ruler, the fact of the Duke's appearing rather more at home in the cowl and hood than in his ducal robes certainly lends some colour to this discovery.

The King's unamiable repugnance to being gazed upon by throngs of admiring subjects is thus spoken of by a contemporary writer: "In his public appearance, especially in his sports, the accesses of the people made him so impatient, that he often dispersed them with frowns, that we may not say, with curses." And his churlish bearing towards the crowds which, prompted by eager loyalty, flocked forth to hail his accession, is noted by several historians. But he was a pretty free encourager of the Drama, as well as of other liberal preparations; and, with those who had tasted, or who sought, his patronage, it was natural that these symptoms of weakness should pass for tokens of a wise superiority to the dainties of popular applause. All which renders it not unlikely that the Poet may have had an eye to the King in the passages cited by Malone in support of his conjecture:

"I love the people, But do not like to stage me to their eyes: Though it do well, I do not relish well Their loud applause and aves vehement; Nor do I think the man of safe discretion That does affect it."

"So play the foolish throngs with one that swoons; Come all to help him, and so stop the air By which he should revive: and even so The general, subject to a well-wish'd king, Quit their own part, and in obsequious fondness Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love Must needs appear offence."

The allusion here being granted, Malone's inference, that the play was made soon after the King's accession, and before the effect of his unlooked-for austerity on this score had spent itself, was natural enough. Nor is the conjecture of Ulrici and others without weight, "that Shakespeare was led to the composition of the play by the rigoristic sentiments and arrogant virtue of the Puritans." And in this view several points of the main action might have been aptly suggested at the time in question: for the King had scarcely set foot in England but he began to be worried by the importunities of that remarkable people; who had been feeding upon the hope, that by the sole exercise of his prerogative he would work through a radical change in the constitution of the Church, and so bring her into accordance with their ideas:--all this on the principle, of course, that a minority however small, with the truth, was better than a majority however large, without it.

The accession of King James to the English throne was in March, 1603. So that the forecited arguments would conclude the writing of the play to have been nearly synchronous with the revisal of _All's Well that Ends Well_, and with the production of _King Lear_, perhaps also of _Macbeth_; at least, within the same period of four or five years. The characteristics of style and temper draw to the same conclusion as regards the date of the writing.

* * * * *

There is no doubt that for some particulars in the plot and story of _Measure for Measure_ the Poet was ultimately indebted to Cinthio, an Italian novelist of the sixteenth century. The original story makes the eighty-fifth in his _Hundred Tales_. A youth named Ludovico is there overtaken in the crime of seduction: Juriste, a magistrate highly reputed for wisdom and justice, passes sentence of death upon him; and Ludovico's sister, a virgin of rare gifts and graces, goes to pleading for his life. Her beauty and eloquence have the same effect on Juriste as Isabella's on Angelo. His proposals are rejected with scorn and horror; but the lady, overcome by the pathetic entreaties of her brother, at last yields to them under a solemn promise of marriage. His object being gained, the wicked man then commits a double vow-breach, neither marrying the sister nor sparing the brother. She appeals to the Emperor, by whom Juriste is forced to marry her, and then sentenced to death; but is finally pardoned at the lady's suit, who is now as earnest and eloquent for her husband as she had been for her brother. Her conduct touches him with remorse, and at length proves as effective in reforming his character as it was in redeeming his life.

As early as 1578, this tale was dramatized after a sort by George Whetstone, and was published as _The History of Promos and Cassandra_. Whetstone was a writer of learning and talent, but not such that even the instructions of a Shakespeare could have made him capable of dramatic excellence; and, as he had no such benefit, his performance is insipid and worthless enough. The drama is in Two Parts, and is written in verse, with alternate rhymes. In his conduct of the story Whetstone varies somewhat from the original; as the following abstract will show:

In the city of Julio, then under the rule of Corvinus, King of Hungary, there was a law that for incontinence the man should suffer death, and the woman be marked out for infamy by her dress. Through the indulgence of magistrates, this law came to be little regarded. The government falling at length into the hands of Lord Promos, he revived the statute, and, a youth named Andrugio being convicted of the fault in question, resolved to visit the penalties in their utmost rigour upon both the parties. Andrugio had a sister of great virtue and accomplishment, named Cassandra, who undertook to sue for his life. Her good behaviour, great beauty, and "the sweet order of her talk" wrought so far with the governor as to induce a short reprieve. Being inflamed soon after with a criminal passion, he set down the spoil of her honour as the ransom. She spurned his suit with abhorrence. Unable, however, to resist the pleadings of her brother, she at last yielded to the man's proposal, on condition of his pardoning her brother and then marrying her. This he vowed to do; but, his end once gained, instead of keeping his vow, he ordered the jailer to present Cassandra with her brother's head. As the jailer knew what the governor had done, he took the head of a felon just executed, and set Andrugio at liberty. Cassandra, supposing the head to be her brother's, was at the point to kill herself for grief, but spared that stroke, to be avenged on the traitor. She devised to make her case known to the King; who forthwith hastened to do justice on Promos, ordering that, to repair the lady's honour, he should marry her, and then, for his crime against the State, lose his head. No sooner was Cassandra a wife than all her rhetoric of eye, tongue, and action was tasked to procure the pardon of her husband; but the King, tendering the public good more than hers, denied her suit. At length, Andrugio, overcome by his sister's grief, made himself known; for he had all the while been about the place in disguise; whereupon the King, to honour the virtues of Cassandra, pardoned both him and Promos.

In 1592, Whetstone published his _Heptameron of Civil Discourses_, containing a prose version of the same tale. It is observable that he deviates from Cinthio in bringing Andrugio off alive; and as Shakespeare does the same with Claudio, we may well conclude that he drew directly from Whetstone, not from the original author. Beyond the mere outline of the story, it does not appear that the Poet borrowed any thing more than a few slight hints and casual expressions. And a comparison of the two pieces would nowise reduce his claims; it being not less creditable to have lifted the story out of the mire into such a region of art and poetry than to have invented it. Then too, even as regards the story, Shakespeare varies from Whetstone much more materially than the latter does from Cinthio: representing the illicit meeting of Claudio and Juliet as taking place under the shield of a solemn betrothment; which very much lessens their fault, as marriage bonds were already upon them; and proportionably heightens Angelo's wickedness, as it brings on him the guilt of making the law responsible for his own arbitrary rigour. But the main _original_ feature in the plot of _Measure for Measure_ is the part of Mariana, which puts a new life into the whole, and purifies it almost into another nature; as it prevents the soiling of Isabella's womanhood, supplies an apt reason for the Duke's mysterious conduct, and yields a pregnant motive for Angelo's pardon, in that his life is thereby bound up with that of a wronged and innocent woman, whom his crimes are made the occasion of restoring to her rights and happiness; so that her virtue may be justly allowed to reprieve him from death.

In the comic parts of Whetstone's drama there is all the grossness of _Measure for Measure_, without any thing that the utmost courtesy of language can call wit or humour. So that, if the Poet here received no help, neither can he have any excuse, from the workmanship of his predecessor. But he probably saw that some such matter was required by the scheme of the play and the laws of dramatic proportion. And as in these parts the truth and character are all his own, so he can hardly be blamed for not anticipating the delicacy or squeamishness of later times, there being none such in the most refined audiences of his day; while, again, his choice of a subject so ugly in itself is amply screened from censure by the lessons of virtue and wisdom which he used it as an opportunity for delivering. To have trained and taught a barbarous tale of cruelty and lust into such a fruitage of poetry and humanity, may well offset whatever of offence there may be in the play to modern taste.

* * * * *

I have already referred to certain characteristics of style and temper which this play shares with several others probably written about the same time, and which, as before observed, have been thought to mark some crisis in the Poet's life. It cannot well be denied that the plays in question have something of a peculiar spirit, which might aptly suggest that some passage of bitter experience must have turned the milk of his genius for a time into gall, and put him upon a course of harsh and indignant thought. The point is well stated by Hallam: "There seems to have been a period of Shakespeare's life when his heart was ill at ease, and ill content with the world or his own conscience: the memory of hours misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited, the experience of man's worser nature, which intercourse with ill-chosen associates peculiarly teaches,--these, as they sank down into the depths of his great mind, seem not only to have inspired into it the conception of Lear and Timon, but that of one primary character, the censurer of mankind."[21] And Verplanck speaks in a similar strain of "that portion of the author's life which was memorable for the production of the additions to the original _Hamlet_, with their melancholy wisdom; probably of _Timon_, with its indignant and hearty scorn, and rebukes of the baseness of civilized society; and above all of _Lear_, with its dark pictures of unmixed, unmitigated guilt, and its terrible and prophet-like denunciations."

[21] "This type," continues the writer, "is first seen in the philosophic melancholy of Jaques, gazing with an undiminished serenity, and with a gayety of fancy, though not of manners, on the follies of the world. It assumes a graver cast in the exiled Duke of the same play, and one rather more severe in the Duke of _Measure for Measure_. In all these, however, it is merely a contemplative philosophy. In Hamlet this is mingled with the impulses of a perturbed heart under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances: it shines no longer, as in the former characters, with a steady light, but plays in fitful coruscations amid feigned gayety and extravagance. In Lear, it is the flash of sudden inspiration across the incongruous imagery of madness; in Timon, it is obscured by the exaggerations of misanthropy."

These words certainly carry much weight, and may go far to warrant the belief of the writers, that the Poet was smitten with some rude shock of fortune which untuned the melody of his soul, and wrenched his mind from its once smooth and happy course, causing it to recoil upon itself and brood over its own thoughts. Yet there are considerable difficulties besetting a theory of this kind. For, in some other plays referred by these critics to the same period, there is so much of the Poet's gayest and happiest workmanship as must greatly embarrass if not quite upset such a theory. But, whatever may have caused the peculiar tone and the cast of thought in the forenamed plays, it is pretty certain that the darkness was not permanent; the clear azure, soft sunshine, and serene sweetness of _The Tempest_ and _The Winter's Tale_ being unquestionably of a later date. And, surely, in the life of so earnest and thoughtful a man as Shakespeare, there might well be, nay, there must have been, times when, without any special woundings or bruisings of fortune, his mind got fascinated by the appalling mystery of evil that haunts our fallen nature.

That such darker hours, however occasioned, were more frequent at one period of the Poet's life than at others, is indeed probable. And it was equally natural that their coming should sometimes engage him in heart-tugging and brain-sweating efforts to scrutinize the inscrutable workings of human guilt, and thus stamp itself strongly upon the offspring of his mind. Thus, without any other than the ordinary progress of thoughtful spirits, we should naturally have a middle period, when the early enthusiasm of hope had passed away, and before the deeper, calmer, but not less cheerful tranquillity of resignation had set in. For so it is apt to be in this life of ours: the angry barkings of fortune, or what seem such, have their turn with us; "the fretful fever and the stir unprofitable" work our souls full of discord and perturbation; but after a while these things pass away, and are followed by a more placid and genial time; the experienced insufficiency of man for himself having charmed our wrestlings of thought into repose, and our spirits having undergone the chastening and subduing power of life's sterner discipline.

In some such passage, then, I should rather presume the unique conception of _Measure for Measure_ to have been formed in the Poet's mind. I say unique, because this is his only instance of comedy where the wit seems to foam and sparkle up from a fountain of bitterness; where even the humour is made pungent with sarcasm; and where the poetry is marked with tragic austerity. In none of his plays does he discover less of leaning upon pre-existing models, or a more manly negligence, perhaps sometimes carried to excess, of those lighter graces of manner which none but the greatest minds may safely despise. His genius is here out in all its colossal individuality, and he seems to have meant it should be so; as if he felt quite sure of having now reached his mastership; so that henceforth, instead of leaning on those who had gone before, he was to be himself a leaning-place for those who should follow.

Accordingly the play abounds in fearless grapplings and strugglings of mind with matters too hard to consist with much facility and gracefulness of tongue. The thought is strong, and in its strength careless of appearances, and seems rather wishing than fearing to have its roughnesses seen: the style is rugged, irregular, abrupt, sometimes running into an almost forbidding sternness, but everywhere throbbing with life: often a whole page of meaning is condensed and rammed into a clause or an image, so that the force thereof beats and reverberates through the entire scene: with little of elaborate grace or finish, we have bold, deep strokes, where the want of finer softenings and shadings is more than made up by increased energy and expressiveness; the words going right to the spot, and leaving none of their work undone. Thus the workmanship is in a very uncommon degree what I sometimes designate as _steep_, meaning thereby _hard to get to the top of_. Hence it is perhaps, in part, that so many axioms and "brief sententious precepts" of moral and practical wisdom from this play have wrought themselves into the currency and familiarity of household words, and live for instruction or comfort in the memory of many who know nothing of their original source. As a strong instance in point, take Isabella's meaty apothegm,--

"Man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority,-- Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd,-- Plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven As make the angels weep; who, _with our spleens, Would all themselves laugh mortal_."

Which means that, if the angels had our disposition to splenetic or satirical mirth, the sight of our human arrogance strutting through its absurd antics would cast them into such an ecstasy of ridicule, that they would laugh themselves clean out of their immortality; this celestial prerogative being quite incompatible with such ebullitions of spleen.

* * * * *

Whether from the nature of the subject, or the mode of treating it, or both, _Measure for Measure_ is generally regarded as one of the least attractive, though most instructive, of Shakespeare's plays. Coleridge, in those fragments of his critical lectures which now form our best text-book of English criticism, says, "This play, which is Shakespeare's throughout, is to me the most painful--rather say the only painful--part of his genuine works." From this language, sustained as it is by other high authorities, I probably should not dissent; but when, in his _Table Talk_, he says that "Isabella herself contrives to be unamiable, and Claudio is detestable," I can by no means go along with him.

It would seem indeed as if undue fault had sometimes been found, not so much with the play itself as with some of the persons, from trying them by a moral standard which cannot be fairly applied to them, or from not duly weighing all the circumstances, feelings, and motives under which they are represented as acting. Thus Ulrici speaks of Claudio as being guilty of seduction. Which is surely wide of the mark; it being clear enough that, according to the usages then and there established, he was, as he considered himself to be, virtually married, though not admissible to all the rights of the married life. Hence we have the Duke assuring Mariana that there would be no crime in her meeting with Angelo, because he was her "husband on a pre-contract." And it is well known that in ancient times the ceremony of betrothment conferred the marriage tie, though not the nuptials, so that the union of the parties was thenceforth firm in the eye of the law itself. So again Hallam, speaking of Isabella: "One is disposed to ask whether, if Claudio had been really executed, the spectator would not have gone away with no great affection for her; and at least we now feel that her reproaches against her miserable brother, when he clings to life like a frail and guilty being, are too harsh." As to the first branch of this indictment, I might have ventured to ask the writer how his affection would have stood towards the heroine, if she had yielded to Angelo's proposal. As to the second branch, though I do indeed feel that Claudio were rather to be pitied than blamed, whatever course he had taken in so terrible an alternative, yet the conduct of his sister strikes me as every way creditable to her. Her reproaches were indeed too harsh, if they sprang from want of love; but such is evidently not the case. The truth is, she is in a very hard struggle between affection and principle: she needs, and she hopes, to have the strain upon her womanly fortitude lightened by the manly fortitude of her brother; and her harshness of reproof discovers the natural workings of a tender and deep affection, in an agony of disappointment at being urged, by one for whom she would die, to an act which she shrinks from with noble horror, and justly considers worse than death. So that we here have the keen anguish of conflicting feelings venting itself in a severity which, though unmerited, serves to disclose the more impressively her nobleness of character.

* * * * *

Again, the same critic, referring to the part of Mariana as indispensable to "a satisfactory termination" of the story, objects, that "it is never explained how the Duke had become acquainted with this secret, and, being acquainted with it, how he had preserved his esteem and confidence in Angelo." But, surely, we are given to understand at the outset that the Duke has not preserved the esteem and confidence in question. In his first scene with Friar Thomas, among his reasons for the action he has on foot, he makes special mention of this one:

"Lord Angelo is precise; _Stands at a guard with envy_; scarce confesses That his blood flows, or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone: _hence shall we see, If power change purpose, what our_ SEEMERS _be_."

Which clearly infers that his main purpose in assuming the disguise of a monk is to unmask the deputy, and demonstrate to others what has long been known to himself. And he throws out other hints of a belief or suspicion that Angelo is angling for emolument or popularity, and baiting his hook with great apparent strictness and sanctity of life; thus putting on sheep's clothing, in order to play the wolf with more safety and success. As to the secret concerning Mariana, it seems enough that the Duke knows it, that the knowledge justifies his distrust, and that when the time comes he uses it for a good purpose; the earlier part of the play thus preparing quietly for what is to follow, and the later explaining what went before. In truth, the Duke is better able to understand the deputy's character than to persuade others of it: this is one of his motives for the stratagem. And a man of his wisdom, even if he have no available facts in the case, might well suspect an austerity so theatrical as Angelo's to be rather an art than a virtue: he could not well be ignorant that, when men are so forward to air their graces and _make_ their light shine, they can hardly be aiming at any glory but their own.

It is to be supposed, withal, that Angelo has been wont to set himself up as an example of ghostly rectitude, and to reflect somewhat on the laxity of the Duke's administration. These reproofs the Duke cannot answer without laying himself open to the retort of being touched with jealousy. Then too Angelo is nervously apprehensive of reproach; is ever on the watch, and "making broad his phylacteries," lest malice should spy some holes in his conduct; for such is the meaning of "standing at a guard with envy": whereas "virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful" in that kind. The Duke knows that such an ostentatious strictness, however it may take with the multitude, is among the proper symptoms of a bad conscience; that such high professions of righteousness are seldom used but as a mask to cover some secret delinquencies from the public eye. Angelo had entered into a solemn engagement of marriage, his motive being the lady's wealth; her wealth being lost, so that she could no longer hold him through his secret sin of covetousness, he had cruelly deserted her; this great wrong he had still more cruelly made use of to purchase a brighter semblance of virtue, blasting her good name with alleged discoveries of crime, and thus fattening his own reputation with the life-blood of his innocent and helpless victim. Here was an act of extreme heartlessness and turpitude, too bad to be believed of one so ensconced in solemn plausibilities. The matter had come privately to the Duke's knowledge; but his tongue was tied by the official delicacies of his position.

A certain class of offences had caused a law to be passed of such overstrained severity that it broke down in the trial; so it fell into disuse, and became a dead letter,--a perch to birds of prey, and not their terror. From its extreme rigour, this law was extremely odious; and, as is always the case with laws so hated, the attempt to enforce it drew on a commensurate reaction of licentiousness; the law thus stimulating the evil it was meant to repress,--a mistaken plaster inflaming the sore. Angelo had been secretly guilty of a far worse sin than the one this law was aimed against, but had managed to fence himself about with practical impunity; nay, his crafty, sanctimonious selfishness had even turned that sin to an increase of honour, and so made it a basis of pride. As the slumbering law does not touch his case, he is earnest to have it revived and put to work: so the Duke, being somewhat divided between the pleadings of justice and mercy, concludes to let him try his hand. In the discharge of his new office, which he conceives his great moral strictness to have gained for him, Angelo thinks to build his reputation still higher by striking at a conspicuous object. In the prosecution of his scheme, he soon goes to attempting a vastly deeper breach of the very law he is enforcing than that of the man whom he has found obnoxious to its penalties. Claudio's offence was done when the law was sleeping. Angelo has just awakened it, yet he proceeds against Claudio as if the latter had transgressed while the law was vigilant. Angelo's transgression has no such excuse, since he has himself already given new life and force to the law. Nevertheless he persists in his design, and hardens himself to the point of resolving to "give his sensual race the rein." The hitherto unsuspected evil within he is now fully aware of, but looks it squarely in the face, and rushes headlong into the double crime of committing in its worst form the sin and at the same time punishing the lighter form of it with death in another. Thus it turns out that

"This outward-sainted deputy-- Whose settled visage and deliberate word Nips youth i' the head, and follies doth emmew As falcon doth the fowl--is yet a devil; His filth within being cast, he would appear A pond as deep as Hell."

Yet Angelo is at first not so properly a hypocrite as a self-deceiver. For it is very considerable that he wishes to be and sincerely thinks he is, what he affects and appears to be; as is plain from his consternation at the wickedness which opportunity awakens into conscious action within him. He thus typifies that sort of men of whom Bishop Butler says, "they try appearances upon themselves as well as upon the world, and with at least as much success; and choose to manage so as to make their own minds easy with their faults, which can scarce be done without management, rather than to mend them." Even so Angelo for self-ends imitates sanctity, and then gets taken in by his own imitation. This "mystery of iniquity" locks him from all true knowledge of himself. He must be worse before he will be better. The refined hypocrisies which so elude his eye, and thus nurse his self-righteous pride, must put on a grosser form, till he cannot choose but see himself as he is. The secret devil within must blaze out in a shape too palpable to be ignored. And so, as often happens where the subtleties of self-deceit are thus cherished, he at length proceeds a downright conscious hypocrite, this too of the deepest dye.

Angelo's original fault lay in forgetting or ignoring his own frailty. As a natural consequence, his "darling sin is pride that apes humility." And his conceit of virtue,--"my gravity, wherein (let no man hear me) I take pride,"--while it keeps him from certain vices, is itself a far greater vice than any it keeps him from; insomuch that his interviews with Isabella may almost be said to _elevate_ him into lust. They at least bring him to a just vision of his inward self. The serpent charms of self-deceit which he has so hugged are now broken. For even so--and how awful is the fact!--men often wound themselves so deeply with medicines, that Providence has no way for them, apparently, but to make wounds medicinal, or, as Hooker says, "to cure by vice where virtue hath stricken." So indeed it must be where men turn their virtues into food of spiritual pride; which is the hardest of all sores to be cured, "inasmuch as that which rooteth out other vices causeth this." And perhaps the array of low and loathsome vices, which the Poet has clustered about Angelo in the persons of Lucio, Pompey, and Mrs. Overdone, was necessary, to make us feel how unspeakably worse than any or all of these is Angelo's pride of virtue. It can hardly be needful to add, that in Angelo these fearful traits of character are depicted with a truth and sternness of pencil, such as could scarce have been achieved but in an age fruitful in living examples of them.

* * * * *

The placing of Isabella, "a thing ensky'd and sainted," and who truly _is_ all that Angelo seems, side by side with such a breathing, shining mass of pitch, is one of those dramatic audacities wherein none perhaps but a Shakespeare could safely indulge. Of her character the most prolific hint that is given is what she says to the disguised Duke, when he is urging her to fasten her ear on his advisings touching the part of Mariana: "I have spirit to do any thing that appears not foul in the truth of my spirit." That is, she cares not what face her action may wear to the world, nor how much reproach it may bring on her from others, if it will only leave her the society, which she has never parted from, of a clean breast and a pure conscience.

Called from the cloister, where she is on the point of taking the veil of earthly renouncement, to plead for her brother's life, she comes forth a saintly anchoress, clad in the austerest sweetness of womanhood, to throw the light of her virgin soul upon the dark, loathsome scenes and characters around her. With great strength of intellect and depth of feeling she unites an equal power of imagination, the whole being pervaded, quickened, and guided by a still, intense religious enthusiasm. And because her virtue is securely rooted and grounded in religion, therefore she never thinks of it as her own, but only as a gift from the Being whom she adores, and who is her only hope for the keeping of what she has. Which suggests the fundamental point of contrast between her and Angelo, whose virtue, if such it may be called, is nothing, nay, worse than nothing, because it is a virtue of his own making, is without any inspiration from the one Source of all true good, and so has no basis but pride, which is itself a bubble. Accordingly her character appears to me among the finest, in some respects the very finest, in Shakespeare's matchless cabinet of female excellence.

The power and pathos with which she pleads for her brother are well known. At first she is timid, distrustful of her powers, shrinking with modest awe of the law's appointed organ; and she seems drawn unawares into the heights of moral argument and the most sweetly-breathing strains of Gospel wisdom. Much of what she says has become domesticated wherever the English language is spoken, and would long since have grown stale, if it were possible to crush the freshness of immortal youth out of it. The dialogues between her and Angelo are extremely subtile and suggestive on both sides, fraught with meanings to reward the most searching ethical study, but which I cannot stay to trace out, and which the closest criticism would fail to exhaust. At the opening of their interview, she is in a struggle between wishing and not wishing, and therefore not in a mood to "play with reason and discourse." With her settled awe of purity, she cannot but admit the law to be right, yet she sees not how, in the circumstances, mercy can be wrong. At this thought her heart presently kindles, her eloquence springs to work, and its tones grow deeper, clearer, more penetrating, as point after point catches her mental eye. Thenceforth it is a keen encounter of mind with mind; but on his side it is the conscious logic of an adroit and practised lawyer, who has full mastery of his case, and is prompt in all the turns of legal ingenuity; while on her side it is the logic of nature's finest moral instincts spontaneously using the forces of a quick, powerful, and well-balanced intellect as their organ of expression. She perceives at once how subtile and acute of apprehension he is; so, lest her speech should have too much edge, she veils the matter in figures of a somewhat enigmatical cast, because she knows that he will instantly take the sense. Her instinctive knowledge of the human heart guides her directly to his secret springs of action. With a tact that seems like inspiration, she feels out his assailable points, and still surprises and holds him with new and startling appeals to his innermost feelings. At length, when, his wicked purpose being formed, he goes to talking to her in riddles, she quickly understands him, but thinks he is only testing her: her replies leave him in doubt whether craft or innocence speaks in her: so she draws him on to speaking plainer and plainer, till at last he makes a full and explicit avowal of his inhuman baseness. He is especially caught, be it observed, "in the strong toil" of her moral grace; at least he is pleased to think so: and as he has been wont to pride himself on being a saint, so he now takes refuge in the thought, "O cunning enemy, that to catch a saint, with saints dost bait thy hook!"

It is not to be denied, indeed, that Isabella's chastity is rather too demonstrative and self-pronounced; but this is because of the unblushing and emphatic licentiousness of her social environment. Goodness cannot remain undemonstrative amidst such a rank demonstrativeness of its opposite: the necessity it is under of fighting against so much and such aggressive evil forces it into stress, and so into taking a full measure of itself. Isabella, accordingly, is deeply conscious and mindful of her virtue, which somewhat mars the beauty of it, I admit; but in the circumstances it could not be otherwise: with such a strong stew of corruption boiling and bubbling all about her, it was not possible that purity in her case should retain that bland, unconscious repose which is indeed its greatest charm. From the prevailing rampancy of vice, a certain air of over-sternness and rigidity has wrought itself into her character, displacing somewhat of its proper sweetness and amiability: but, in the right view of things, this loss is well made up in that she is the more an object of reverence; albeit I have to confess that she would touch me rather more potently, if she had a little more of loveliness and a little less of awfulness. And it is remarkable that even Lucio, light-minded libertine as he is, whose familiar sin it is to jest with maids, "tongue far from heart," cannot approach her, but that his levity is at once awed into soberness, and he regards her as one "to be talk'd with in sincerity, as with a saint."

* * * * *

The Duke has been rather hardly dealt with by critics. Shakespeare--than whom it would not be easy to find a better judge of what belongs to wisdom and goodness--seems to have meant him for a wise and good man: yet he represents him as having rather more skill and pleasure in strategical arts and roundabout ways than is altogether in keeping with such a character. Some of his alleged reasons for the action he goes about reflect no honour on him; but it is observable that the sequel does not approve them to have been his real ones: his conduct, as the action proceeds, infers better motives than his speech offered at the beginning; which naturally suggests that there may have been more of purpose than of truth in his speaking. His first dialogue with Angelo is, no doubt, partly ironical. A liberal, thoughtful, and merciful prince, but with more of whim and caprice than exactly suits the dignity of his place, humanity speaks richly from his lips; yet in his actions the philosopher and the divine are better shown than the statesman and ruler. Therewithal he seems to take a very questionable delight in moving about as an unseen providence, by secret counsels leading the wicked designs of others to safe and just results. It is indeed true, as Heraud observes regarding him, that so "Divine Providence, while it deputes its authority to the office-bearers of the world, is still present both with them and it, and ever ready to punish the evil-doer": still I doubt of its being just the thing for the world's office-bearers to undertake the functions of Providence in that particular. Probably the Duke should not be charged with a fanaticism of intrigue; but he comes something nearer to it than befits a mind of the first order. Schlegel thinks "he has more pleasure in overhearing his subjects than in governing them in the usual way of princes"; and sets him down as an exception to the proverb, "A cowl does not make a monk": and perhaps his princely virtues are somewhat obscured by the disguise which so completely transforms him into a monk. Whether he acts upon the wicked principle with which that fraternity is so often reproached, or not, it is pretty certain that some of his means can be justified by nothing but the end. But perhaps, in the vast complexity of human motives and affairs, a due exercise of fairness and candour will find cause enough for ascribing to him the merit of honestly pursuing the good and true according to the best lights he has. Hereabouts Schlegel makes the following just remark: "Shakespeare, amidst the rancour of religious parties, delights in painting monks, and always represents their influence as beneficial; there being in his plays none of the black and knavish specimens which an enthusiasm for Protestantism, rather than poetical inspiration, has put some modern poets upon delineating. He merely gives his monks an inclination to be busy in the affairs of others, after renouncing the world for themselves; though in respect of pious frauds he does not make them very scrupulous."

As to the Duke's pardoning of Angelo, though Justice seems to cry out against the act, yet in the premises it were still more unjust in him to do otherwise; the deception he has practised on Angelo in substituting Mariana having plainly bound him to the course he finally takes in that matter. For the same power whereby he works through this deception might easily have prevented Angelo's crime; and to punish the offence after thus withholding the means of prevention were clearly wrong: not to mention how his proceedings here involve an innocent person; so that he ought to spare Angelo for her sake, if not for his own. Coleridge indeed strongly reprehends this act, on the ground that "cruelty, with lust and damnable baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive them as being morally repented of." But it seems to me hardly prudent, or becoming thus to set bounds to the grace of repentance, or to say what amount of sin must necessarily render a man incapable of being reformed. All which may in some measure explain the Duke's severity to the smaller crime of Lucio, after his clemency to the greater one of Angelo.

I must not leave the gentle Duke without remarking how, especially in the earlier portions of the play, his tongue drops the very manna of moral and meditative wisdom. His discourse in reconciling Claudio to the quick approach of death condenses the marrow of all that philosophy and divinity can urge, to wean us mortals from the "many deceiving promises of life."

* * * * *

Lucio is one of those mixed characters, such as are often generated amidst the refinements and pollutions of urban society, in whom low and disgusting vices, and a frivolity still more offensive, are blended with engaging manners and some manly sentiments. Thus he appears a gentleman and a blackguard by turns; and, which is more, he does really unite something of these seemingly-incompatible qualities. With a true eye and a just respect for virtue in others, yet, so far as we can see, he cares not a jot to have it in himself. And while his wanton, waggish levity seems too much for any generous sentiment to consist with, still he shows a strong and steady friendship for Claudio, and a heart-felt reverence for Isabella; as if on purpose to teach us that "the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together." And perhaps the seeming "snow-broth blood" of Angelo puts him upon affecting a more frisky circulation than he really has. For an overacted austerity is not the right way to win others out of a too rollicking levity.

* * * * *

Dr. Johnson rather oddly remarks that "the comic scenes are natural and pleasing": not that the remark is not true enough, but that it appears something out of character in him. And if these scenes please, it is not so much from any fund of mirthful exhilaration, or any genial gushings of wit and humour, as for the remorseless, unsparing freedom, not unmingled with touches of scorn, with which the deformities of mankind are anatomized. The contrast between the right-hearted, well-meaning Claudio, a generous spirit walled in with overmuch infirmity, and Barnardine, a frightful petrification of humanity, "careless, reckless and fearless of what is past, present, or to come," is in the Poet's boldest manner.

Nevertheless the general current of things is far from musical, and the issues greatly disappointing. The drowsy Justice which we expect and wish to see awakened, and set in living harmony with Mercy, apparently relapses at last into a deeper sleep than ever. Our loyalty to Womanhood is not a little wounded by the humiliations to which poor Mariana stoops, at the ghostly counsels of her spiritual guide, that she may twine her life with that of the execrable hypocrite who has wronged her sex so deeply. That, amid the general impunity, the mere telling of some ridiculous lies to the disguised Duke about himself, should draw down a disproportionate severity upon Lucio, the lively, unprincipled, fantastic jester and wag, who might well be let pass as a privileged character, makes the whole look more as if done in mockery of justice than in honour of mercy. Except, indeed, the noble unfolding of Isabella, scarce any thing turns out to our wish; nor are we much pleased at seeing her diverted from the quiet tasks and holy contemplations where her heart is so much at home; although, as Gervinus observes, "she has that two-sided nature, the capacity to enjoy the world, according to circumstances, or to dispense with it."

The title of this play is apt to give a wrong impression of its scope and purpose. _Measure for Measure_ is itself equivocal; but the subject-matter here fixes it to be taken in the sense, not of the old Jewish proverb, "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," but of the divine precept, "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." Thus the title falls in with one of Portia's appeals to Shylock, "We do pray for mercy, and that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy." The moral centre of the play properly stands in avoidance of extremes,--

"the golden mean and quiet flow Of truths that soften hatred, temper strife."

THE TEMPEST.

The Tempest is on all hands regarded as one of Shakespeare's perfectest works. Some of his plays, I should say, have beams in their eyes; but this has hardly so much as a mote; or, if it have any, my own eyes are not clear enough to discern it. I dare not pronounce the work faultless, for this is too much to affirm of any human workmanship; but I venture to think that whatever faults it may have are such as criticism is hardly competent to specify. In the characters of Ariel, Miranda, and Caliban, we have three of the most unique and original conceptions that ever sprang from the wit of man. We can scarce imagine how the Ideal could be pushed further beyond Nature; yet we here find it clothed with all the truth and life of Nature. And the whole texture of incident and circumstance is framed in keeping with that Ideal; so that all the parts and particulars cohere together, mutually supporting and supported.

The leading sentiment naturally inspired by the scenes of this drama is, I believe, that of delighted wonder. And such, as appears from the heroine's name, Miranda, who is _the_ potency of the drama, is probably the sentiment which the play was meant to inspire. But the grace and efficacy in which the workmanship is steeped are so ethereal and so fine, that they can hardly be discoursed in any but the poetic form: it may well be doubted whether Criticism has any fingers delicate enough to grasp them. So much is this the case, that it seemed to me quite doubtful whether I should do well to undertake the theme at all. For Criticism is necessarily obliged to substitute, more or less, the forms of logic for those of art; and art, it scarce need be said, can do many things that are altogether beyond the reach of logic. On the other hand, the charm and verdure of these scenes are so unwithering and inexhaustible, that I could not quite make up my mind to leave the subject untried. Nor do I know how I can better serve my countrymen than by engaging and helping them in the study of this great inheritance of natural wisdom and unreproved delight. For, assuredly, if they early learn to be at home and to take pleasure in these productions, their whole after-life will be the better and the happier for it.

* * * * *

_The Tempest_ is one of the plays that were never printed till in the folio of 1623; where, for reasons unknown to us, it stands the first in the volume; though, as we shall presently see, it was among the last of the Poet's writing.

It has been ascertained clearly enough that the play was written somewhere between 1608 and 1613. On the one hand, the leading features of Gonzalo's Commonwealth, as described in the play, were evidently taken from Florio's translation of Montaigne. As the passage is curious in itself, and as it aptly illustrates the Poet's method of appropriating from others, I will quote it:

"_Gon_. Had I plantation of this isle, my lord, And were the King on 't, what would I do? I' the Commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things: for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too,--but innocent and pure; No sovereignty;--

_Seb_. Yet he would be King on't.

_Ant_. The latter end of his Commonwealth forgets the beginning.

_Gon_. All things in common Nature should produce Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Would I not have; but Nature should bring forth, Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people."

In Montaigne's Essay _Of the Cannibals_, as translated by Florio, we have the following: "It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic superiority; no use of service, of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no dividences; no occupation, but idle; no respect of kindred, but common; no apparel, but natural; no manuring of lands; no use of wine, corn, or metal: the very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon, were never heard amongst them."

Here the borrowing is too plain to be questioned; and this fixes the writing of _The Tempest_ after 1603. On the other hand, Malone ascertained from some old records that the play was acted by the King's players "before Prince Charles, the Princess Elizabeth, and the Prince Palatine, in the beginning of 1613."

For any nearer fixing of the date we have nothing firm to go upon but probabilities. Some of these, however, are pretty strong. I must rest with noting one of them:

Some hints towards the play were derived, apparently, from a book published by one Jourdan in 1610, and entitled, _A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Isle of Devils_. The occasion was as follows: A fleet of nine ships, with some five hundred people, sailed from England in May, 1609. Among the officers were Sir George Somers, Sir Thomas Gates, and Captain Newport. The fleet was headed by the _Sea-Venture_, called the Admiral's Ship. On the 25th of July they were struck by a terrible tempest, which scattered the whole fleet, and parted the _Sea-Venture_ from the rest. Most of the ships, however, reached Virginia, left the greater part of their people there, and sailed again for England, where Gates arrived in August or September, 1610, having been sent home by Lord Delaware. Jourdan's book, after relating their shipwreck, continues thus: "But our delivery was not more strange in falling so happily upon land, than our provision was admirable. For the Islands of the Bermudas, as every one knoweth that hath heard or read of them, were never inhabited by any Christian or Heathen people, but ever reputed a most prodigious and enchanted place, affording nothing but gusts, storms, and foul weather. Yet did we find the air so temperate, and the country so abundantly fruitful, that, notwithstanding we were there for the space of nine months, we were not only well refreshed, but out of the abundance thereof provided us with some reasonable quantity of provision to carry us for Virginia, and to maintain ourselves and the company we found there." About the same time, the Council of Virginia also put forth a narrative of "the disasters which had befallen the fleet, and of their miraculous escape," wherein we have the following: "These Islands of the Bermudas have ever been accounted an enchanted pile of rocks, and a desert inhabitation of devils; but all the fairies of the rocks were but flocks of birds, and all the devils that haunted the woods were but herds of swine."

In this account and these extracts there are several points which clearly connect with certain things in the play. To mark those points, or to trace out that connection, seems hardly worth the while. It may be well to add that the Poet's _still-vexed Bermoothes_ seems to link his work in some way with Jourdan's narrative. So that 1610 is as early a date as can well be assigned for the writing of _The Tempest_. The supernatural in the play was no doubt the Poet's own creation; but it would have been in accordance with his usual method to avail himself of whatever interest might spring from the popular notions touching the Bermudas. In his marvellous creations the people would see nothing but the distant marvels with which their fancies were prepossessed.

Concurrent with all this is the internal evidence of the play itself. The style, language, and general cast of thought, the union of richness and severity, the grave, austere beauty of character which pervades it, and the organic compactness of the whole structure, all go to mark it as an issue of the Poet's ripest years. Coleridge regarded it as "certainly one of Shakespeare's latest works, judging from the language only." Campbell the poet considers it his very latest. "_The Tempest_," says he, "has a sort of sacredness as the last work of a mighty workman. Shakespeare, as if conscious that it would be his last, and as if inspired to typify himself, has made his hero a natural, a dignified, and benevolent magician, who could conjure up 'spirits from the vasty deep,' and command supernatural agency by the most seemingly-natural and simple means. Shakespeare himself is Prospero, or rather the superior genius who commands both Prospero and Ariel. But the time was approaching when the potent sorcerer was to break his staff, and bury it fathoms in the ocean 'deeper than did ever plummet sound.' That staff has never been and will never be recovered." But I suspect there is more of poetry than of truth in this; at least I can find no warrant for it: on the contrary, we have fair ground for believing that at least _Coriolanus, King Henry the Eighth_, and perhaps _The Winter's Tale_ were written after _The Tempest_. Mr. Verplanck, rather than give up the notion so well put by Campbell, suggests that the Poet may have _revised The Tempest_ after all his other plays were written, and inserted the passage where Prospero abjures his "rough magic," and buries his staff, and drowns his book. But I can hardly think that Shakespeare had any reference to himself in that passage: for, besides that he did not use to put his own feelings and purposes into the mouth of his characters, the doing so in this case would infer such a degree of self-exultation as, it seems to me, his native and habitual modesty would scarce permit.

* * * * *

No play or novel has been discovered to which Shakespeare could have been at all indebted for the plot or matter of _The Tempest_. There is indeed an old ballad called _The Inchanted Island_, which was once thought to have contributed something towards the play: but it is now generally held to be more modern than the play, and probably founded upon it; the names and some of the incidents being varied, as if on purpose to disguise its connection with a work that was popular on the stage.

* * * * *

There has been considerable discussion as to the scene of _The Tempest_. A wide range of critics from Mr. Chalmers to Mrs. Jameson have taken for granted that the Poet fixed his scene in the Bermudas. For this they have alleged no authority but his mention of "the still-vex'd Bermoothes." Ariel's trip from "the deep nook to fetch dew from the still-vex'd Bermoothes" does indeed show that the Bermudas were in the Poet's mind; but then it also shows that his scene was not there; for it had been no feat at all worth mentioning for Ariel to fetch dew from one part of the Bermudas to another. An aerial voyage of some two or three thousand miles was the least that so nimble a messenger could be expected to make any account of. Besides, in less than an hour after the wrecking of the King's ship, the rest of the fleet are said to be upon the Mediterranean, "bound sadly home for Naples." On the other hand, the Rev. Mr. Hunter is very positive that, if we read the play with a map before us, we shall bring up at the island of Lampedusa, which "lies midway between Malta and the African coast." He makes out a pretty fair case, nevertheless I must be excused; not so much that I positively reject his theory as that I simply do not care whether it be true or not. But if we must have any supposal about it, the most reasonable as well as the most poetical one seems to be, that the Poet, writing without a map, placed his scene upon an island of the mind; and that it suited his purpose to transfer to his ideal whereabout some of the wonders of trans-Atlantic discovery. I should almost as soon think of going to history for the characters of Ariel and Caliban, as to geography for the size, locality, or whatsoever else, of their dwelling-place. And it is to be noted that the old ballad just referred to seems to take for granted that the island was but an island of the mind; representing it to have disappeared upon Prospero's leaving it:

"From that day forth the isle has been By wandering sailors never seen: Some say 'tis buried deep Beneath the sea, which breaks and roars Above its savage rocky shores, Nor e'er is known to sleep."

Coleridge says "_The Tempest_ is a specimen of the purely romantic drama." The term _romantic_ is here used in a technical sense; that is, to distinguish the Shakespearian from the Classic Drama. In this sense, I cannot quite agree with the great critic that the drama is _purely_ romantic. Highly romantic it certainly is, in its wide, free, bold variety of character and incident, and in all the qualities that enter into the picturesque; yet not romantic in such sort, I think, but that it is at the same time equally classic; classic, not only in that the unities of time and place are strictly observed, but as having the other qualities which naturally go with those laws of the classic form; in its severe beauty and majestic simplicity, its interfusion of the lyrical and the ethical, and in the mellow atmosphere of serenity and composure which envelopes it: as if on purpose to show the Poet's mastery not only of both the Classic and Romantic Drama, but of the common Nature out of which both of them grew. This union of both kinds in one without hindrance to the distinctive qualities of either,--this it is, I think, that chiefly distinguishes _The Tempest_ from the Poet's other dramas. Some have thought that in this play Shakespeare specially undertook to silence the pedantic cavillers of his time by showing that he could keep to the rules of the Greek stage, if he chose to do so, without being any the less himself. But it seems more likely that he was here drawn into such a course by the leadings of his own wise spirit than by the cavils of contemporary critics; the form appearing too cognate with the matter to have been dictated by any thing external to the work itself.

There are some points that naturally suggest a comparison between _The Tempest_ and _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_. In both the Poet has with equal or nearly equal success carried Nature, as it were, beyond herself, and peopled a purely ideal region with the attributes of life and reality; so that the characters touch us like substantive, personal beings, as if he had but described, not created them. But, beyond this, the resemblance ceases: indeed no two of his plays differ more widely in all other respects.

_The Tempest_ presents a combination of elements apparently so incongruous that we cannot but marvel how they were brought together; yet they blend so sweetly, and co-operate so smoothly, that we at once feel at home with them, and see nothing to hinder their union in the world of which we are a part. For in the mingling of the natural and the supernatural we here find no gap, no break; nothing disjointed or abrupt; the two being drawn into each other so harmoniously, and so knit together by mutual participations, that they seem strictly continuous, with no distinguishable line to mark where they meet and join. It is as if the gulf which apparently separates the two worlds had been abolished, leaving nothing to prevent a free circulation and intercourse between them.

* * * * *

Prospero, standing in the centre of the whole, acts as kind of subordinate Providence, reconciling the diverse elements to himself and in himself to one another. Though armed with supernatural might, so that the winds and waves obey him, his magical and mysterious powers are tied to truth and right: his "high charms work" to none but just and beneficent ends; and whatever might be repulsive in the magician is softened and made attractive by the virtues of the man and the feelings of the father: Ariel links him with the world above us, Caliban with the world beneath us, and Miranda--"thee, my dear one, thee my daughter"--with the world around and within us. And the mind acquiesces freely in the miracles ascribed to him; his thoughts and aims being so at one with Nature's inward harmonies, that we cannot tell whether he shapes her movements or merely falls in with them; that is, whether his art stands in submission or command. His sorcery indeed is the sorcery of knowledge, his magic the magic of virtue. For what so marvellous as the inward, vital necromancy of good which transmutes the wrongs that are done him into motives of beneficence, and is so far from being hurt by the powers of Evil, that it turns their assaults into new sources of strength against them? And with what a smooth tranquillity of spirit he everywhere speaks and acts! as if the discipline of adversity had but served

"to elevate the will, And lead him on to that transcendent rest Where every passion doth the sway attest Of Reason seated on her sovereign hill."

Shakespeare and Bacon, the Prince of poets and the Prince of philosophers, wrought out their mighty works side by side, and nearly at the same time, though without any express recognition of each other. And why may we not regard Prospero as prognosticating in a poetical form those vast triumphs of man's rational spirit which the philosopher foresaw and prepared? For it is observable that, before Prospero's coming to the island, the powers which cleave to his thoughts and obey his "so potent art" were at perpetual war, the better being in subjection to the worse, and all being turned from their rightful ends into a mad, brawling dissonance: but he teaches them to know their places; and, "weak masters though they be," without such guidance, yet under his ordering they become powerful, and work together as if endowed with a rational soul and a social purpose; their insane gabble turning to speech, their savage howling to music; so that

"the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not."

Wherein is boldly figured the educating of Nature up, so to speak, into intelligent ministries, she lending man hands because he lends her eyes, and weaving her forces into vital union with him.

"You by whose aid-- Weak masters though ye be--I have bedimm'd The noontide Sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds, And 'twixt the green sea and the azure vault Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak With his own bolt: the strong-bas'd promontory Have I made shake; and by the spurs pluck'd up The pine and cedar."

In this bold imagery we seem to have a kind of prophecy of what human science and skill have since achieved in taming the great forces of Nature to man's hand, and harnessing them up into his service. Is not all this as if the infernal powers should be appeased and soothed by the melody and sweetness of the Orphean harp and voice? And do we not see how the very elements themselves grow happy and merry in serving man, when he by his wisdom and eloquence has once charmed them into order and concert? Man has but to learn Nature's language and obey her voice, and she clothes him with plenipotence. The mad warring of her forces turns to rational speech and music when he holds the torch of reason before them and makes it shine full in their faces. Let him but set himself steadfastly to understand and observe her laws, and her mighty energies hasten to wait upon him, as docile to his hand as the lion to the eye and voice of Lady Una. So that we may not unfairly apply to Prospero what Bacon so finely interprets of Orpheus, as "a wonderful and divine person skilled in all kinds of harmony, subduing and drawing all things after him by sweet and gentle methods and modulations."

All this, to be sure, is making the work rather an allegory than a drama, and therein of course misrepresents its quality. For the connecting links in this strange intercourse of man and Nature are "beings individually determined," and affect us as persons, not as propositions.

* * * * *

Ariel and Caliban are equally preternatural, though in opposite directions. Ariel's very being is spun out of melody and fragrance; at least, if a feeling soul and an intelligent will are the warp, these are the woof of his exquisite texture. He has just enough of human-heartedness to know how he would feel were he human, and a proportionable sense of gratitude, which has been aptly called "the memory of the heart": hence he needs to be often reminded of his obligations, but is religiously true to them so long as he remembers them. His delicacy of nature is nowhere more apparent than in his sympathy with right and good: the instant he comes within their touch he follows them without reserve; and he will suffer any torments rather than "act the earthy and abhorr'd commands" that go against his moral grain. And what a merry little personage he is withal! as if his being were cast together in an impulse of play, and he would spend his whole life in one perpetual frolic.

But the main ingredients of Ariel's zephyr-like constitution are shown in his leading inclinations; as he naturally has most affinity for that of which he is framed. Moral ties are irksome to him; they are not his proper element: when he enters their sphere, he feels them to be holy indeed; but, were he free, he would keep out of their reach, and follow the circling seasons in their course, and always dwell merrily in the fringes of Summer. Prospero quietly intimates his instinctive dread of the cold by threatening to make him "howl away twelve Winters." And the chief joy of his promised release from service is, that he will then be free to live all the year through under the soft rule of Summer, with its flowers and fragrances and melodies. He is indeed an arrant little epicure of perfume and sweet sounds, and gives forth several songs which "seem to sound in the air, and as if the person playing them were invisible."

A part of Ariel's unique texture is well shown in the scene where he relents at the sufferings of the shipwrecked lords, and remonstrates with his master in their behalf:

"_Ariel_. The King, His brother, and yours, abide all three distracted; And the remainder mourning over them, Brimful of sorrow and dismay; but chiefly He that you term'd _the good old lord, Gonzalo_: His tears run down his beard, like Winter's drops From eaves of reeds: your charm so strongly works 'em. That, if you now beheld them, your affections Would become tender.

_Pros_. Dost thou think so, spirit?

_Ariel_. Mine would, sir, were I human."

Another mark-worthy feature of Ariel is, that his power does not stop with the physical forces of Nature, but reaches also to the hearts and consciences of men; so that by his music he can kindle or assuage the deepest griefs of the one, and strike the keenest pangs of remorse into the other. This comes out in the different effects of his art upon Ferdinand and the guilty King, as related by the men themselves:

"Where should this music be? i' the air or th' earth? It sounds no more:--and, sure, it waits upon Some god o' the island. Sitting on a bank, Weeping again the King my father's wreck, This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it, Or it hath drawn me rather:--but it is gone. No, it begins again."

Such is the effect on Ferdinand: now mark the contrast when we come to the King:

"O, it is monstrous, monstrous! Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it; The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounc'd The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass. Therefore my son i' the ooze is bedded; and I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded, And with him there lie mudded."

In the planting of love, too, Ariel beats old god Cupid all to nothing. For it is through some witchcraft of his that Ferdinand and Miranda are surprised into a mutual rapture; so that Prospero notes at once how "at the first sight they have chang'd eyes," and "are both in either's power." All which is indeed just what Prospero wanted; yet he is himself fairly startled at the result: that fine issue of nature outruns his thought; and the wise old gentleman takes care forthwith lest it work too fast:

"This swift business I must uneasy make, lest too light winning Make the prize light."

I must note one more trait in Ariel. It is his fondness of mischievous sport, wherein he reminds us somewhat of Fairy Puck in _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_. It is shown in the evident gust with which he relates the trick he has played on Caliban and his confederates, when they were proceeding to execute their conspiracy against the hero's life:

"As I told you, sir, they were red-hot with drinking; So full of valour, that they smote the air For breathing in their faces; beat the ground For kissing of their feet; yet always bending Towards their project. Then I beat my tabor; At which, like unback'd colts, they prick'd their ears, Advanc'd their eyelids, lifted up their noses As they smelt music: so I charm'd their ears, That, calf-like, they my lowing follow'd through Tooth'd briers, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns, Which enter'd their frail shins: at last I left them I' the filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell, There dancing up to th' chins."

Of Ariel's powers and functions as Prospero's prime minister, no logical forms, nothing but the Poet's art, can give any sort of an idea. No painter, I am sure, can do any thing with him; still less can any sculptor. Gifted with the ubiquity and multiformity of the substance from which he is named, before we can catch and define him in any one shape, he has passed into another. All we can say of him on this score is, that through his agency Prospero's thoughts forthwith become things, his volitions events. And yet, strangely and diversely as Ariel's nature is elemented and composed, with touches akin to several orders of being, there is such a self-consistency about him, he is so cut out in individual distinctness, and so rounded-in with personal attributes, that contemplation freely and easily rests upon him as an object. In other words, he is by no means an abstract idea personified, or any sort of intellectual diagram, but a veritable _person_; and we have a personal feeling towards the dear creature, and would fain knit him into the living circle of our human affections, making him a familiar playfellow of the heart, to be cherished with "praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles."

* * * * *

If Caliban strikes us as a more wonderful creation than Ariel, it is probably because he has more in common with us, without being in any proper sense human. Perhaps I cannot hit him off better than by saying that he represents, both in body and soul, a sort of intermediate nature between man and brute, with an infusion of something that belongs to neither; as though one of the transformations imagined by the Developmentists had stuck midway in its course, where a breath or vapour of essential Evil had knit itself vitally into his texture. Caliban has all the attributes of humanity from the moral downwards, so that his nature touches and borders upon the sphere of moral life; still the result but approves his exclusion from such life, in that it brings him to recognize moral law only as making for self; that is, he has intelligence of seeming wrong in what is done to him, but no conscience of what is wrong in his own doings. It is a most singular and significant stroke in the delineation, that sleep seems to loosen the fetters of his soul, and lift him above himself: then indeed, and then only, "the muddy vesture of decay" doth not so "grossly close him in," but that some proper spirit-notices come upon him; as if in his passive state the voice of truth and good vibrated down _to_ his soul, and stopped there, being unable to kindle any answering tones within: so that in his waking hours they are to him but as the memory of a dream.

"Sometime a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd, I cried to dream again."

Thus Caliban is part man, part demon, part brute, each being drawn somewhat out of itself by combination with the others, and the union of all preventing him from being either; for which cause language has no generic term that fits him. Yet this strange, uncouth, but life-like confusion of natures Prospero has educated into a sort of poet. This, however, has nowise tamed, it has rather increased, his innate malignity and crookedness of disposition; education having of course but _educed_ what was in him. Even his poetry is, for the most part, made up of the fascinations of ugliness; a sort of inverted beauty; the poetry of dissonance and deformity; the proper music of his nature being to curse, its proper laughter to snarl. Schlegel finely compares his mind to a dark cave, into which the light of knowledge falling neither illuminates nor warms it, but only serves to put in motion the poisonous vapours generated there.

Now it is by exhausting the resources of instruction on such a being that his innate and essential deficiency is best shown. For, had he the germs of a human soul, they must needs have been drawn forth by the process that has made him a poet. The magical presence of spirits has indeed cast into the caverns of his brain some faint reflection of a better world, but without calling up any answering emotions or aspirations; he having no susceptibilities to catch and take in the epiphanies that throng his whereabout. So that, paradoxical as it may seem, he exemplifies the two-fold triumph of art over nature, and of nature over art; that is, art has triumphed in making him a poet, and nature, in still keeping him from being a man; though he has enough of the human in him to evince in a high degree the swelling of intellectual pride.

But what is most remarkable of all in Caliban is the perfect originality of his thoughts and manners. Though framed of grossness and malignity, there is nothing vulgar or commonplace about him. His whole character indeed is developed from within, not impressed from without; the effect of Prospero's instructions having been to make him all the more himself; and there being perhaps no soil in his nature for conventional vices and knaveries to take root and grow in. Hence the almost classic dignity of his behaviour compared with that of the drunken sailors, who are little else than a sort of low, vulgar conventionalities organized, and as such not less true to the life than consistent with themselves. In his simplicity, indeed, he at first mistakes them for gods who "bear celestial liquor," and they wax merry enough at the "credulous monster"; but, in his vigour of thought and purpose, he soon conceives such a scorn of their childish interest in whatever trinkets and gewgaws meet their eye, as fairly drives off his fit of intoxication; and the savage of the woods, half-human though he be, seems nobility itself beside the savages of the city.

In fine, if Caliban is, so to speak, the organized sediment and dregs of the place, from which all the finer spirit has been drawn off to fashion the delicate Ariel, yet having some parts of a human mind strangely interwoven with his structure; every thing about him, all that he does and says, is suitable and correspondent to such a constitution of nature. So that all the elements and attributes of his being stand and work together in living coherence, thus rendering him no less substantive and personal to our apprehension than he is original and peculiar in himself.

* * * * *

Such are the objects and influences amidst which the clear, placid nature of Miranda has been developed. Of the world whence her father was driven, its crimes and follies and sufferings, she knows nothing; he having studiously kept all such notices from her, to the end, apparently, that nothing might thwart or hinder the plastic efficacies that surrounded her. And here all the simple and original elements of her being, love, light, grace, honour, innocence, all pure feelings and tender sympathies, whatever is sweet and gentle and holy in womanhood, seem to have sprung up in her nature as from celestial seed: "the contagion of the world's slow stain" has not visited her; the chills and cankers of artificial wisdom have not touched nor come nigh her: if there were any fog or breath of evil in the place that might else dim or spot her soul, it has been sponged up by Caliban, as being more congenial with his nature; while he is simply "a villain she does not love to look on." Nor is this all. The aerial music beneath which her soul has expanded with answering sweetness seems to rest visibly upon her, linking her as it were with some superior order of beings: the spirit and genius of the place, its magic and mystery, have breathed their power into her face; and out of them she has unconsciously woven herself a robe of supernatural grace, in which even her mortal nature seems half hidden, so that we are in doubt whether she belongs more to Heaven or to Earth. Thus both her native virtues and the efficacies of the place seem to have crept and stolen into her unperceived, by mutual attraction and assimilation twining together in one growth, and each diffusing its life and beauty over and through the others. It would seem indeed as if Wordsworth must have had Miranda in his eye, (or was he but working in the spirit of that Nature which she so rarely exemplifies?) when he wrote,

"The floating clouds their state shall lend To her; for her the willow bend: Nor shall she fail to see Even in the motions of the storm Grace that shall mould the maiden's form By silent sympathy.

The stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face."

Yet, for all this, Miranda not a whit the less touches us as a creature of flesh and blood,

"A being breathing thoughtful breath, A traveller between life and death."

Nay, rather she seems all the more so, inasmuch as the character thus coheres with the circumstances, the virtues and poetries of the place being expressed in her visibly; and she would be far less real to our feelings, were not the wonders of her whereabout thus vitally incorporated with her innate and original attributes.

It is observable that Miranda does not perceive the working of her father's art upon herself. For, when he casts a spell of drowsiness over her, so that she cannot choose but sleep, on being awaked by him she tells him, "The strangeness of your story put heaviness in me." So his art conceals itself in its very potency of operation; and seems the more like nature for being preternatural. It is another noteworthy point, that while he is telling his strange tale he thinks she is not listening attentively to his speech, partly because he is not attending to it himself, his thoughts being busy with the approaching crisis of his fortune, and drawn away to the other matters which he has in hand, and partly because in her trance of wonder at what he is relating she seems abstracted and self-withdrawn from the matter of his discourse. His own absent-mindedness on this occasion is aptly and artfully indicated by his broken and disjointed manner of speech. That his tongue and thought are not beating time together appears in that the latter end of his sentences keeps forgetting the beginning.

These are among the fine strokes and delicate touches whereby the Poet makes, or rather permits, the character of his persons to transpire so quietly as not to excite special notice at the time. That Miranda should be so rapt at her father's tale as to seem absent and wandering, is a charming instance in point. For indeed to her the supernatural stands in the place of Nature; and nothing is so strange and wonderful as what actually passes in the life and heart of man: miracles have been her daily food, her father being the greatest miracle of all; which must needs make the common events and passions and perturbations of the world seem to her miraculous. All which is wrought out by the Poet with so much art and so little appearance of art, that Franz Horn is the only critic, so far as I know, that seems to have thought of it.

I must not dismiss Miranda without remarking the sweet union of womanly dignity and childlike simplicity in her character, she not knowing or not caring to disguise the innocent movements of her heart. This, too, is a natural result of her situation. The instance to which I refer is when Ferdinand, his manhood all alive with her, lets her hear his soul speak; and she, weeping at what she is glad of, replies,--

"Hence, bashful cunning! And prompt me, plain and holy innocence!-- I am your wife, if you will marry me; If not, I'll die your maid: to be your fellow You may deny me; but I'll be your servant, Whether you will or no."

Equally fine is the circumstance that her father opens to her the story of his life, and lets her into the secret of her noble birth and ancestry, at a time when she is suffering with those that she saw suffer, and when her eyes are jewelled with "drops that sacred pity hath engender'd"; as if on purpose that the ideas of rank and dignity may sweetly blend and coalesce in her mind with the sympathies of the woman.

* * * * *

In Ferdinand is portrayed one of those happy natures, such as we sometimes meet with, who are built up all the more strongly in truth and good by contact with the vices and meannesses of the world. Courage, piety, and honour are his leading characteristics; and these virtues are so much at home in his breast, and have such an easy, natural ascendant in his conduct, that he thinks not of them, and cares only to prevent or remove the stains which affront his inward eye. The meeting of him and Miranda is replete with magic indeed,--a magic higher and more potent even than Prospero's; the riches that nestle in their bosoms at once leaping forth and running together in a stream of poetry which no words of mine can describe. So much of beauty in so few words, and those few so plain and simple,--"O, wondrous skill and sweet wit of the man!"

Shakespeare's genius is specially venerable in that he makes piety and honour go hand in hand with love. It seems to have been a fixed principle with him, if indeed it was not rather a genial instinct, that where the heart is rightly engaged, there the highest and tenderest thoughts of religion do naturally cluster and converge. For indeed the love that looks to marriage is itself a religion: its first impulse is to invest its object with poetry and consecration: to be "true to the kindred points of Heaven and home," is both its inspiration and its law. It thus involves a sort of regeneration of the inner man, and carries in its hand the baptismal fire of a nobler and diviner life.

And so it is in this delectable instance. In Ferdinand, as in all generous natures, "love betters what is best." Its first springing in his breast stirs his heavenward thoughts and aspirations into exercise: the moment that kindles his heart towards Miranda also kindles his soul in piety to God; and he knows not how to commune in prayer with the Source of good, unless he may couple her welfare with his own, and breathe her name in his holiest service. Thus his love and piety are kindred and coefficient forces, as indeed all true love and piety essentially are. However thoughtless we may be of the Divine help and guardianship for ourselves, we can hardly choose but crave them for those to whom our souls are knit in the sacred dearness of household ties. And so with this noble pair, the same power that binds them to each other in the sacraments of love also binds them both in devout allegiance to the Author of their being; whose presence is most felt by them in the sacredness of their mutual truth.

So much for the illustration here so sweetly given of the old principle, that whatsoever lies nearest a Christian's heart, whatsoever he tenders most dearly on Earth, whatsoever draws in most intimately with the currents of his soul, that is the spontaneous subject-matter of his prayers; our purest loves thus sending us to God, as if from an instinctive feeling that unless God be sanctified in our hearts, our hearts cannot retain their proper life.

In regard to what springs up between Ferdinand and Miranda, it is to be noted that Prospero does little but furnish occasions. He indeed thanks the quaint and delicate Ariel for the kindling touch that so quickly puts them "both in either's power"; for it seems to him the result of a finer inspiration than his art can reach; and so he naturally attributes it to the magic of his airy minister; whereas in truth it springs from a source far deeper than the magic of either,--a pre-established harmony which the mutual recognition now first quickens into audible music. After seeing himself thus outdone by the Nature he has been wont to control, and having witnessed such a "fair encounter of two most rare affections," no wonder that Prospero longs to be a man again, like other men, and gladly returns to

"The homely sympathy that heeds The common life; our nature breeds; A wisdom fitted to the needs Of hearts at leisure."

The strength and delicacy of imagination displayed in the characters already noticed are hardly more admirable than the truth and subtilty of observation shown in others.

In the delineation of Antonio and Sebastian, short as it is, we have a volume of wise science, which Coleridge remarks upon thus: "In the first scene of the second Act, Shakespeare has shown the tendency in bad men to indulge in scorn and contemptuous expressions, as a mode of getting rid of their own uneasy feelings of inferiority to the good, and also of rendering the transition of others to wickedness easy, by making the good ridiculous. Shakespeare never puts habitual scorn into the mouths of other than bad men, as here in the instance of Antonio and Sebastian."

Nor is there less of judgment in the means used by Prospero for bringing them to a better mind; provoking in them the purpose of crime, and then taking away the performance; that so he may lead them to a knowledge of themselves, and awe or shame down their evil by his demonstrations of good. For such is the proper effect of bad designs thus thwarted, showing the authors at once the wickedness of their hearts and the weakness of their hands; whereas, if successful in their schemes, pride of power would forestall and prevent the natural shame and remorse of guilt. And we little know what evil it lieth and lurketh in our hearts to will or to do, till occasion invites or permits; and Prospero's art here stands in presenting the occasion till the wicked purpose is formed, and then removing it as soon as the hand is raised. In the case of Antonio and Sebastian, the workings of magic are so mixed up with those of Nature, that we cannot distinguish them; or rather Prospero here causes the supernatural to pursue the methods of Nature.

And the same deep skill is shown in the case of the good old Lord Gonzalo, whose sense of his own infelicities seems lost in his care to minister comfort and diversion to others. Thus his virtue spontaneously opens the springs of wit and humour in him amid the terrors of the storm and shipwreck; and he is merry while others are suffering, and merry even from sympathy with them; and afterwards his thoughtful spirit plays with Utopian fancies; and if "the latter end of his Commonwealth forgets the beginning," it is all the same to him, his purpose being only to beguile the anguish of supposed bereavement. It has been well said that "Gonzalo is so occupied with duty, in which alone he finds pleasure, that he scarce notices the gnat-stings of wit with which his opponents pursue him; or, if he observes, firmly and easily repels them."

The comic portions and characters of this play are in Shakespeare's raciest vein; yet they are perfectly unique and singular withal, being quite unlike any other of his preparations in that kind, as much so as if they were the growth of a different planet.

The presence of Trinculo and Stephano in the play has sometimes been regarded as a blemish. I cannot think it so. Their part is not only good in itself as comedy, but is in admirable keeping with the rest. Their follies give a zest and relish to the high poetries amidst which they grow. Such things go to make up the mysterious whole of human life; and they often help on our pleasure while seeming to hinder it: we may think they were better left out, but, were they left out, we should somehow feel the want of them. Besides, this part of the work, if it does not directly yield a grateful fragrance, is vitally connected with the parts that do. For there is perhaps no one of the Poet's dramas of which it can be more justly affirmed that all the parts draw together in organic unity, so that every thing helps every other thing.

* * * * *

Such are the strangely-assorted characters that make up this charming play. This harmonious working together of diverse and opposite elements,--this smooth concurrence of heterogeneous materials in one varied yet coherent impression,--by what subtile process this is brought about, is perhaps too deep a problem for Criticism to solve.

I cannot leave the theme without remarking what an atmosphere of wonder and mystery overhangs and pervades this singular structure; and how the whole seems steeped in glories invisible to the natural eye, yet made visible by the Poet's art: so that the effect is to lead the thoughts insensibly upwards to other worlds and other forms of being. It were difficult to name any thing else of human workmanship so thoroughly transfigured with

"the gleam, The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet's dream."

The celestial and the earthly are here so commingled,--commingled, but not confounded,--that we see not where the one begins or the other ends: so that in the reading we seem transported to a region where we are strangers, yet old acquaintances; where all things are at once new and familiar; the unearthly visions of the spot hardly touching us with surprise, because, though wonderful indeed, there is nothing about them but what readily finds or creates some answering powers and sympathies within us. In other words, they do not surprise us, because they at once kindle us into fellowship with them. That our thoughts and feelings are thus at home with such things, and take pleasure in them,--is not this because of some innate aptitudes and affinities of our nature for a supernatural and celestial life?

"Point not these mysteries to an art Lodg'd above the starry pole?"

THE WINTER'S TALE.

In Shakespeare's time there lived in London one Simon Forman, M.D., to whom we are indebted for our earliest notice of THE WINTER'S TALE. He was rather an odd genius, I should think; being an adept in occult science and the arts of magic, and at the same time an ardent lover of the stage; thus symbolizing at once with the most conservative and the most radical tendencies of the age: for, strange as it may seem, the Drama then led the van of progress; Shakespeare being even a more audacious innovator in poetry and art than Bacon was in philosophy. Be this as it may, Forman evidently took great delight in the theatre, and he kept a diary of what he witnessed there. Not many years ago, the manuscript of this diary was discovered by Mr. Collier in the Ashmolean Museum, and a portion of its contents published. Forman was at the Globe theatre on Wednesday, the 15th of May, 1611, and under that date he records "how Leontes the King of Sicilia was overcome with jealousy of his wife with the King of Bohemia, his friend that came to see him, and how he contrived his death, and would have had his cup-bearer poison him, who gave the King warning thereof, and fled with him to Bohemia. Also, how he sent to the oracle of Apollo, and the answer of Apollo was that she was guiltless; and except the child was found again that was lost, the King should die without issue: for the child was carried into Bohemia, and there laid in a forest, and brought up by a shepherd; and the King of Bohemia's son married that wench, and they fled into Sicilia, and by the jewels found about her she was known to be Leontes' daughter, and was then sixteen years old."

This clearly identifies the performance seen by Forman as _The Winter's Tale_ of Shakespeare. It is altogether probable that the play was then new, and was in its first course of exhibition. For Sir George Buck became Master of the Revels in October, 1610, and was succeeded in that office by Sir Henry Herbert in 1623, who passed _The Winter's Tale_ without examination, on the ground of its being an "old play formerly allowed by Sir George Buck." As the play had to be licensed before it could be performed, this ascertains its first performance to have been after October, 1610. So that _The Winter's Tale_ was most likely presented for official sanction some time between that date and the 15th of May following, when Forman saw it at the Globe. To all this must be added the internal characteristics of the play itself, which is in the Poet's ripest and most idiomatic style of art. It is not often that the date of his workmanship can be so closely remarked. _The Winter's Tale_ was never printed, so far as we know, till it appeared in the folio of 1623.

* * * * *

In the plot and incidents of this play, Shakespeare followed very closely the _Pandosto_, or, as it was sometimes called, the _Dorastus and Fawnia_, of Robert Greene. This novel appears to have been one of the most popular books of the time; there being no less than fourteen old editions of it known, the first of which was in 1588. Greene was a scholar, a man of some genius, Master of Arts in both the Universities, and had indeed much more of learning than of judgment in the use and application of it. For it seems as if he could not write at all without overloading his pages with classical allusion, nor hit upon any thought so trite and commonplace, but that he must run it through a series of aphoristic sentences twisted out of Greek and Roman lore. In this respect, he is apt to remind one of his fellow-dramatist, Thomas Lodge, whose _Rosalynd_ contributed so much to the Poet's _As You Like It_: for it was then much the fashion for authors to prank up their matter with superfluous erudition. Like all the surviving works of Greene, _Pandosto_ is greatly charged with learned impertinence, and in the annoyance thence resulting one is apt to overlook the real merit of the performance. It is better than Lodge's _Rosalynd_ for this reason, if for no other, that it is shorter. I must condense so much of the tale as may suffice to indicate the nature and extent of the Poet's obligations.

Pandosto, King of Bohemia, and Egistus, King of Sicilia, had passed their boyhood together, and grown into a mutual friendship which kept its hold on them long after coming to their crowns. Pandosto had for his wife a very wise and beautiful lady named Bellaria, who had made him the father of a prince called Garinter in whom both himself and his people greatly delighted. After many years of separation, Egistus "sailed into Bohemia to visit his old friend," who, hearing of his arrival, went with a great train of lords and ladies to meet him, received him very lovingly, and wished his wife to welcome him. No pains were spared to honour the royal visitor and make him feel at home. Bellaria, "to show how much she liked him whom her husband loved," treated Egistus with great confidence, often going herself to his chamber to see that nothing should be amiss. This honest familiarity increased from day to day, insomuch that when Pandosto was busy with State affairs they would walk into the garden and pass their time in pleasant devices. After a while, Pandosto began to have doubtful thoughts, considering the beauty of his wife, and the comeliness and bravery of his friend. This humour growing upon him, he went to watching them, and fishing for proofs to confirm his suspicions. At length his mind got so charged with jealousy that he felt quite certain of the thing he feared, and studied for nothing so much as revenge. He resolved to work by poison, and called upon his cup-bearer, Franion, to execute the scheme, and pressed him to it with the alternative of preferment or death. The minister, after trying his best to dissuade the King, at last gave his consent, in order to gain time, then went to Egistus, and told him the secret, and fled with him to Sicilia. Full of rage at being thus baffled, Pandosto then let loose his fury against the Queen, ordering her forthwith into close prison. He then had his suspicion proclaimed as a certain truth; and though her character went far to discredit the charge, yet the sudden flight of Egistus caused it to be believed. And he would fain have made war on Egistus, but that the latter not only was of great strength and prowess, but had many kings in his alliance, his wife being daughter to the Emperor of Russia.

Meanwhile the Queen in prison gave birth to a daughter, which put the King in a greater rage than ever, insomuch that he ordered both the mother and the babe to be burnt alive. Against this cruel sentence his nobles stoutly remonstrated; but the most they could gain was, that he should spare the child's life; his next device being to put her in a boat and leave her to the mercy of the winds and waves. At the hearing of this hard doom, the Queen fell down in a trance, so that all thought her dead; and on coming to herself she at last gave up the babe, saying, "Let me kiss thy lips, sweet infant, and wet thy tender cheeks with my tears, and put this chain about thy little neck, that if fortune save thee, it may help to succour thee."

When the day of trial came, the Queen, standing as a prisoner at the bar, and seeing that nothing but her death would satisfy the King, "waxed bold, and desired that she might have law and justice," and that her accusers might be brought before her face. The King replied that their word was enough, the flight of Egistus confirming what they had said; and that it was her part "to be impudent in forswearing the fact, since she had passed all shame in committing the fault." At the same time he threatened her with a cruel death; which she met by telling him that her life had ever been such as no spot of suspicion could stain, and that, if she had borne a friendly countenance towards Egistus, it was only as he was her husband's friend: "therefore, if she were condemned without further proof, it was rigour, and not law." The judges said she spoke reason, and begged that her accusers might be openly examined and sworn; whereupon the King went to browbeating them, the very demon of tyranny having got possession of him. The Queen then told him that, if his fury might stand for law, it was of no use for the jury to give their verdict; and therefore she begged him to send six of his noblemen to "the Isle of Delphos," to inquire of Apollo whether she were guilty or not. This request he could not refuse. The messengers using all haste soon came back with the sealed answer of Apollo. The court being now assembled again, the scroll was opened and read in their presence, its contents being much the same as in the play. As soon as Apollo's verdict was known, the people raised a great shout, rejoicing and clapping their hands, that the Queen was clear. The repentant King then besought his nobles to intercede with the Queen in his behalf, at the same time confessing how he had tried to compass the death of Egistus; and while he was doing this word came that the young Prince was suddenly dead; at the hearing of which the Queen fell down, and could never be revived: the King also sank down senseless, and lay in that state three days; and there was nothing but mourning in Bohemia. Upon reviving, the King was so frenzied with grief and remorse that he would have killed himself, but that his peers being present stayed his hand, entreating him to spare his life for the people's sake. He had the Queen and Prince very richly and piously entombed; and from that time repaired daily to the tomb to bewail his loss.

Up to this point, the play, so far as the mere incidents are concerned, is little else than a dramatized version of the tale: henceforth the former diverges more widely from the latter, though many of the incidents are still the same in both.

The boat with its innocent freight was carried by wind and tide to the coast of Sicilia, where it stuck in the sand. A poor shepherd, missing one of his sheep, wandered to the seaside in search of it. As he was about to return he heard a cry, and, there being no house near, he thought it might be the bleating of his sheep; and going to look more narrowly he spied a little boat from which the cry seemed to come. Wondering what it might be, he waded to the boat, and found the babe lying there ready to die of cold and hunger, wrapped in an embroidered mantle, and having a chain about the neck. Touched with pity he took the infant in his arms, and as he was fixing the mantle there fell at his feet a very fair rich purse containing a great sum of gold. To secure the benefit of this wealth, he carried the babe home as secretly as he could, and gave her in charge to his wife, telling her the process of the discovery. The shepherd's name was Porrus, his wife's Mopsa; the precious foundling they named Fawnia. Being themselves childless, they brought her up tenderly as their own daughter. With the gold Porrus bought a farm and a flock of sheep, which Fawnia at the age of ten was set to watch; and, as she was likely to be his only heir, many rich farmers' sons came to his house as wooers; for she was of singular beauty and excellent wit, and at sixteen grew to such perfection of mind and person that her praises were spoken at the Sicilian Court. Nevertheless she still went forth every day with the sheep, veiling her face from the Sun with a garland of flowers; which attire became her so well, that she seemed the goddess Flora herself for beauty.

King Egistus had an only son, named Dorastus, a Prince so adorned with gifts and virtues, that both King and people had great joy of him. He being now of ripe age, his father sought to match him with some princess; but the youth was little minded to wed, as he had more pleasure in the exercises of the field and the chase. One day, as he was pursuing this sport, he chanced to fall in with the lovely shepherdess, and while he was rapt in wonder at the vision one of his pages told him she was Fawnia, whose beauty was so much talked of at the Court.

The story then goes on to relate the matter of their courtship; how the Prince resolved to forsake his home and inheritance, and become a shepherd, for her sake, as she could not think of matching with one above her degree; how, forecasting the opposition and dreading the anger of his father, he planned for escaping into Italy, in which enterprise he was assisted by an old servant of his named Capnio, who managed the affair so shrewdly, that the Prince made good his escape, taking the old shepherd along with him; how, after they got to sea, the ship was seized by a tempest and carried away to Bohemia; and how at length the several parties met together at the Court of Pandosto, which drew on a disclosure of the facts, and a happy marriage of the fugitive lovers.

I must add one more item from the novel, as it aptly shows what advantage is sometimes to be gained by tracing the Poet in his reading. In the play, the Shepherd on finding the babe is made to exclaim, "What have we here? Mercy on 's, a bairn; a very pretty bairn! a boy, or a child, I wonder?" For some hundred years, editorial ingenuity has been strained to the utmost to explain why _child_ should be thus used in opposition to _boy_; and nothing would do but to surmise an obsolete custom of speech which made _child_ signify _girl_. The simple explanation is, that _boy_ is a misprint for _god_. For this felicitous restoration we are indebted to Mr. R.G. White, of New York, who was guided to it by the corresponding passage of the novel: "The shepherd, who before had never seen so fair a babe nor so rich jewels, thought assuredly that it was _some little god_, and began with great devotion to knock on his breast. The babe, who writhed with the head to seek for the pap, began again to cry, whereby the poor man knew _it was a child_." That we are not gods, is indeed evident enough when we cry. Of course the man's devotion turned all to pity as soon as he caught that little but most unequivocal note of humanity.

* * * * *

From the foregoing sketch, it would seem that the Poet must have written with the novel before him, and not merely from general recollection. Here, again, as in case of _As You Like It_, to appreciate his judgment and taste, one needs to compare his workmanship in detail with the original, and to note what he left unused. The free sailing between Sicily and Bohemia he retained, inverting, however, the local order of the persons and incidents, so that Polixenes and Florizel are Bohemian Princes, whereas their prototypes, Egistus and his son, are Sicilians. The reason of this inversion does not appear. Of course, the Poet could not have done it with any view to disguise his obligations; as his purpose evidently was, to make the popular interest of the tale tributary to his own success and profit. The most original of men, he was also the most free from pride and conceit of originality. In this instance, too, as in others, the instinctive rectitude of his genius is manifest in that, the subject once chosen, and the work begun, he thenceforth lost himself in the inspiration of his theme; all thoughts of popularity and pay being swallowed up in the supreme regards of Nature and Truth. For so, in his case, however prudence might dictate the plan, poetry was sure to have command of the execution. If he was but human in electing what to do, he became divine as soon as he went to doing it. And it is further considerable that, with all his borrowings in this play, the Poet nowhere drew more richly or more directly from his own spring. The whole life of the work is in what he gave, not in what he took; the mechanism of the story being used but as a skeleton to underpin and support the eloquent contexture of life and beauty. In the novel, Paulina and the Clown are wanting altogether; while Capnio yields but a slight hint, if indeed it be so much, towards the part of Antolycus. And, besides the great addition of life and matter in these persons, the play has several other judicious departures from the novel.

In Leontes all the revolting features of Pandosto, save his jealousy, and the headstrong insolence and tyranny thence proceeding, are purged away; so that while the latter has neither intellect nor generosity to redeem his character, jealousy being the least of his faults, the other has a liberal stock of both. And in Bellaria the Poet had little more than a bare framework of incident wherein to set the noble, lofty womanhood of Hermione,--a conception far, far above the reach of such a mind as Greene's. In the matter of the painted statue, Shakespeare, so far as is known, was altogether without a model, as he is without an imitator; the boldness of the plan being indeed such as nothing but entire success could justify, and wherein it is hardly possible to conceive of anybody but Shakespeare's having succeeded. And yet here it is that we are to look for the idea and formal cause of Hermione's character, while her character, again, is the shaping and informing power of the whole drama. For this idea is really the living centre and organic law in and around which all the parts of the work are vitally knit together. But, indeed, the Poet's own most original and inimitable mode of conceiving and working out character is everywhere dominant.

* * * * *

So much has been said about the anachronisms of this play, that it seems needful to add a word concerning them. We have already seen that the making of seaports and landing of ships in Bohemia were taken from Greene. Mr. Verplanck conjectures that by Bohemia Shakespeare meant simply the land of the Boii, an ancient people several tribes of whom settled in the maritime parts of France: but I hardly think he would have used the name with so much license at a time when the boundaries of that country were so well fixed and so widely known. For the events of the Reformation had made Bohemia an object of special interest to the people of England, and there was much intercourse between the English and Bohemian Courts. I have no notion indeed that this breach of geography was a blunder: it was meant, no doubt, for the convenience of thought; and such is its effect, until one goes to viewing the parts of the work with reference to ends not contemplated in the use here made of them. And the same is to be said touching several points of chronological confusion; such as the making Whitsun pastorals, Christian burial, Julio Romano, the Emperor of Russia, and Puritans singing psalms to hornpipes, all contemporary with the Oracle of Delphi; wherein actual things are but marshalled into an ideal order, so as to render Memory subservient to Imagination. In these and such points, it is enough that the materials be apt to combine among themselves, and that they agree in working out the issue proposed, the end thus regulating the use of the means. For a work of art, as such, should be itself an object for the mind to rest upon, not a directory to guide it to something else. So that here we may justly say "the mind is its own place"; and, provided the work be true to this intellectual whereabout, breaches of geography and history are of little consequence. And Shakespeare knew full well, that in poetical workmanship Memory stands absolved from the laws of time, and that the living order of art has a perfect right to overrule and supersede the chronological order of facts. In a word, history and chronology have no rights which a poet, as such, is bound to respect. In his sphere, things draw together and unite in virtue of other affinities than those of succession and coexistence. A work of art must indeed aim to be understood and felt; and so far as historical order is necessary to this, so far it may justly claim a prerogative voice. But still such a work must address itself to the mind and heart of man as man, and not to particular men as scholars or critics. That Shakespeare did this better than anybody else is the main secret of his supremacy. And it implies a knowledge far deeper than books could give,--the knowledge of a mind so intuitive of Nature, and so at home with her, as not to need the food of learning, because it fed directly on that which is the original food of learning itself.

Hence the conviction which I suppose all true Shakespearians to have, that no amount of scholastic advantages and acquirements could really do any thing towards explaining the mystery of his works. To do what he did at all, he must have had a native genius so strong and clear and penetrative, as to become more than learned without the aid of learning. What could the hydrants of knowledge do for a mind which thus dwelt at its fountain? Or why should he need to converse with Wisdom's messengers, whose home was in the very court and pavilion of Wisdom herself? Shakespeare is always weakest when a fit of learning takes him. But then he is stronger without learning than any one else is with it, and, perhaps, than he would have been with it himself; as the crutches that help the lame are but an incumbrance to the whole.

Perhaps I ought to add, touching the forecited anachronisms, that the Poet's sense of them may be fairly regarded as apparent in the naming of the piece. He seems to have judged that, in a dramatic _tale_ intended for the delight of the fireside during a long, quiet Winter's evening, such things would not be out of place, and would rather help than mar the entertainment and life of the performance. Thus much indeed is plainly hinted more than once in the course of the play; as in Act v. scene 2, where, one of the Gentlemen being asked, "What became of Antigonus, that carried hence the child?" he replies, "Like an _old tale_ still, which will have matter to rehearse, though credit be asleep, and not an ear open."

Much the same is to be said touching the remarkable freedom which the Poet here takes with the conditions of time; there being an interval of sixteen years between the third and fourth Acts, which is with rather un-Shakespearian awkwardness bridged over by the Chorus introducing Act iv. This freedom, however, was inseparable from the governing idea of the piece, nor can it be faulted but upon such grounds as would exclude all dramatized fiction from the stage. It is to be noted also that while the play thus divides itself into two parts, these are skilfully woven together by a happy stroke of art. The last scene of the third Act not only finishes the action of the first three, but by an apt and unforced transition begins that of the other two; the two parts of the drama being smoothly drawn into the unity of a continuous whole by the introduction of the old Shepherd and his son at the close of the one and the opening of the other. This natural arrangement saves the imagination from being disturbed by any yawning or obtrusive gap of time, notwithstanding the lapse of so many years in the interval. On this point, Gervinus remarks that, "while Shakespeare has in other dramas permitted a twofold action united by a common idea, he could not in this instance have entirely concentrated the two fictions; he could but unite them indistinctly by a leading idea in both; though the manner in which he has outwardly united them is a delicate and spirited piece of art."

* * * * *

In the delineation of Leontes there is an abruptness of change which strikes us, at first view, as not a little a-clash with nature: we cannot well see how one state of mind grows out of another: his jealousy shoots in comet-like, as something unprovided for in the general ordering of his character. Which causes this feature to appear as if it were suggested rather by the exigencies of the stage than by the natural workings of human passion. And herein the Poet seems at variance with himself; his usual method being to unfold a passion in its rise and progress, so that we go along with it freely from its origin to its consummation. And, certainly, there is no accounting for Leontes' conduct, but by supposing a predisposition to jealousy in him, which, however, has been hitherto kept latent by his wife's clear, firm, serene discreetness, but which breaks out into sudden and frightful activity as soon as she, under a special pressure of motives, slightly overacts the confidence of friendship. There needed but a spark of occasion to set this secret magazine of passion all a-blaze.

The Pandosto of the novel has, properly speaking, no character at all: he is but a human figure going through a set of motions; that is, the person and the action are put together arbitrarily, and not under any law of vital correspondence. Almost any other figure would fit the motions just as well. It is true, Shakespeare had a course of action marked out for him in the tale. But then he was bound by his own principles of art to make the character such as would rationally support the action, and cohere with it. For such is the necessary law of moral development and transpiration. Nor is it by any means safe to affirm that, he has not done this. For it is to be noted that Polixenes has made a pretty long visit, having passed, it seems, no less than nine changes of the Moon at the home of his royal friend. And he might well have found it not always easy to avoid preferring the Queen's society to the King's; for she is a most irresistible creature, and her calm, ingenuous modesty, itself the most dignified of all womanly graces, is what, more than any thing else, makes her so. What secret thoughts may have been gathering to a head in the mind of Leontes during that period, is left for us to divine from the after-results. And I believe there is a jealousy of friendship, as well as of love. Accordingly, though Leontes invokes the Queen's influence to induce a lengthening of the visit, yet he seems a little disturbed on seeing that her influence has proved stronger than his own.

"_Leon_. Is he won yet?

_Herm_. He'll stay, my lord.

_Leon_. At my request he would not. Hermione, my dear'st, thou never spok'st To better purpose.

_Herm_. Never?

_Leon_. Never, but once.

_Herm_. What! have I twice said well? when was't before? I pr'ythee tell me.

_Leon_. Why, that was when Three crabbed months had sour'd themselves to death, Ere I could make thee open thy white hand, And clap thyself my love: then didst thou utter, _I'm yours forever_."

There is, I think, a relish of suppressed bitterness in this last speech, as if her long reluctance had planted in him a germ of doubt whether, after all, her heart was really in her words of consent. For the Queen is a much deeper character than her husband. It is true, these notices, and various others, drop along so quiet and unpronounced, as hardly to arrest the reader's attention. Shakespeare, above all other men, delights in just such subtile insinuations of purpose; they belong indeed to his usual method of preparing for a given issue, yet doing it so slyly as not to preclude surprise when the issue comes.

So that in his seeming abruptness Leontes, after all, does but exemplify the strange transformations which sometimes occur in men upon sudden and unforeseen emergencies. And it is observable that the very slightness of the Queen's indiscretion, the fact that she goes but a little, a very little too far, only works against her, causing the King to suspect her of great effort and care to avoid suspicion. And on the same principle, because he has never suspected her before, therefore he suspects her all the more vehemently now: that his confidence has hitherto stood unshaken, he attributes to extreme artfulness on her part; for even so, to an ill-disposed mind perfect innocence is apt to give an impression of consummate art. A passion thus groundless and self-generated might well be full-grown as soon as born. The more greedy and craving, too, that it has nothing real to eat; it therefore proceeds at once to "make the meat it feeds on," causing him to magnify whatever he sees, and to imagine many things that are not. That jealousy, however, is not the habit of his mind, appears in that it finds him unprepared, and takes him by surprise; insomuch that he forthwith loses all self-control, and runs right athwart the rules of common decency and decorum, so that he becomes an object at once of pity, of hatred, and scorn.

I think the Poet hardly anywhere shows a keener and juster insight of nature than in the behaviour of this man while the distemper is upon him. He is utterly reason-proof, and indeed acts as one literally insane. For the poison infects not only his manners, but his very modes of thought: in fact, all his rational and imaginative forces, even his speech and language, seem to have caught the disease. And all the loathsome filth which had settled to the bottom of his nature is now shaken up to the surface, so that there appears to be nothing but meanness and malignity and essential coarseness in him. Meanwhile an instinctive shame of his passion and a dread of vulgar ridicule put him upon talking in dark riddles and enigmas: hence the confused, broken, and disjointed style, an odd jumble of dialogue and soliloquy, in which he tries to jerk out his thoughts, as if he would have them known, and yet not have them known. I believe men generally credit themselves with peculiar penetration when they are in the act of being deluded, whether by themselves or by others. Hence, again, the strange and even ludicrous conceit in which Leontes wraps himself. "Not noted, is 't," says he, referring to the Queen's imaginary crime,--

"not noted, is 't, But of the finer natures? by some severals Of head-piece extraordinary? lower messes, Perchance, are to this business purblind."

Thus he mistakes his madness for a higher wisdom, and clothes his delusion with the spirit of revelation; so that Camillo rightly says,--

"You may as well Forbid the sea for to obey the Moon As or by oath remove or counsel shake The fabric of his folly, whose foundation Is pil'd upon his faith."

I must note one more point of the delineation. When Leontes sends his messengers to Delphos, he avows this as his reason for doing so:

"Though I am satisfied, and need no more Than what I know, yet shall the Oracle Give rest to th' minds of others."

Which means simply that he is not going to let the truth of the charge stand in issue, and that he holds the Divine authority to be a capital thing, provided he may use it, and need not obey it; that is, if he finds the god agreeing with him in opinion, then the god's judgment is infallible; if not, then, in plain terms, he is no god. And they who have closely observed the workings of jealousy, know right well that in all this Shakespeare does not one whit "overstep the modesty of Nature."

The Poet manages with great art to bring Leontes off from the disgraces of his passion, and repeal him home to our sympathies, which had been freely drawn to him at first by his generosity of friendship. To this end, jealousy is represented as his only fault, and this as a sudden freak, which passes on directly into a frenzy, and whips him quite out of himself, temporarily overriding his characteristic qualities, but not combining with them; the more violent for being unwonted, and the shorter-lived for being violent. In his firm, compact energy of thought and speech, after his passion has cleared itself, and in his perennial flow of repentance after his bereavement, are displayed the real tone and texture of his character. We feel that, if his sin has been great, his suffering is also great, and that if he were a greater sinner, his suffering would be less. Quick, impulsive, headstrong, he admits no bounds to anger or to penitence; condemns himself as vehemently as he does others; and will spend his life in atoning for a wrong he has done in a moment of passion: so that we are the more willing to forgive him, inasmuch as he never forgives himself.

* * * * *

The old poets seem to have contemplated a much wider range of female excellence than it has since grown customary to allow; taking for granted that whatsoever we feel to be most divine in man might be equally so in woman; and so pouring into their conceptions of womanhood a certain _manliness_ of soul, wherein we recognize an union of what is lovely with what is honourable,--such a combination as would naturally inspire any right-minded man at the same time with tenderness and with awe. Their ideas of delicacy did not preclude strength: in the female character they were rather pleased than otherwise to have the sweetness of the violet blended with the grandeur of the oak; probably because they saw and felt that woman might be big-hearted and brave-minded, and yet be none the less womanly; and that love might build all the higher and firmer for having its foundations laid deep in respect. This largeness of heart and liberality of thought often comes out in their writings, and that too whether in dealing with ideal or with actual women; which suggests that in what they chose to create they were a good deal influenced by what they were accustomed to see. For in a thing that works so much from the sympathies, it could hardly be but that they reflected the mind and spirit of their age. Of this the aptest illustration that my reading has lighted upon is in Ben Jonson's lines on the Countess of Bedford, describing "what kind of creature I could most desire to honour, serve, and love":

"I meant to make her fair, and free, and wise, Of greatest blood, and yet more good than great; I meant the day-star should not brighter rise, Nor lend like influence from his lucent seat: I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet, Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride; I meant each softest virtue there should meet, Fit in that softer bosom to reside: Only a learned and a manly soul I purpos'd her; that should with even powers The rock, the spindle, and the shears control Of Destiny, and spin her own free hours."

That Shakespeare fully shared in this magnanimous bravery of sentiment, we need no further proof than is furnished in the heroine of this play. We can scarce call Hermione sweet or gentle, though she is both; she is a _noble_ woman,--one whom, even in her greatest anguish, we hardly _dare_ to pity. The whole figure is replete with classic grace, is shaped and finished in the highest style of classic art. As she acts the part of a statue in the play, so she has a statue-like calmness and firmness of soul. A certain austere sweetness pervades her whole demeanour, and seems, as it were, the essential form of her life. It is as if some masterpiece of ancient sculpture had warmed and quickened into life from its fulness of beauty and expression.

Appearing at first as the cheerful hostess of her husband's friend, and stooping from her queenly elevation to the most winning affabilities, her behaviour rises in dignity as her sorrow deepens. With an equal sense of what is due to the King as her husband, and to herself as a woman, a wife, and a mother, she knows how to reconcile all these demands; she therefore resists without violence, and submits without weakness. And what her wise spirit sees to be fit and becoming, that she always has strength and steadiness of character to do: hence, notwithstanding the insults and hardships wantonly put upon her, she still preserves the smoothnesses of peace; is never betrayed into the least sign of anger or impatience or resentment, but maintains, throughout, perfect order and fitness and proportion in act and speech: the charge, so dreadful in itself, and so cruel in its circumstances, neither rouses her passions, as it would Paulina's, nor stuns her sensibilities, as in the case of Desdemona; but, like the sinking of lead in the ocean's bosom, it goes to the depths without ruffling the surface of her soul. Her situation is indeed full of pathos,--a pathos the more deeply-moving to others, that it stirs no tumults in her; for her nature is manifestly fitted up and furnished with all tender and gentle and womanly feelings; only she has the force of mind to control them, and keep them all in the right place and degree. "They are the patient sorrows that touch nearest." And so, under the worst that can befall, she remains within the region of herself, calm and serenely beautiful, stands firm, yet full of grace, in the austere strengths of reason and conscious rectitude. And when, at her terrible wrongs and sufferings, all hearts are shaken, all eyes wet, but her own, the impression made by her stout-hearted fortitude is of one whose pure, tranquil, deep-working breast is the home of sorrows too big for any eye-messengers to report:

"Calm pleasures there abide, majestic pains."

The delineation keeps the same tone and texture through all its parts, but the sense of it is specially concentrated in what she says when the King winds up his transport of insane fury by ordering her off to prison:

"Good my lords, I am not prone to weeping, as our sex Commonly are; the want of which vain dew Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have That honourable grief lodg'd here which burns Worse than tears drown. 'Beseech you all, my lords, With thoughts so qualified as your charities Shall best instruct you, measure me;--and so, The King's will be perform'd!--'Beseech your Highness, My women may be with me; for, you see, My plight requires it.--Do not weep, good fools; There is no cause: when you shall know your mistress Has deserv'd prison, then abound in tears, As I come out.--.... Adieu, my lord: I never wish'd to see you sorry; now I trust, I shall."

And her character is answerably reflected in the minds of the King's chief counsellors, whose very swords seem stirring with life in the scabbards, and yearning to leap forth and vindicate the honour of their glorious Queen, but that awe of the crown restrains them.

Her last speech at the trial is, I am apt to think, the solidest piece of eloquence in the language. It is like a piece of the finest statuary marble, chiselled into perfect form; so compact of grain, that you cannot crush it into smaller space; while its effect is as wholesome and bracing as the atmosphere of an iced mountain when tempered by the Summer sun. The King threatens her with death, and she replies,--

"Sir, spare your threats: The bug which you would fright me with I seek. To me can life be no commodity: The crown and comfort of my life, your favour, I do give lost; for I do feel it gone, But know not how it went: my second joy, And first-fruits of my body, from his presence I'm barr'd, like one infectious: my third comfort, Starr'd most unluckily, is from my breast, The innocent milk in its most innocent mouth, Hal'd out to murder: myself on every post Proclaim'd a strumpet; with immodest hatred, The child-bed privilege denied, which 'longs To women of all fashion: lastly, hurried Here to this place, i' the open air, before I have got strength of limit. Now, my liege, Tell me what blessings I have here alive, That I should fear to die. Therefore, proceed. But yet hear this; mistake me not: My life, I prize it not a straw; but for mine honour, Which I would free, if I shall be condemn'd Upon surmises, all proofs sleeping else But what your jealousies awake, I tell you 'Tis rigour, and not law."

Noble simplicity of the olden time, when the best and purest of women, with the bravest men in presence, thought no shame to hear themselves speaking such plain honest words as these!

The Queen's long concealing of herself has been censured by some as repugnant to nature. Possibly they may think it somewhat strained and theatrical, but it is not so: the woman is but true to herself, in this matter, and to the solid and self-poised repose in which her being dwells. So that the thing does not seem repugnant to nature as individualized by her reason and will; nor is her character herein more above or out of nature than the proper ideal of art abundantly warrants. For to her keen sensibility of honour the King's treatment is literally an _infinite_ wrong; nor does its cruelty more wound her affection, than its meanness alienates her respect; and one so strong to bear injury might well be equally strong to remember it. Therewithal she knows full well that, in so delicate an instrument as married life, if one string be out of tune the whole is ajar, and will yield no music: for her, therefore, all things must be right, else none are so. And she is both too clear of mind and too upright of heart to put herself where she cannot be precisely what the laws of propriety and decorum require her to seem. Accordingly, when she does forgive, the forgiveness is simply _perfect_; the breach that has been so long a-healing is at length _completely_ healed; for to be whole and entire in whatever she does, is both an impulse of nature and a law of conscience with her. When the King was wooing her, she held him off three months, which he thought unreasonably long; but the reason why she did so is rightly explained when, for his inexpressible sin against her, she has locked herself from his sight sixteen years, leaving him to mourn and repent. Moreover, with her severe chastity of principle, the reconciliation to her husband must begin there where the separation grew. Thus it was for Perdita to restore the parental unity which her being represents, but of which she had occasioned the breaking.

Such is Hermione, in her "proud submission," her "dignified obedience," with her Roman firmness and integrity of soul, heroic in strength, heroic in gentleness, the queenliest of women, the womanliest of queens. She is perhaps the Poet's best illustration of the great principle, which I fear is not so commonly felt as it should be, that the highest beauty always has an element or shade of the terrible in it, so that it awes you while it attracts.

"If I prove honey-mouth'd, let my tongue blister, And never to my red-look'd anger be The trumpet any more."

"Good Queen, my lord, good Queen; I say, good Queen, And would by combat make her good, so were I A man, the worst about you."

"For ever Unvenerable be thy hands, if thou Tak'st up the Princess by that forcèd baseness Which he has put upon 't."

Such are some of the words that boil over from the stout heart of Paulina,--the noblest and most amiable termagant we shall anywhere find,--when, with the new-born babe in charge, she confronts the furious King. He threatens to have her burnt, and she replies instantly,--

"I care not: It is an heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in 't."

If her faults were a thousand times greater than they are, I could pardon them all for this one little speech; which proves that Shakespeare was, I will not say a Protestant, but a true Christian, intellectually at least, and far deeper in the spirit of his religion than a large majority of the Church's official organs were in his day, or, let me add, have been any day since. And this was written, be it observed, at a time when the embers of the old ecclesiastical fires were not yet wholly extinct, and when many a priestly bigot was deploring the lay ascendency which kept them from being rekindled.

Paulina makes a superb counterpart to Hermione, heightening the effect of her character by the most emphatic contrast, and at the same time reflecting it by her intense and outspoken sympathy. Without any of the Queen's dignified calmness and reserve, she is alive to all her inward beauty and greatness: with a head to understand and a heart to reverence such a woman, she unites a temper to fight, a generosity to die for her. But no language but her own can fitly measure the ardour with which she loves and admires and even adores her "dearest, sweetest mistress," whose power has indeed gone all through her, so that every part of her nature cannot choose but speak it, when the occasion kindles her. Loud, voluble, violent, and viraginous, with a tongue sharper than a sword, and an eloquence that fairly blisters where it hits, she has, therewithal, too much honour and magnanimity and kind feeling either to use them without good cause, or to forbear using them at all hazards when she has such cause. Mrs. Jameson classes her, and justly, no doubt, among those women--and she assures us there are many such--who seem regardless of the feelings of those for whom they would sacrifice their life.

"I thought she had some great matter there in hand; for she hath privately, twice or thrice a day, ever since the death of Hermione, visited that removed house." Such is the speech of one gentleman to another, as the royal party and all the Court are going to Paulina's house to see the mysterious workmanship of Julio Romano. Nothing could better suggest the history of that quiet, placid intercourse, with its long record of patient, self-rewarding service; a fellowship in which little needed to be said, for each knew what was in the other's mind by a better language than words. It is such an idea of friendship as it does the heart good to rest upon. Just think of those two great manly souls, enshrined in womanly tenderness, thus communing together in secret for sixteen long years! And what a powerful charm of love and loyalty must have been cast upon Paulina's impulsive tongue, that she should keep so reticent of her dear cause through all that time! To play the woman after that fashion would not hurt any of us.

* * * * *

During the first three Acts the interest of this play is mainly tragic; the scene is densely crowded with incidents; the action hurried, abrupt, almost spasmodic; the style quick and sharp, flashing off point after point in brief, sinewy strokes; and all is rapidity and despatch: what with the insane fury of the King, the noble agony of the Queen, the enthusiasm of the Court in her behalf, and the King's violence towards both them and her, the mind is kept on the jump: all which, if continued to the end, would generate rather a tumult and hubbub in the thoughts, than that inward music which the title of the play promises; not to say, that such a prolonged hurry of movement would at length become monotonous and wearisome. Far otherwise the latter half of the play. Here the anticipations proper to a long, leisurely winter evening are fully met; the general effect is soothing and composing; the tones, dipped in sweetness, fall gently on the ear, disposing the mind to be still and listen and contemplate; thus making the play, as Coleridge describes it, "exquisitely respondent to the title." It would seem, indeed, that in these scenes the Poet had specially endeavoured how much of silent effect he could produce, without diverging from the dramatic form. To this end, he provides resting-places for thought; suspending or retarding the action by musical pauses and periods of lyrical movement, and breathing in the mellowest strains of poetical harmony, till the eye is "made quiet by the power of beauty," and all tumult of mind is hushed in the very intensity of feeling.

In the last two Acts we have a most artful interchange and blending of romantic beauty and comic drollery. The lost Princess and the heir-apparent of Bohemia, two of the noblest and loveliest beings that ever fancy conceived, occupy the centre of the picture, while around them are clustered rustic shepherds and shepherdesses amid their pastimes and pursuits, the whole being enlivened by the tricks and humours of a merry pedler and pickpocket. For simple purity and sweetness, the scene which unfolds the loves and characters of the Prince and Princess is not surpassed by any thing in Shakespeare. Whatsoever is enchanting in romance, lovely in innocence, elevated in feeling, and sacred in faith, is here concentrated; forming, all together, one of those things which we always welcome as we do the return of Spring, and over which our feelings may renew their youth for ever. So long as flowers bloom and hearts love, they will do it in the spirit of this scene.

It is a pastoral frolic, where free thoughts and guileless hearts rule the hour, all as true and as pure as the tints and fragrances with which field and forest and garden have beautified the occasion. The neighbouring swains and lasses have gathered in, to share and enhance the sport. The old Shepherd is present, but only as a looker-on, having for the nonce resigned the command to his reputed daughter. Under their mutual inspiration, the Prince and Princess are each in the finest rapture of fancy, while the surrounding influences of the rustic festival are just enough to enfranchise their inward music into modest and delicate utterance. He has tastefully decked her person with flowers, till no traces of the shepherdess can be seen, and she seems herself a multitudinous flower; having also attired himself "with a swain's wearing," so that the prince is equally obscured.

"These your unusual weeds to each part of you Do give a life: no shepherdess; but Flora, Peering in April's front. This your sheep-shearing Is as a meeting of the petty gods, And you the queen on't."

Thus he opens the play. And when she repeats her fears of the event:

"Thou dearest Perdita, With these forc'd thoughts, I pr'ythee, darken not The mirth o' the feast: or I'll be thine, my fair, Or not my father's; for I cannot be Mine own, nor any thing to any, if I be not thine: to this I am most constant, Though destiny say no."

The King and Camilla steal upon them in disguise, and while they are present we have this:

"_Perdita_. Come, take your flowers: Methinks I play as I have seen them do In Whitsun pastorals: sure, this robe of mine Does change my disposition.

_Florizel_. What you do Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, I'd have you do it ever: when you sing, I'd have you buy and sell so; so give alms; Pray so; and, for the ordering your affairs, To sing them too: when you do dance I wish you A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that; move still, still so, and own No other function. Each your doing is So singular in each particular, Crowning what you have done i' the present deed, That all your acts are queens.

_Perdita_. O Doricles! Your praises are too large: but that your youth, And the true blood that peeps so fairly through 't, Do plainly give you out an unstain'd shepherd, With wisdom I might fear, my Doricles, You woo'd me the false way.

_Florizel_. I think you have As little skill to fear as I have purpose To put you to 't. But come; our dance, I pray.

_Polix_. This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever Ran on the green-sward: nothing she does or seems But smacks of something greater than herself,-- Too noble for this place.

_Camil_. He tells her something That makes her blood look out: Good sooth, she is The queen of curds and cream.

_Polix_. 'Pray you, good shepherd, what fair swain is this Which dances with your daughter?

_Shep_. They call him Doricles; and boasts himself To have a worthy feeding: I but have it Upon his own report, and I believe it; He looks like sooth. He says he loves my daughter: I think so too; for never gaz'd the Moon Upon the water, as he'll stand, and read, As 't were, my daughter's eyes: and, to be plain, I think there is not half a kiss to choose Who loves another best.

_Polix_. She dances featly.

_Shep_. So she does any thing, though I report it, That should be silent."

Perdita, notwithstanding she occupies so little room in the play, fills a large space in the reader's thoughts, almost disputing precedence with the Queen. And her mother's best native qualities reappear in her, sweetly modified by pastoral associations; her nature being really much the same, only it has been developed and seasoned in a different atmosphere; a nature too strong indeed to be displaced by any power of circumstances or supervenings of art, but at the same time too delicate and susceptive not to take a lively and lasting impress of them. So that, while she has thoroughly assimilated, she nevertheless clearly indicates, the food of place and climate, insomuch that the dignities of the princely and the simplicities of the pastoral character seem striving which shall express her goodliest. We can hardly call her a poetical being; she is rather poetry itself, and every thing lends and borrows beauty at her touch. A playmate of the flowers, when we see her with them, we are at a loss whether they take more inspiration from her or she from them; and while she is the sweetest of poets in making nosegays, the nosegays become in her hands the richest of crowns. If, as Schlegel somewhere remarks, the Poet is "particularly fond of showing the superiority of the innate over the acquired," he has surely nowhere done it with finer effect than in this unfledged angel.

There is much to suggest a comparison of Perdita and Miranda; yet how shall I compare them? Perfectly distinct indeed as individuals, still their characters are strikingly similar; only Perdita has perhaps a sweeter gracefulness, the freedom, simplicity, and playfulness of nature being in her case less checked by external restraints; while Miranda carries more of a magical and mysterious charm woven into her character from the supernatural influences of her whereabout. So like, yet so different, it is hard saying which is the better of the two, or rather one can hardly help liking her best with whom he last conversed. It is an interesting fact also, for such it seems to be, that these two glorious delineations were produced very near together, perhaps both the same year; and this too when Shakespeare was in his highest maturity of poetry and wisdom; from which it has been not unjustly argued that his experience both in social and domestic life must have been favourable to exalted conceptions of womanhood. The Poet, though in no sort a bigot, was evidently full of loyal and patriotic sentiment; and I have sometimes thought that the government of Elizabeth, with the grand national enthusiasm which clustered round her throne and person, may have had a good deal to do in shaping and inspiring this part of his workmanship. Be that as it may, with but one great exception, I think the world now finds its best ideas of moral beauty in Shakespeare's women.

* * * * *

Florizel's character is in exquisite harmony with that of the Princess. To be sure, it may be said that if he is worthy of her, it is mainly her influence that makes him so. But then it is to be observed, on the other hand, that as in such cases men find only what they bring the faculties for finding, so the meeting with her would not have elicited such music from him, had not his nature been originally responsive to hers. For he is manifestly drawn and held to her by a powerful instinct of congeniality. And none but a living abstract and sum-total of all that is manly could have so felt the perfections of such a woman. The difference between them is, that she was herself before she saw him, and would have been the same without him; whereas he was not and could not be himself, as we see him, till he caught inspiration from her; so that he is but right in saying,--

"I bless the time When my good falcon made her flight across Thy father's ground."

Nevertheless it is a clear instance of the pre-established harmony of souls: but that his spirit were akin to hers, he could not have recognized his peer through such a disguise of circumstances. For any one to be untouched and unsweetened by the heavenly purity of their courtship, were indeed a sin almost too great to be forgiven.

Shakespeare knew,--none better,--that in order to be a lover in any right sense of the term, one must first be a man. He therefore does not leave the Prince without an opportunity to show that he is such. And it is not till after the King has revealed himself, and blown up the mirth of the feast by his explosion of wrath, that the Prince displays his proper character in this respect. I need not stay to remark how well the Poet orders the action for that purpose; suffice it to say that the Prince then fully makes good his previous declaration:

"Were I crown'd the most imperial monarch, Thereof most worthy; were I the fairest youth That ever made eye swerve; had force and knowledge More than was ever man's; I would not prize them, Without her love; for her employ them all; Commend them or condemn them to her service, Or to their own perdition."

The minor characters of this play are both well conceived and skilfully disposed, the one giving them a fair personal, the other a fair dramatic interest. The old Shepherd and his clown of a son are near, if not in, the Poet's happiest comic vein. Autolycus, the "snapper-up of unconsidered trifles," is the most amiable and ingenious rogue we should desire to see; who cheats almost as divinely as those about him love, and whose thieving tricks the very gods seem to crown with thrift in reward of his wit. His self-raillery and droll soliloquizing give us the feeling that his sins are committed not so much for lucre as for fun.--The Poet was perhaps a little too fond of placing his characters in situations where they have to be false in order to be the truer; which no doubt sometimes happens; yet, surely, in so delicate a point of morality, some care is needful, lest the exceptions become too much for the rule. And something too much of this there may be in the honest, upright, yet deceiving old lord, Camillo. I speak this under correction; for I know it is not safe to fault Shakespeare's morals; and that they who affect a better morality than his are very apt to turn out either hypocrites or moral coxcombs. As for the rest, this Camillo, though little more than a staff in the drama, is nevertheless a pillar of State; his integrity and wisdom making him a light to the counsels and a guide to the footsteps of the greatest around him. Fit to be the stay of princes, he is one of those venerable relics of the past which show us how beautiful age can be, and which, linking together different generations, format once the salt of society and the strength of government.

I have never seen this play on the stage; but I can well understand how the scene with the painted statue, if fairly delivered, might be surpassingly effective. The illusion is all on the understandings of the spectators; and they seem to feel the _power_ without the _fact_ of animation, or to have a _sense_ of mobility in a _vision_ of fixedness. And such is the magic of the scene, that we almost fancy them turning into marble, as they fancy the marble turning into flesh.

END OF VOL. I.