hitherto been considering, are constructed, for the most part, with materials not his own, supplied either by the ancient chronicler, or by some preceding dramatist; and are wrought up without any reference to that essential portion of a drama, a plot or fable. But when he is disengaged from the incumbrances to which he had submitted in his histories, he assumes the full character of the more perfect dramatist; and discovers that art, for which, equally with the powers of his imagination, he was celebrated by Ben Jonson. In some of his plays, indeed, we acknowledge the looseness with which his fable is combined, and the careless hurry with which he accelerates its close: but in the greater triumphs of his genius, we find the fable artificially planned and solidly constructed. In "The Merchant of Venice," in "Romeo and Juliet," in " Lear," in " Othello," and, above all, in that intellectual wonder, "The Tempest," we may observe the fable managed with the hand of a master, and contributing its effect, with the characters and the dialogue, to amuse, to agitate, or to surprise. In that beautiful pastoral drama," As You Like It," the sudden disappearance of old Adam from the scene has been a subject of regret to more than one of the commentators and Samuel Johnson wishes that the dialogue between the hermit, as he calls him, and the usurping duke, the result of which was the conversion of the latter, had not been omitted on the stage. But old Adam had fulfilled the purposes of his dramatic existence, and it was therefore properly closed. He had discovered his honest attachment to his young master, and had experienced his young master's gratitude. He was brought into a place of safety; and his fortunes were now blended with those of the princely exiles of the forest. There was no further part for him to act; and he passed naturally from the stage, no longer the object of our hopes or our fears. On the subject of S. Johnson's wish respecting the dialogue between the old religious man and the guilty duke, we may shortly remark, that nothing could have been more undramatic than the intervention of such a scene of dry and didactic morality, at such a crisis of the drama, when the minds of the audience were heated, and hurrying to its approaching close. Like Felix in the sacred history, the royal criminal might have trembled at the lecture of the holy man: but the audience, probably, would have been irritated or asleep. No! Shakspeare was not so ignorant of his art as to require to be instructed in it by the author of Irene. But it was in the portraiture of the human mind: in the specific delineation of intellectual and moral man, that the genius of Shakspeare was preeminently conspicuous. The curious inquisition of his eye into the characters, which were passing beneath its glance, cannot be made too much the subject of our admiration and wonder. He saw them not only under their broad distinctions, when they became obvious to the common observer; but he beheld them in their nicer tints and shadings, by which they are diversified, though the tone of their general colouring may be the same. "facies non omnibus una; Nec diversa tamen." To illustrate what I mean, let us contemplate Portia, Desdemona, Imogen, Rosalind, Beatrice, Cordelia, and Ophelia. They are equally amiable and affectionate women; equally faithful and attached as wives, as friends, as daughters: two of them, also, are noted for the poignancy and sparkle of their wit: and yet can it be said that any one of them can be mistaken for the other; or that a single speech can with propriety be transferred from the lips of her to whom it has been assigned by her dramatic creator? They are all known to us as the children of one family, with a general resemblance, and an individual discrimination. Benedict and Mercutio are both young men of high birth; of known valour; of playful wit, delighting itself in pleasantry and frolic: yet are they not distinguished beyond the possibility of their being confounded? So intimately conversant is our great dramatist with the varieties of human nature, that he scatters character, as a king on his accession scatters gold, among the populace; and there is not one, perhaps, of his subordinate agents, who has not his peculiar features and a complexion of his own. So mighty is our Poet as a dramatic creator, that characters of the most opposite description are thrown in equal perfection and with equal facility from his hand. The executive decision of Richard; the meditative inefficiency of Hamlet: the melancholy of Jaques, which draws subjects of moral reflexion from every object around him; and the hilarity of Mercutio, which forsakes him not in the very act of dying: the great soul of Macbeth, maddened and bursting under accumulated guilt; and "the unimitated and inimitable Falstaff" (as he is called by S. Johnson, in the single outbreak of enthusiasm extorted from him by the wonders of Shakspeare's page) revelling in the tavern at Eastcheap, or jesting on the field of Shrewsbury, are all the creatures of one plastic intellect, and are absolute and entire in their kind. Malignity and revenge constitute the fourdation on which are constructed the two very dissimilar characters of Shylock and Iago. But there is something terrific and even awful in the inexorability of the Jew, whilst there is nothing but meanness in the artifices of the Venetian standard-bearer. They are both men of vigorous and acute understandings: we hate them both; but our hatred of the former is mingled with involuntary respect; of the latter our detestation is made more intensely strong by its association with contempt. In his representation of madness, Shakspeare must be regarded as inimitably excellent; and the picture of this last degradation of humanity, with nature always for his model, is diversified by him at his pleasure. Even over the wreck of the human mind he throws the variegated robe of character. How different is the genuine insanity of Lear from the assumed insanity of Edgar, with which it is immediately confronted; and how distinct, again, are both of these from the disorder which prevails in the brain of the lost and the tender Ophelia. In one illustrious effort of his dramatic power, our Poet has had the confidence to produce two delineations of the same perversion of the human heart, and to present them, at once similar and dissimilar, to the examination of our wondering eyes. In Timon and Apemantus is exhibited the same deformity of misanthropy: but in the former it springs from the corruption of a noble mind, stricken and laid prostrate by the ingratitude of his species: in the latter it is a noisome weed, germinating from a bitter root, and cherished by perverse cultivation into branching malignity. In each of them, as the vice has a different parentage, so has it a diversified aspect. With such an intimacy with all the fine and subtle workings of Nature in her action on the human heart, it is not wonderful that our great dramatist should pos→ sess an absolute controll over the passions; and should be able to unlock the cell of each of them as the impulse of his fancy may direct. When we follow MacDeth to the chamber of Duncan: when we stand with him by the enchanted caldron; or see him, under the infliction of conscience, glaring at the spectre of the blood-boltered Banquo in the possession of the royal chair, horror is by our side, thrilling in our veins and bristling in our hair. When we attend the Danish prince to his midnight conference with the shade of his murdered father, and hear the ineffable accents of the dead, willing, but prohibited, "to tell the secrets of his prisonhouse," we are appalled, and our faculties are suspended in terror. When we see the faithful and the lovely Juliet awaking in the house of darkness and corruption with the corpse of her husband on her bosom: when we behold the innocent Desdemona dying by the hand, to which she was the most fondly attached; and charging on herself, with her latest breath, the guilt of her murderer: when we witness the wretchedness of Lear, contending with the midnight storm, and strewing his white locks on the blast; or carrying in his withered arms the body of his Cordelia murdered in his cause, is it possible that the tear of pity should not start from our cyes and trickle down our cheeks? In the forest of Arden, as we ramble with its accidental inmates, our spirits are soothed into cheerfulness, and are, occasionally, elevated into gaiety. In the tavern at Eastcheap, with the witty and debauched knight, we meet with "Laughter holding both his sides;" and we surrender ourselves, willingly and delighted, to the inebriation of his influence. We could dwell for a long summer's day amid the fertility of these charming topics; if we were not called from them to a higher region of poetic enjoyment, possessed by the genius of Shakspeare alone; where he reigns sole lord; and where his subjects are the wondrous progeny of his own creative imagination. From whatever quarter of the world, eastern or northern, England may have originally derived her elves and her fairies, Shakspeare undoubtedly formed these little beings, as they flutter in his scenes, from an idea of his own; and they came from his hand, beneficent and friendly to man; immortal and invulnerable; of such corporeal minuteness as to lie in the bell of a cowslip; and yet of such power as to disorder the seasons; as "to bedim The noontide sun; call forth the mutinous winds : And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault, Set roaring war.' To this little etherial people our Poet has assigned manners and occupations in perfect consistency with their nature; and has sent them forth, in the richest array of fancy, to gambol before us, to astonish and delight us. They resemble nothing upon earth: but if they could exist with man, they would act and speak as they act and speak, with the inspiration of our Poet, in "The Tempest,” and “ A Midsummer Night's Dream.” In contrast with his Ariel," a spirit too delicate," as the servant of a witch, "to act her earthy and abhorr'd commands:" but ready, under the controll of his philosophic master, "To answer his best pleasure, be it to fly, |