degree of earnestness and self-possession. His character is displayed as distinctly in other less prominent parts of the play, and we may collect from a few sentences the history of his life-his descent and origin, his thrift and domestic economy, his affection for his daughter, whom he loves next to his wealth, his courtship and his first present to Leah his wife! "I would not have given it (the ring which he first gave her) for a wilderness of monkeys!" What a fine Hebraism is implied in this expression! . . .

When we first went to see Mr. Kean in Shylock, we expected to see, what we had been used to see, a decrepit old man, bent with age and ugly with mental deformity, grinning with deadly malice, with the venom of his heart congealed in the expression of his countenance, sullen, morose, gloomy, inflexible, brooding over one idea, that of his hatred, and fixed on one unalterable purpose, that of his revenge. We were disappointed, because we had taken our idea from other actors, not from the play. There is no proof there that Shylock is old, but a single line, “ Bassanio and old Shylock, both stand forth"- which does not imply that he is infirm with age-and the circumstance that he has a daughter marriageable, which does not imply that he is old at all. It would be too much to say that his body should be made crooked and deformed to answer to his mind, which is bowed down and warped with prejudices and passion. That he has but one idea is not true; he has more ideas than any other person in the piece; and if he is intense and inveterate in the pursuit of his purpose, he shows the utmost elasticity, vigour, and presence of mind, in the means of attaining it. But so rooted was our habitual impression of the part from seeing it caricatured in the representation, that it was only from a careful perusal of the play itself that we saw our error. The stage is not in general the best place to study our author's characters in. It is too often filled with traditional commonplace conceptions of the part, handed down

from sire to son, and suited to the taste of the great vulgar and the small. ""T is an unweeded garden; things rank and gross do merely gender in it.”* If a man of genius comes once in an age to clear away the rubbish, to make it fruitful and wholesome, they cry, "T is a bad school; it may be like nature, it may be like Shakespear, but it is not like. us." Admirable critics!

[From Knight's "Pictorial Shakspere." †]

Antonio is one of the most beautiful of Shakspere's characters. He does not take a very prominent part in the drama: he is a sufferer rather than an actor. We view him, in the outset, rich, liberal, surrounded with friends; yet he is unhappy. He has higher aspirations than those which ordinarily belong to one dependent upon the chances of commerce; and this uncertainty, as we think, produces his unhappiness. He will not acknowledge the forebodings of evil which come across his mind. Ulrici says, "It was the overgreat magnitude of his earthly riches, which, although his heart was by no means dependent upon their amount, unconsciously confined the free flight of his soul." We doubt if Shakspere meant this. He has addressed the reproof of that state of mind to Portia, from the lips of Nerissa :

Portia. By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world.

Nerissa. You would be, sweet madam, if your miseries were in the *Hazlitt is evidently quoting from memory. The reading in Ham, i. 2. 135 is:

't is an unweeded garden

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely.

Shakespeare uses the verb gender only in Oth. iv. 2. 63:

a cistern for foul toads

To knot and gender in.

† Pictorial Edition of Shakspere, edited by Charles Knight (2d ed. London, 1867), vol. i. of Comedies, p. 452 fol.

same abundance as your good fortunes are; and yet, for aught I see, they are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing.

Antonio may say

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad;

but his reasoning denial of the cause of his sadness is a proof to us that the foreboding of losses

Enow to press a royal merchant down,

is at the bottom of his sadness.

It appears to us as a self

delusion, which his secret nature rejects, that he says,

My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year:

Therefore, my merchandize makes me not sad.

When he has given the fatal bond, he has a sort of desperate confidence, which to us looks very unlike assured belief:

Why, fear not, man, I will not forfeit it;

Within these two months, that 's a month before

This bond expires, I do expect return

Of thrice three times the value of this bond.

And, finally, when his calamity has become a real thing, and not a shadowy notion, his deportment shows that his mind. has been long familiar with images of ruin:

Give me your hand, Bassanio; fare you well!
Grieve not that I am fallen to this for you;
For herein Fortune shows herself more kind
Than is her custom: it is still her use,

To let the wretched man outlive his wealth,

To view, with hollow eye and wrinkled brow,

An age of poverty; from which lingering penance

Of such a misery doth she cut me off.

The generosity of Antonio's nature unfitted him for a contest with the circumstances amid which his lot was cast.

The

Jew says

In low simplicity,

He lends out money gratis.

I oft deliver'd from his forfeitures

Many that have at times made moan to me.

Bassanio describes him, as

The kindest man,

The best condition'd and unwearied spirit

In doing courtesies.

To such a spirit, whose "means are in supposition "—whose ventures are "squander'd abroad"—the curse of the Jew must have sometimes presented itself to his own prophetic mind:

This is the fool that lends out money gratis.

Antonio and his position are not in harmony. But there is something else discordant in Antonio's mind. This kind friend this generous benefactor-this gentle spirit—this man "unwearied in doing courtesies"-can outrage and insult a fellow-creature, because he is of another creed:

Shylock. Fair sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last;
You spurn'd me such a day; another time

You call'd me dog; and for these courtesies

I'll lend you thus much moneys.

Antonio. I am as like to call thee so again,
To spet on thee again, to spurn thee too.

Was it without an object that Shakspere made this man, so entitled to command our affections and our sympathy, act so unworthy a part, and not be ashamed of the act? Most assuredly the poet did not intend to justify the indignities which were heaped upon Shylock; for in the very strongest way he has made the Jew remember the insult in the progress of his wild revenge :

Thou call'dst me dog before thou hadst a cause :

But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs.

Here, to our minds, is the first of the lessons of charity which this play teaches. Antonio is as much to be pitied for his

prejudices as the Jew for his.

They had both been nurtured in evil opinions. They had both been surrounded by influences which more or less held in subjection their better natures. The honoured Christian is as intolerant as the despised Jew. The one habitually pursues with injustice the subjected man that he has been taught to loathe; the other, in the depths of his subtle obstinacy, seizes upon the occasion to destroy the powerful man that he has been compelled to fear. The companions of Antonio exhibit, more or less, the same reflection of the prejudices which have become to them a second nature. They are not so gross in their prej udices as Launcelot, to whom "the Jew is the very devil incarnation." But to Lorenzo, who is about to marry his daughter, Shylock is a "faithless Jew." When the unhappy father is bereft of all that constituted the solace of his home, and before he has manifested that spirit of revenge which might well call for indignation and contempt, he is to the gentlemanly Salanio "the villain Jew,” and “the dog Jew.” When the unhappy man speaks of his daughter's flight, he is met with a brutal jest on the part of Salarino, who, within his own circle, is the pleasantest of men: "I, for my part, knew the tailor that made the wings she flew withal." We can understand the reproaches that are heaped upon Shylock in the trial scene, as something that might come out of the depths of any passion-stirred nature; but the habitual contempt with which he is treated by men who in every other respect are gentle and good-humoured and benevolent, is a proof to us that Shakspere meant to represent the struggle that must inevitably ensue, in a condition of society where the innate sense of justice is deadened in the powerful by those hereditary prejudices which make cruelty virtue; and where the powerless, invested by accident with the means of revenge, say with Shylock, "The villany you teach me I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction." The climax of this subjection of our higher and bet