In this, addressed, as all the sonnets of this description are, to his young friend, there is an evident allusion to the laxity of habits and manners which his profession had suffered him to indulge. The following is not quoted by Schlegel, but it is a curious and emphatic testimony, as I have before taken occasion to remark, that, whatever may have been his success as an actor with the audience in impressing them with the cunning of the scene, he most assuredly went for his acting to the only true source-his own heart. Well might he say that "he sold cheap what is most dear," since he " coined his heart for drachmas." His own thoughts he gored" that he might express the thoughts of others, his own affections, newly reaped, he turned into a harvest of profit-for all but for himself!

"Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motley to the view;

Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,

Made old offences of affections new!

Most true it is that I have looked on truth

Askaunce and strangely *.'

It is not my purpose to occupy the reader further with a question I have already discussed, but I may be permitted to subjoin an extract in illustration of the manners of the audiences of those days at a new play (they have not greatly altered since), which were certainly not of a nature to subdue, at a later period of his life when he acted in plays he had written, this tendency of dislike to a profession which, in the jealous self-watchfulness of his fine character, Shakspeare had feared, from the first, might hurt his mind. Fancy the poet playing in one of his own tragedies, to such an audience as is described in the following extract! "But the sport is at a new play to observe the sway and variety of opinion that passeth it. A man shall have such a confused mixture of judgment poured out in the throng there, as ridiculous as laughter itself. One says he likes not the writing, another likes not the plot, another not the playing; and sometimes a fellow that comes not there past once in five years, at a Parliament time or so, will be as deep mired in censuring as the best, and swear by God's foot he would never stir his foot to see a hundred such as that is!" Such is criticism still, and so "For eighteen-pence we sit

The lord and judge of all fresh wit!”

With his profession, then, notwithstanding its momentary triumphs, it is clear that Shakspeare was at heart discontented. I have before shown, that as soon as the opportunity came within his reach, by accession to considerable shares in the theatre, he removed his name from the list of the company. His affection for his brother actors continued nevertheless, and his last will showed he had not forgotten them. never vented his discontent on others. The very source of his weary sadness was the strength of his charity. The genius which made him feel more intensely, and suffer more strongly than other men, gave him more noble means of complaint and of endurance.

He

And truly they were tested to the uttermost. In one of his sonnets he speaks of the impression which "vulgar scandalt" had stamped upon his brow. His "friends" had not been so considerate as he. With

what measure he meted, it was not meted to him again. The ill-fated passion which I have in former papers described, and the irregularities into which it betrayed him, would seem to have been turned, by every engine of gossip and slander, into the means of charging him with gross imputations of vice. Stung to the quick by these reports, he breaks forth at last into the following. A nobler lesson of rebuke to the mean baseness of slander was never written :

""Tis better to be vile, than vile esteem'd,

When not to be receives reproach of being;
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deem'd
Not by our feeling, but by other's seeing.
For why should others' false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?

Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,

Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No-I am that I am; and they that level

At my abuses, reckon up their own:

I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel;'

By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown*."

And not the less conscious of his weaknesses was the divine poet, though the world's exaggerated slanders wrung from him this selfvindication. The contrast in his manner of turning from these scandals of the multitude, to repose, as it were, in the very strength of weakness, upon the bosom of his friend, bears with it a most affecting instructiveness. "When thou shalt be disposed," he says,

"to set me light,

And place my merit in the eye of scorn,
Upon thy side against myself I'll fight +.”

It is the fashion with many to confess their failings with an ostentatious air, as if they were as good as other people's virtues. Contrast this with the modesty of Shakspeare!

In a subsequent sonnet to his friend, he expresses with peculiar tenderness a feeling of deep melancholy, which it is easy to see has had its origin in some injustice on the part of the world :—

"No longer mourn for me when I am dead,
When you shall hear the surly, sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled

From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell!

Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
Or if (I say) you
look upon this verse,

When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,

But let your love even with my life decay,-
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone."

In another he says,—

"Let those who are in favour with their stars,
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars," &c.§

* Sonnet 121.

+ Sonnet 88.

Sonnet 71.

§ Sonnet 25.

And the feeling has a still more striking illustration (many could be adduced besides) in the ninetieth sonnet :

"Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now,

Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow,
And do not drop in for an after loss ;-

Ah! do not, when my heart hath 'scaped this sorrow,
Come in the rearward of a conquer'd woe;
Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,

To linger out a purposed overthrow !

If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite,
But in the onset come; so shall I taste

At first the very worst of Fortune's might;
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compared with loss of thee, will not seem so*.

But

It is impossible now to trace to their origin these complaints of wrong, but that serious cause existed for them there can be little doubt. observe how little they influenced his greater writings, unless to temper them with more benignant charity! It is a delightful matter of contemplation. He-the so potent master," the absolute governor of laughter and of tears, the creator of passion and of thought, who strung the very chords of the human heart upon his lyre-is_here exhibited wrestling like an ordinary man with the mean wrongs and petty accidents of the world, and yet leaving, in the record of those human sufferings, a lesson not less glorious or instructive than in the most godlike of his intellectual triumphs. He does not attempt to bear away opposition or injury, however unjust, by self-sufficiency or intolerance. He has obviously his wisdom still, his strength, his power over others and himself. Baffled by the unkindness of his fellow-men, he will not use his genius to baffle the hopes of others. Feeling the wrongs of the world, he feels the allowances that may be made for them. "Beautiful usages are remaining still, ardent hopes, radiant aspirations!" When Dante was injured by his fellow-citizens, he worked terrible vengeance on them in one of the sublimest of poems,—for the memory of his injuries pursued him even into the immensity of eternal light, and his unforgiving spirit, in the company of saints and angels, "darkened at the name of Florence." Shakspeare, suffering from the sense of wrong (not perhaps so deeply, but in these cases the effect is ever in a great degree independent of the amount of grievance), simply utters to his friend an involuntary sonnet of complaint, which is felt, as we read it, not as a declaration published to the world, but as a secret whispered to a chosen ear; and after heaving this sigh, as it were, from the fulness of his heart, proceeds to lay upon himself cheerfully the duties of life; to dream no more of the excesses of sorrow; but to teach us in immortal comedies and tragedies, that if every good quality and every good blessing were distributed in equal portions through the world, there would be less of gratitude, less of submission, less of hope, less even of contentment; and that it is well for us that the web of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together; for that our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not, and our vices would despair if they were not che

*Sonnet 90.

rished by our virtues. This is the moral teaching of Shakspeare's melancholy and discontentment. Whatever may have been his private losses and sufferings, he used them simply for the purposes of wisdom. He scorned to make the public a party to them, or to bring the evil thing near them. If the yoke of life presses heavily on us, we may use that very experience to make it light and supportable to others. Shakspeare kept his personal emotions to himself, and gave the world his knowledge. There is not one of his deepest tragedies from which we do not feel after reading it better disposed to be happy ourselves and kind to others. In proportion to the greatness of the evil, is our sense and desire' of the opposite good excited. Even his "Timon of Athens," which we may suppose the effusion of his mind when smarting most severely from recollected baseness and ingratitude, leaves with us equally the effect of a noble satire against vice, or of an impassioned invocation of virtue. It is anything but an argument for spleen.

Nor, be sure, did Shakspeare go unrewarded for this magnanimity of sorrow. It was his fortune, while he strove thus to alleviate the sorrows of others, to have his own lightened also. He felt his very calamity

"Sweeten in the suffering pangs it bears;"

and after the wholesome exercise of his imagination and genius, "return rebuked to my content,

And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent *."

Thus, the sonnet I am now about to quote is perhaps the most beautiful and pathetic picture that was ever painted, both of the afflictions by which life is embittered, and of the affections by which life is endeared; of the weary trials to which it is exposed, and of the pure and peaceful enjoyments with which its trials may be yet subdued :

"When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With that I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,-and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings t."

What manner of man might that be whose art or scope Shakspeare needed to desire! But this is a modesty inimitable as his wonderful writings, and conveying to the heart, as I have already said, a lesson of equal truth and beauty. Perhaps of greater. For in his writings the man, Shakspeare, soars above humanity like a god; whereas, here we meet him on the common ground of suffering and necessity, which may be far more profitable to our moral sense, if, as the poet has said so beautifully, the human heart by which we live is kept in a sound and healthful state, not so much by gazing on the everlasting stars that are

above and at a distance from it, as by feeding on the humble roots that grow in the common path which we are destined to pass over, and inhaling the breath of those frail flowers of a day that spring up by its side. Such, so fragrant and so frail, are the sufferings of the man, compared with the glorious achievements of the poet! How refreshing it is even to feel that this divine poet had his actual sufferings, when, as in the sonnet we have just read, we see also that even from them his natural affections derived an impulse in which suffering, for the time, was lost. Besides, it is permitted us to trace through all these personal confessions a man of irresistible fineness and gentleness of nature; and this circumstance may add as much to the wisdom we derive from love, as the exhibition of Shakspeare's intellect in his plays adds to the wisdom we confess in admiration. For love is not due to intellect alone. Intellectual powers are the leaders of the world (as Mr. Hunt remarked the other day in one of his delightful essays,) but only for the purpose of guiding them into the promised land of peace and amiableness, or of showing them encouraging pictures of it by the way. They are no more the things to live with, or repose with, apart from the qualities of the heart and temper, than the means are without the end; or than “ a guide to a pleasant spot is to be taken for the spot itself, with its trees, health, and quiet."

These remarks on the melancholy of Shakspeare may be appropriately closed with the following sonnet. It must have been written in the meridian of his life, while he was about forty, and before some of his great plays were written. Yet it is not the only one in which he anticipates for himself a "confined doom."* Here he would seem to have been immediately influenced by some distrust of the continuance of his intellectual strength; some dread that that which had nourished might consume him; some fear that the muse might desert him, and leave tenantless a "bare, ruin'd choir." Vain fears!

"That time of year thou may'st 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 see'st 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 perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long."+

What inexpressibly touching images this fine sonnet conjures up before us! What a noble comparison that is, of an avenue of trees with its upper branches leafless, to the vaulting of a gothic aisle with its roof shattered,—and of both to the poet silenced by sickness or age, the husk of what he was, the empty image of his former beauty and glory! The "confined doom" which Shakspeare anticipated was fated to be realized. Having lived long enough to realize an independence, as well + Sonnet 73.

* Sonnet 107.