and no man was better formed for the task. A thousand might have been found to have ravaged nations, and swept over empires, in all the greatness of the conqueror, to one who could have reformed the stage; or rather human nature exhibited by the stage.

Shakspeare, in the thirty-five plays proved to have been from his pen, has exhibited the mind of man in all its phases. His propensities, his habits, his practices, his reasoning, false and philosophical, were all exhibited by him, in truth and power. His virtues, his weaknesses, his eccentricities, even his idiosyncrasies, were all known to this great anatomist of the human mind; his hopes, his passions, his frivolities, were all laid bare to him. Tthese plays, which seemed, perhaps, in the age in which he lived, only written to amuse the populace of a city, contained the analysis of the human mind, and the history of the passions. For instance, if he would give ambition, look at his Richard III, when the passion is up, the means patiently pursued, and every principle sacrificed to the end. Hypocrisy, cunning, flattery, and diabolical energy, all are used for his purposes. In all this, all is natural in its way-the monarch croaks morality, and utters "wise saws," while he plots destruction, and strikes the dagger; but he does not hide his deformity, even from the mother who bare him. She sees all his moral baseness; and speaks it in words wrung from her breaking heart.

"Techy and wayward was thy infancy;

Thy schooldays frightful, desperate, wild, and furious; Thy prime of manhood, daring, bold, and venturous; Thy age confirm'd, proud, subtle, sly, and bloody."

His lady Macbeth is even a finer delineation of character, as it regards reckless ambition. She was bold in her means, as well as anxious for results. She had firmness of purpose, as well as insatiable passion for power. She put heaven and hell at defiance, and drove onward to expected enjoyment and distinction. She spoke in all the boldness of her nature:

"The raven himself is hoarse,

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements. Come, come you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;
And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood,
Stop the access and passage to remorse!
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep pace between
The effect and it."

Notwithstanding she braced herself with all this fiend-like energy, yet, he made her true to nature; for though she had plucked from her soul all remorse, while she could concentrate her powers, no sooner than she slept, her dreams and somnambulism spoke all the horrors of her soul. Shakspeare developed this truth in Richard and Clarence-neither of whom shrunk from perjury or murder while awake and masters of themselves, but when the soul was naked and in the lonely watches of the night, were very babies in fortitude. A quiet conscience rarely sees a frightful object in the repose of nature; it has none of the night-mare agonies of villany. Angels smooth the pillows of the virtuous, and bring visions of delight to the benevolent and the good. If we sleep each passing

night so much better for doing well, who would not wish to lie down in the long sleep of the grave, with all quiet about his heart?

Macbeth was of a more delicate fibre; he felt and shrunk from his deeds of blood; he had some touches of nature in him; he saw daggers, and heard warning voices, and said aloud,

"I'll go no more;

I am afraid to think what I have done;

Look on't again I dare not."

She, braced by ambition to the use of reckless means to bring about ends, tauntingly replies,

"Infirm of purpose!

Give me the daggers; the sleeping, and the dead,
Are but as pictures; 'tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil.”

Shakspeare never suffers the shades of character to run unnaturally into each other; for the usurper of the crown of Denmark did as foul a deed for power as Lady Macbeth and her husband; but though as treacherous and more vile, for it was a brother's blood he shed, yet he had no energy of character. He exhibited remorse of conscience, and yet could not refrain from adding to his crime in seeking safety in the death of others.

Shakspeare has been as successful in describing love, as ambition. He has shown it in all its varieties, from the sickly flame that glimmers in the breasts of those whom interests unite, to the simplicity, warmth, and

truth of the cottager; from the impassioned Queen of Egypt to the melting Juliet, and the sweet violet Miranda. He knew all the springs of the human heart, and could describe their ebb and flow.

How admirably has he depicted "Avarice with his blade and beam," in Shylock; and yet how weak is that avarice when it walks hand in hand with revenge.

Pride is as well delineated in Coriolanus. Not only has he made this character true to history, but he has given the mighty patrician new thoughts of aristocratic consequence.

"His nature is too noble for the world:

He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,
Or Jove for his power to thunder. His heart's

his mouth:

What his breast forges that his tongue must vent; And, being angry, does forget that ever

He heard the name of death."

The inferior and superhuman beings the great poet creates, are admirable productions. His Caliban is a monster of malignity and ignorance; a being to whose nature nurture would not stick. He has many resemblances in crowded cities, in manners and in mind; but these are not dressed with the skins of wild beasts nor confined to a desolate island, but they cannot name the greater or lesser lights better than he. It would take more than Prospero's wand to exile them all to the wilds of nature.

The delicate Ariel was a lovely creature of the imagination; probably, a personification of the imagination itself, which is first a slave to ignorance, obliged

to bear the earthly and abhorred commands of capricious malignity; but when enlarged from confinement by the wand of science, is ready to answer the best pleasure of its master,

"Be it to fly,

To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride

On the curl'd clouds."

There are Calibans in the field of literature, who would curse all science and taste, and violate the offspring of refinement and genius, if they had power; but we trust in heaven that the Tempest is up in the intellectual world-that the spell is in operation which will be kept alive by study, and science, and letters, until the wishes of the good are accomplished, and the conspiracies of the base defeated.

We might go on until the seasons changed with these discussions, for I question whether you can name a passion or a trait of character in the whole history of man, developed by the metaphysician, or illustrated by poetry, of which Shakspeare does not furnish some excellent specimen. His coarse wit, now so offensive to some, was in his day pungent satire. This we may infer distinctly from what we now understand of it; for instance, the satire from the mouth of the grave-digger in Hamlet, upon the bar and bench, and the laws, as administered in that day, is admirable. The character of Holofernes, in Love's Labour's Lost, is full of sarcasm upon the literati of his time, for attempting to destroy the English language by Latinizing it. Many of the saws he suffers to drop from the mouth, of his fools, are so formed under the motley guise he gives