For you in me can nothing worthy prove;
Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,
To do more for me than mine own desert,
And hang more praise upon deceased I
Than niggard truth would willingly impart :
O, lest your true love may seem false in this,
That you for love speak well of me untrue,
My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.

For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,
And so should you to love things nothing worth.
That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Sonnets, lxxi., lxxii., lxxiii.

Last Words.

There is nothing in history which is so improving to the reader as those accounts which we must write of the deaths of eminent persons, and of their behaviour in that dreadful season.

JOSEPH ADDISON, Spectator, No. 289.

O, BUT they say the tongues of dying men

Enforce attention like deep harmony:

Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain,
For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.
He that no more must say is listen'd more

Than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose;
More are men's ends mark'd than their lives before :
The setting sun, and music at the close,

As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past :
Though Richard my life's counsel would not hear,
My death's sad tale may yet undeaf his ear.

King Richard II., Act ii. Sc. 1, l. 5.

FROM

Shakespeare's Will.

First, E commend my soule into the handes of God my Creator,

Hoping and assuredlie beleeving,

Through thonelie merites of Jesus Christe my Saviour,

To be made partaker of lyfe everlastinge,

And my bodge to the earth

Whereof yt ys made.

SHAKESPEARE THE CHIEF OF

ALL POETS.

OF

Shakespeare's Entellect.

F this Shakespeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one. I think the best judgment, not of this country only, but of Europe, at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, that Shakespeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth, placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea! It has been said that, in the constructing of Shakespeare's dramas, there is, apart from all other "faculties," as they are called, an understanding manifested equal to that in Bacon's "Novum Organum." That is true; and it is not a truth that strikes every one. It would become more apparent if we tried, any of us for himself,

how, out of Shakespeare's dramatic materials, we could fashion such a result! The built house seems all so fit, - every way as it should be, as if it came there by its own law and the nature of things, we forget the rude disorderly quarry it was shaped from. The very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself had made it, hides the builder's merit. Perfect, more perfect, than any other man, we may call Shakespeare in this; he discerns, knows as by instinct, what condition he works under, what his materials are, what his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitory glance of insight that will suffice; it is deliberate illumination of the whole matter; it is a calmly seeing eye; a great intellect, in short. How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will give of it, is the best measure you could get of what intellect is in the man. What circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent; which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true beginning, the true sequence and ending? To find out this, you task the whole force of insight that is in the man. He must understand the thing; according to the depth of his understanding will the fitness of his answer be. You will try him so. Does like join itself to like; does the spirit of method stir in that confusion, so that its embroilment becomes order? Can the man say, Fiat lux, let there be light, and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is light in himself will he accomplish this. . . .

If called to define Shakespeare's faculty, I should say