THE DRAMATIC WORKS OF William Shakspeare. FROM THE TEXT OF THE CORRECTED COPIES OF STEEVENS AND MALONE, WITH A LIFE OF THE POET, BY CHARLES SYMMONS, D. D. THE SEVEN AGES OF MAN; EMBELLISHED WITH ELEGANT ENGRAVINGS. AND A GLOSSARY. COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME. New-York: PUBLISHED BY JAMES CONNER. SOLD BY COLLINS & HANNAY; COLLINS & CO. ; C. & G. & H. CARVILL; J. LEAVITT THE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE. BY CHARLES SYMMONS, D. D. Wherever any extraordinary display of human inferences of lawless and vagabond conjecture intellect has been made, there will human cu- Of this remarkable ignorance of one of the most riosity, at one period or the other, be busy to richly endowed with intellect of the human obtain some personal acquaintance with the dis- species, who ran his mortal race in our own tinguished mortal whom Heaven had been pleas-country, and who stands separated from us by ed to endow with a larger portion of its own no very great intervention of time, the causes ethereal energy. If the favoured man walked may not be difficult to be ascertained. William on the high places of the world; if he were con- Shakspeare was an actor and a writer of plays, versant with courts; if he directed the move-in neither of which characters, however he might ments of armies or of states, and thus held in his excel in them, could he be lifted high in the hand the fortunes and the lives of multitudes of estimation of his contemporaries. He was hohis fellow-creatures, the interest, which he noured, indeed, with the friendship of nobles, excites, will be immediate and strong; he stands and the patronage of monarchs; his theatre was on an eminence where he is the mark of many frequented by the wits of the metropolis; and he eyes; and dark and unlettered indeed must be associated with the most intellectual of his times. the age in which the incidents of his eventful life But the spirit of the age was against him; and, will not be noted, and the record of them be pre-in opposition to it, he could not become the subserved for the instruction or the entertainment ject of any general or comprehensive interest. of unborn generations. But if his course were The nation, in short, knew little and cared less through the vale of life: if he were unmingled about him. During his life, and for some years with the factions and the contests of the great: after his death, inferior dramatists outran him if the powers of his mind were devoted to the in the race of popularity; and then the flood of silent pursuits of literature-to the converse of puritan fanaticism swept him and the stage philosophy and the Muse, the possessor of the together into temporary oblivion. On the reethereal treasure may excite little of the attention storation of the monarchy and the theatre, the of his contemporaries; may walk quietly, with school of France perverted our taste, and it was a veil over his glories, to the grave; and, in not till the last century was somewhat advanced other times, when the expansion of his intel- that William Shakspeare arose again, as it were, lectual greatness has filled the eyes of the world, from the tomb, in all his proper majesty of light. it may be too late to inquire for his history as a He then became the subject of solicitous and man. The bright track of his genius indelibly learned inquiry: but inquiry was then too late; remains; but the trace of his mortal footstep is and all that it could recover, from the ravage of soon obliterated for ever. Homer is now only a time, were only a few human fragments, which name-a solitary name, which assures us, that, could scarcely be united into a man. To these at some unascertained period in the annals of causes of our personal ignorance of the great mankind, a mighty mind was indulged to a bard of England, must be added his own strange human being, and gave its wonderful produc- indifference to the celebrity of genius. When tions to the perpetual admiration of men, as they he had produced his admirable works, ignorant spring in succession in the path of time. Of or heedless of their value, he abandoned them Homer himself we actually know nothing; and with perfect indifference to oblivion or to fame. we see only an arm of immense power thrust It surpassed his thought that he could grow into forth from a mass of impenetrable darkness, and the admiration of the world; and, without any holding up the hero of his song to the applauses reference to the curiosity of future ages, in which of never-dying fame. But it may be supposed he could not conceive himself to possess an inthat the revolution of, perhaps, thirty centuries, terest, he was contented to die in the arms of has collected the cloud which thus withdraws obscurity, as an unlaurelled burgher of a prothe father of poesy from our sight. Little more vincial town. To this combination of causes than two centuries has elapsed since William are we to attribute the scantiness of our mateShakspeare conversed with our tongue, and trod rials for the Life of William Shakspeare. His the self-same soil with ourselves; and if it were works are in myriads of hands: he constitutes not for the records kept by our Church in its the delight of myriads of readers: his renown is registers of births, marriages, and burials, we coextensive with the civilization of man; and, should at this moment be as personally ignorant striding across the ocean from Europe, it occuof the "sweet swan of Avon," as we are of the pies the wide region of transatlantic empire: but old minstrel and rhapsodist of Meles. That he is himself only a shadow which disappoints William Shakspeare was born in Stratford upon our grasp: an undefined form which is rather Avon; that he married and had three children; intimated than discovered to the keenest searchthat he wrote a certain number of dramas; that ings of our eye. Of the little however, questionhe died before he had attained to old age, and able or certain, which can be told of him, we was buried in his native town, are positively the must now proceed to make the best use in our only facts, in the personal history of this extra-power, to write what by courtesy may be called ordinary man, of which we are certainly pos- his life; and we have only to lament that the sessed; and, if we should be solicitous to fill up result of our labour must greatly disappoint the this bare and most unsatisfactory outline, we curiosity which has been excited by the grandeur must have recourse to the vague reports of un- of his reputation. The slight narrative of Rowe, substantial tradition, or to the still more shadowy founded on the information obtained, in the be |