please minds accustomed to the most magnificent spectacles of nature, and to the immensity of the forests and rivers of the New World. His rudeness and inequality, his strange familiarities, offend not a society which is formed of so many different elements, which knows neither an aristocracy nor a court, and which has rather the strength and arms of civilization than its elegance and polite

ness.

There, as on his native soil, Shakspeare is the most popular of all writers; he is the only poet, perhaps, whose verses occasionally blend themselves with the simple eloquence and grave discourses of the American Senate. It is, above all, through him that this people, so familiarised with the coarse enjoyments of society, appears to have become acquainted with the noble enjoyment of letters which it had hitherto neglected, and indeed knew little of; and when the genius of the arts shall awaken in these countries, endowed with an aspect so poetic, but where liberty seems as yet to have inspired little save commerce, industry, and the practical sciences of life, we may expect to see the authority of Shakspeare, and the enthusiasm of his example, rule over this rising republic of literature. Thus, this comedian of the age of Elizabeth, this author esteemed so uneducated, who had himself never collected or revised his own works, rapidly composed, as they were, for obscure and rude theatres, will be the chief and model of a school of poetry which shall speak a language dif

fused over the most flourishing half of a new world.d

VILLEMAIN.

d This diffusion of the language and literature of England, and this picture of the present and future popularity of Shakspeare among the inhabitants of the United States, had been previously and somewhat similarly drawn both by Morgan and the translator of this essay; the latter, alluding to the eloquently prophetic description of the author of the Essay on Falstaff, remarks: "not twenty years had passed over the glowing predictions of Morgan, when the first transatlantic edition of Shakspeare appeared at Philadelphia; nor is it too much to believe that, ere another century elapse, the plains of Northern America, and even the unexplored wilds of Australasia, shall be as familiar with the fictions of our poet, as are now the vallies of his native Avon, or the statelier banks of the Thames.

"It is, indeed, a most delightful consideration for every lover and cultivator of our literature, and one which should excite amongst our authors, an increased spirit of emulation, that the language in which they write is destined to be that of so large. a portion of the New World; a field of glory to which the genius of Shakspeare will assuredly give an imperishable permanency; for the diffusion and durability of his fame are likely to meet with no limit save that which circumscribes the globe, and closes the existence of time."-Shakspeare and his Times, vol. ii. p. 555.

• Nouveaux Mélanges Historiques et Litteraires, Tome i. p. 215 ad p. 287. à Paris, 1827.

No. XVIII.

SHAKSPEARE COMPARED WITH HOMER.

THE genius of Homer has been a topic of admiration to almost every generation of men since the period in which he wrote. But his characters will not bear the slightest comparison with the delineation of the same characters as they stand in the Troilus and Cressida of Shakspeare. This is a species of honour which ought by no means to be forgotten, when we are making the eulogium of our immortal bard a sort of illustration of his greatness, which cannot fail to place it in a very conspicuous light. The dispositions of men, perhaps, had not been sufficiently unfolded in the very early period of intellectual refinement when Homer wrote; the rays of humour had not been dissected by the glass, or rendered perdurable by the pencil, of the poet. Homer's characters are drawn with a laudable portion of variety and consistency; but his Achilles, his Ajax, and his Nestor, are, each of them, rather a species than an individual, and can boast more of the propriety of abstraction than of the vivacity of a moving scene of absolute life. The Achilles, the Ajax, and the various Grecian heroes of Shakspeare on the other hand, are absolute men, deficient in nothing which

can tend to individualise them, and already touched with the Promethean fire, that might infuse a soul into what, without it, were lifeless form. From the rest, perhaps the character of Thersites deserves to be selected (how cold and school-boy a sketch in Homer!) as exhibiting an appropriate vein of sarcastic humour amidst his cowardice, and a profoundness and truth in his mode of laying open the foibles of those about him, impossible to be excelled.

But

Before we quit this branch of Shakspeare's praise, it may not be unworthy of our attention to advert to one of the methods by which he has attained this uncommon superiority. One of the most formidable adversaries of true poetry is an attribute which is generally miscalled dignity. Shakspeare possessed, no man in higher perfection, the true dignity and loftiness of the poetical afflatus, which he has displayed in many of the finest passages of his works with miraculous success. he knew that no man ever was, or ever can be, always dignified. He knew that those subtler traits of character which identify a man, are familiar and relaxed, pervaded with passion, and not played off with an eternal eye to decorum. In this respect the peculiarities of Shakspeare's genius are no where more forcibly illustrated than in the play of Troilus and Cressida. The champions of Greece and Troy, from the hour in which their names were first recorded, had always worn a certain formality of attire, and marched with a

slow and measured step. No poet till this time had ever ventured to force them out of the manner which their epic creator had given them. Shakspeare first suppled their limbs, took from them the classic stiffness of their gait, and enriched them with an entire set of those attributes which might render them completely beings of the same species with ourselves.

GODWIN.

Life of Chaucer, octavo edition, vol. i. p. 509 ad p. 512. I have before appealed to this play (Troilus and Cressida) as a proof of Shakspeare's transcendent talent in the developement of character; and though from the nature of its fable, not one of the most pleasing or interesting of his productions, yet would it be a difficult task to select another exhibiting more profound and original traits of discrimination; and this too, notwithstanding the materials on which it is based, would appear from early and indelible classical association, to be altogether fixed and intractable. The reader, however, will in a few pages more meet a further enquiry from the pen of Mr. Godwin into the merits of this drama, as compared with Chaucer's mode of treating the same subject.