MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to fhapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation, and a name.

Vignette.

IN page 78, I have taken the liberty of hinting at one artist designing the portraits of Helena and Hermia. And there could not be a more pleafing Vignette (nor a more sweet portrait of infantine fondness) than what the fame artist would form of the fame persons, at a different age from what they will appear at, in page 78, viz. at their age of childhood-innocence, or at that early period, when with their needles they created both one flower, both on one fampler,

The fame artist is as capable of painting the tender loveliness of innocence, as of producing a fublime and moft expreffive portrait from the lines of: The poet's eye,

Head-piece.

A Fac-fimile of M. de Loutherbourg's Vignette print to Bell's laft edition, might be given for this department. Should not the airy fpirits however, have had lefs of mortal groffness about them?-Puck is rather too fat to go fwifter than the wind.

Scene-Prints.

TRUE love was never better painted than by Shakespeare. What has been applied to Euripedes, may well apply to our poet:

He steep'd in tears the piteous lines he wrote,
The tenderest bard that e'er impaffion'd fong.

SOME of the interviews of Hermia and Lyfander are tenderly interesting. And it requires an artist of the feeling foul of Cypriani to exprefs the tender defigns which Shakespeare has left us.

I will first mention the feveral pages from which (in my opinion) Hermia might be drawn to most advantage, and I will then recommend fuch O 2 few

* DR. ARMSTRONG tells us, that fome French Abbé has fomewhere afferted, that Shakespeare understood every paffion but love.

few of them, as ftrike me, as being most proper to be felected from the reft, for the purpose of ornamenting fome of the pages with her portrait.

207,

p. 7. So will I grow, fo live, fo die, my lord-
Ere I will yield my virgin patent up

Unto his lordship, to whofe unwish'd yoke
My foul confents not to give fovereignty.

p. 9. Lyf. How now my love? Why is your cheek so pale
How chance the rofes there do fade so fast?

p. 52. Lyf. One turf fhall ferve as pillow for us both,
One heart, one bed, two bofoms, and one troth.

OR, at the lines almost immediately following of:

Lyf. O, take the sense, sweet of my innocence;
Love takes the meaning, in love's conference.
I mean that my
heart unto yours is knit ;

So that but one heart can you make of it:
Two bofoms interchained with an oath.-.

P. 78

THE reader will be much pleafed by looking at page 42, of Heath's Revifal; as well as at page vol. I, of the laft edition of Dod's Beauties.