SHAKSPEARE,

BORN, 1564,-DIED, 1616.

SHAKSPEARE is here in his purely poetical creations, apart (as much as it is possible for such a thinker and humanist to be) from thought and humanity. There is nothing wanting either to the imagination or fancy of Shakspeare. The one is lofty, rich, affecting, palpable, subtle; the other full of grace, playfulness, and variety. He is equal to the greatest poets in grandeur of imagination; to all in diversity of it; to all in fancy; to all in everything else, except in a certain primæval intensity, such as Dante's and Chaucer's; and in narrative poetry, which (to judge from Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece) he certainly does not appear to have had a call to write. He over-informed it with reflection. It has been supposed that when Milton spoke of Shakspeare as

Fancy's child

Warbling his native wood-notes wild,

the genealogy did him injustice. But the critical distinction between Fancy and Imagination was hardly determined till of late. Collins himself, in his Ode on the Poetical Character, uses the word Fancy to imply both, even when speaking of Milton; and so did Milton, I conceive, when speaking of Shakspeare. The propriety of the words, 'native wood-notes wild," is not so clear. I take them to have been hastily said by a learned man of an unlearned. But Shakspeare, though he had not a college education, was as learned as any man, in the highest sense of the word, by a scholarly intuition. He had the spirit of learning. He was aware of the education he wanted, and by some means or other supplied it. He could anticipate Milton's own Greek and Latin ;

Tortive and errant from his course of growth—

The multitudinous seas incarnadine

A pudency so rosy, &C.

In fact, if Shakspeare's poetry has any fault, it is that of being too learned; too over-informed with thought and allusion. His wood-notes wild surpass Haydn and Bach. His wild roses were all twenty times double. He thinks twenty times to another man's once, and makes all his serious characters talk as well as he could himself,-with a superabundance of wit and intelligence. He knew, however, that fairies must have a language of their

own; and hence, perhaps, his poetry never runs in a more purely poetical vein than when he is speaking in their persons;—I mean it is less mixed up with those heaps of comments and reflections which, however the wilful or metaphysical critic may think them suitable on all occasions, or succeed in persuading us not to wish them absent, by reason of their stimulancy to one's mental activity, are assuredly neither always proper to dramatic, still less to narrative poetry; nor yet so opposed to all idiosyncrasy on the writer's part as Mr. Coleridge would have us believe. It is pretty manifest, on the contrary, that the over-informing intellect which Shakspeare thus carried into all his writings, must have been a personal as well as literary peculiarity; and as the events he speaks of are sometimes more interesting in their nature than even a superabundance of his comments can make them, readers may be pardoned in sometimes wishing that he had let them speak a little more briefly for themselves. Most people would prefer Ariosto's and Chaucer's narrative poetry to his; the Griselda, for instance, and the story of Isabel,-to the Rape of Lucrece. The intense passion is enough. The misery is enough. We do not want even the divinest talk about what Nature herself tends to petrify into silence. Curæ ingentes stupent. Our divine poet had not quite outlived the times when it was thought proper for a writer to say everything

that came into his head. He was a student of
Chaucer: he beheld the living fame of Spenser;
and his fellow-dramatists did not help to restrain
him. The players told Ben Jonson that Shaks-
peare never blotted a line; and Ben says he was
thought invidious for observing, that he wished he
had blotted a thousand. He sometimes, he says,
required stopping. (Aliquando sufflaminandus erat.)
Was this meant to apply to his conversation as well
as writing? Did he manifest a like exuberance in
company? Perhaps he would have done so, but
for modesty and self-knowledge. To keep his elo-
quence altogether within bounds was hardly pos-
sible; and who could have wished it had been?
Would that he had had a Boswell a hundred times
as voluminous as Dr. Johnson's, to take all down!
Bacon's Essays would have seemed like a drop out
of his ocean.
He would have swallowed dozens
of Hobbeses by anticipation, like larks for his

supper.

If Shakspeare, instead of proving himself the greatest poet in the world, had written nothing but the fanciful scenes in this volume, he would still have obtained a high and singular reputation,—that of Poet of the Fairies. For he may be said to have invented the Fairies; that is to say, he was the first that turned them to poetical account; that bore them from clownish neighbourhoods to the richest soils of fancy and imagination.

WHOLE STORY OF THE TEMPEST.

ENCHANTMENT, MONSTROSITY, AND LOVE.

The whole story of the Tempest is really contained in this scene.

Mira. I pray you, sir,

(For still 'tis beating in my mind) your reason

For raising this sea-storm?

Pro.

Know thus far forth ;

By accident, most strange, bountiful fortune,
Now my dear lady, hath mine enemies
Brought to this shore: and by my prescience,

I find my zenith doth depend upon

A most auspicious star; whose influence,

If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes
Will ever after droop ;-here cease more questions;
Thou art inclin'd to sleep; 'tis a good dulness,
And give it way;-I know thou canst not choose.-

(Miranda sleeps.)

Come away, servants, come; I am ready now;
Approach, my Ariel; come.

Enter ARIEL.

Ari. All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come

To answer thy best pleasure; be 't to fly,

To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride

On the curl'd clouds; to thy strong bidding, task

Ariel, and all his quality.

Perform'd to point the tempest that I bade thee?

Ari. To every article.

I boarded the king's ship; now on the beak,

Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,