The sun drying the dewdrops on the leaves is not a book image. The brilliancy, the freshness, are as true as they are beautiful. Of such stuff are the natural descriptions of Shakspere always made. He is as minute and accurate as White; he is more philosophical than Davy. The carrier in the inn-yard at Rochester exclaims, "An 't be not four by the day, I'll be hanged: Charles' wain is over the new chimney."* Here is the very commonest remark of a common man; and yet the principle of ascertaining the time of the night by the position of a star in relation to a fixed object must have been the result of observation in him who dramatized the scene. The variation of the quarter in which the sun rises according to the time of the year may be a trite problem to scientific readers; but it must have been a familiar fact to him who, with marvellous art, threw in a dialogue upon the incident, to diversify and give repose to the pause in a scene of overwhelming interest :"Decius. Here lies the east: doth not the day break here? Casca. No. Cinna. O, pardon, sir, it doth; and yon gray lines, That fret the clouds, are messengers of day. Casca. You shall confess that you are both deceived. Here, as I point my sword, the sun arises; Which is a great way growing on the south, Some two months hence up higher toward the north It was in his native fields that Shakspere had seen morning under every aspect ;— "in russet mantle clad ;" now, opening her "golden gates." A mighty battle is compared to the morning's war :— now, "When dying clouds contend with growing light." Perhaps this might have been copied, or imagined; but the poet throws in a reality, which leaves no doubt that it had been seen :— "What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails, Can neither call it perfect day, nor night."‡ What but actual observation could have told the poet that the thin flakes of ice which he calls "flaws” are suddenly produced by the coldness of the morning just before sunrise? The fact abided in his mind till it shaped itself into a comparison with the peculiarities in the character of his Prince Henry : "As humorous as winter, and as sudden He has painted his own Romeo, when under the influence of a fleeting first love, stealing "into the covert of the wood," "An hour before the worshipp'd sun Peer'd forth the golden window of the east." § A melancholy and a joyous spirit would equally have tempted the young poet to * 66 "Henry IV.," Part I., Act II., Scene I. "Julius Cæsar," Act. II., Scene I. "Henry VI.," Part III., Act II., Scene V. § "Romeo and Juliet," Act I., Scene I. or intent upon a favourite book; or yielding to the imagination which "bodies forth the forms of things unknown,"-many of the vacant hours of the young man would be solitary hours in his own fields. Yet, whatever was the pervading train of thought, he would still be an observer. In the vast storehouse of his mind would all that he observed be laid up; not labelled and classified after the fashion of some poetical manufacturers, but to be called into use at a near or a distant day, by that wonderful power of assimilation which perceives all the subtile and delicate relations between the moral and the physical worlds, and thus raises the objects of sense into a companionship with the loftiest things that belong to the fancy and the reason. Who ever painted with such marvellous power-we use the word advisedly—the changing forms of an evening sky, "black vesper's pageants?" "Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish ; A vapour, sometime, like a bear, or lion, A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon 't, that nod unto the world, This is noble painting, but it is something higher. When Antony goes on to compare himself to the cloud which “ even with a thought the rack dislimns," we learn how the great poet uses his observation of nature. Not only do such magnificent objects as these receive an elevation from the poet's moral application of them, but the commonest things, even the vulgarest things, ludicrous but for their management, become in the highest degree poetical. Many a time in the low meadows of the Avon would Shakspere have seen the irritation of the herd under the torments of the gad-fly. The poet takes this common thing to describe an event which changed the destinies of the world : "Yon ribald nag of Egypt, Whom leprosy o'ertake! i' the midst o'the fight,- Both as the same, or rather ours the elder, The brize upon her, like a cow in June, When Hector is in the field, "The strawy Greeks, ripe for his edge, Fall down before him, like the mower's swath." || Brutus, speculating upon the probable consequences of Cæsar becoming king, exclaims "It is the bright day that brings forth the adder, *"Romeo and Juliet," Act I., Scene I. "Triolus and Cressida," Act v., Scene v. "As You Like It," Act IV., Scene III. The same object had been seen and described in an earlier play, without its grand association :— "The snake lies rolled in the cheerful sun." ""* The snake seems a liege subject of the domain of poetry. Her enamel skin is a weed for a fairy ; the green and gilded snake wreathed around the sleeping man‡ is a picture. But what ordinary writer would not shrink from the poetical handling of a snail? It is the surpassing accuracy of the naturalist that has introduced the snail into one of the noblest passages of the poet, in juxta-position with the Hesperides and Apollo's lute : "Love's feeling is more soft and sensible Than are the tender horns of cockled snails." § One of the grandest scenes of a tragedy of the mature poet is full of the most familiar images derived from an accurate observation of the natural world. The images seem to rise up spontaneously out of the minute recollections of a life spent in watching the movements of the lower creation. "A deed of dreadful note" is to be done before nightfall. The bat, the beetle, and the crow, are the common, and therefore the most appropriate, instruments which are used to mark the approach of night. The simplest thing of life is thus raised into sublimity at a touch: the murder of Banquo is to be done. The very time is at hand :— "Light thickens; and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood.” * The naturalist has not only heard the "drowsy hums" of the beetle as he wandered in the evening twilight, but he has traced the insect to its hiding-place. The poet associates the fact with a great lesson,―to be content in obscure safety :— "Often, to our comfort, shall we find The sharded beetle in a safer hold Let it not be forgotten that the young Shakspere had to make himself a naturalist. Books of accurate observation there were none to guide him; for the popular works of natural history, of which there were very few, were full of extravagant fables and vague descriptions. Mr. Douce has told us that Shakspere was extremely well acquainted with one of these works-" Batman uppon Bartholome his booke De proprietatibus rerum, 1582;" and he has ascertained that the original price of this volume was eight shillings. But Shakspere did not go to Bartholomeus or to Batman (who made large additions to the original work from Gesner), for his truths in natural history. Mr. Douce has cited many passages in his "Illustrations," in which he traces Shakspere to Bartholomeus. We have gone carefully through the volumes where these are scattered up and down, and we find a remarkable circumstance unnoticed by Mr. Douce, that these passages, with scarcely an exception, refer to the vulgar errors of natural history which Shakspere has transmuted into never-dying poetry. It is here that we find the origin of the toad which wears a precious jewel in his head;" of the phoenix of Arabia ;§ of the basilisk that kills the innocent gazer;|| of the unlicked bear-whelp. But the truths of natural history which we constantly light upon in Shakspere were all essentially derived from his own observation. There is a remarkable instance in his discrimination between the popular belief and the scientific truth in his notice of the habits of the cuckoo. The Fool in Lear expresses the popular belief in a proverbial sentence:— 66 Worcester, in his address to Henry IV., expresses the scientific fact without the vulgar exaggeration, a fact unnoticed till the time of Dr. Jenner by any writer but the naturalist William Shakspere :— "Being fed by us, you used us so As that ungentle gull the cuckoo's bird That even our love durst not come near your sight." The noble description of the commonwealth of bees in Henry V. was suggested, in all probability, by a similar description in Lyly's "Euphues." But Shakspere's description not only displays the wonderful accuracy of his observation, in subser *Macbeth," Act III., Scene II. †"Cymbeline," Act III. Scene III. vience to the poetical art, but the unerring discrimination of his philosophy. Lyly makes his bees exercise the reasoning faculty-choose a king, call a parliament, consult for laws, elect officers; Shakspere says “they have a king and officers;" and he refers their operations to "a rule in nature." The same accuracy that he brought to the observation of the workings of nature in the fields, he bestows upon the assistant labours of art in the garden. The fine dialogue between the old gardener at Langley and the servants, is full of technical information. The great principles of horticultural economy, pruning and weeding, are there as clearly displayed as in the most anti-poetical of treatises. We have the crab-tree slip grafted upon noble stock (the reverse of the gardener's practice) in one play :* in another we have the luxurious "scions put in wild and savage stock."+ A writer in a technical periodical work seriously maintains that Shakspere was a professional gardener. This is better evidence of the poet's horticultural acquirements than Steevens's pert remark, "Shakspeare seems to have had little knowledge in gardening."§ Shakspere's philosophy of the gardener's art is true of all art. It is the great Platonic belief which raises art into something much higher than a thing of mere imitation, showing the great informing spirit of the universe working through man, as through any other agency of his will :— Perdita's flowers! who can mention them, and not think of the wonderful union of the accuracy of the naturalist with the loveliest images of the poet? It has been well remarked that in Milton's "Lycidas" we have "among vernal flowers many of those which are the offspring of Midsummer;" but Shakspere distinguishes his groups, assorting those of the several seasons. Perhaps in the whole compass of poetry there is no such perfect combination of elegance and truth as the passage in which Perdita bestows her gifts-parts of which are of such surpassing loveliness, that the sense aches at them : "O, Proserpina, For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou lett'st fall * " 'Henry VI.," Part II., Act III., Scene II. "Henry V.," Act III., Scene v .I "The Gardener's Chronicle," May 29, 1841. § Note on |