3. It will not easily be imagined how much Shakspeare excels in accommodating his sentiments to real life, but by comparing him with other authors. It was observed of the ancient schools of declamation, that the more diligently they were frequented, the more was the student disqualified for the world, because he found nothing there which he should ever meet in any other place. The same remark may be applied to every stage but that of Shakspeare. The theater, when it is under any other direction, is peopled by such characters as were never seen, conversing in a language which was never heard, upon topics which will never arise in the commerce of mankind. But the dialogue of this author is often so evidently determined by the incident which produces it, and is pursued with so much ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selection out of common conversation and common occurrences.

4. Upon every other stage the universal agent is love, by whose power all good and evil is distributed, and every action quickened or retarded. To bring a lover, a lady, and a rival into the fable; to entangle them in contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppositions of interest, and harass them with viölence of desires inconsistent with each other; to make them meet in rapture, and part in agony; to fill their mouths with hyperbolical' joy and outrageous sorrow; to distress them as nothing human ever was distressed; to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered; is the business of a modern drămatist. For this, probability is violated, life is misrepresented, and language is depraved.

5. But love is only one of many passions; and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the drāmas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him. He knew that any other passion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity. This, therefore, is the praise of Shakspeare, that his drāma is the mirror of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious ecstasies, by reading human sentiments in human language, by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the trans

'Hy`per bol' ic al, exaggerating or diminishing greatly.

actions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.

6. Shakspeare's plays are not, in the rigorous and critical sense, either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion, and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveler is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolic of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.

7. Shakspeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind, but in one composition. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and ludicrous characters, and, in the successive evolutions of the design, sometimes produce seriousness and sorrow, and sometimes levity and laughter. That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is alway an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poëtry is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy can not be denied, because it includes both in its alternations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by showing how great machinations' and slender designs may promote or obviäte one another, and the high and the low cooperate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation.*

8. The force of his comic scenes has suffered little diminution from the changes made by a century and a half, in manners or in words. As his personages act upon principles arising from genuine passion, věry little modified by particular forms, their pleasures and vexations are communicable to all times and to all places; they are natural, and therefore durable. The adventitious peculiarities of personal habits are only superficial dyes, bright and pleasing for a little while, yet soon fading to a dim

1Machination, (måk`i nå′shun), the act of planning or contriving a scheme for executing some purpose, usually an evil one.

3

2 Con căt`e nation, connection by links; a series of links united, or of things depending on each other. 'Dūra ble, lasting.

tinct,' without any remains of former luster; but the discriminations of true passion are the colors of nature; they pervade the whōle mass, and can only perish with the body that exhibits them. The accidental compositions of heterogeneous modes are dissolved by the chance which combined them; but the uniform simplicity of primitive qualities neither admits increase, nor suffers decay. The sand heaped by one flood is scattered by another; but the rock alway continues in its place. The stream of time, which is continually washing the dis'soluble fabrics of the poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakspeare. DR. JOHNSON,

B

IV.

122. SCENE FROM KING RICHARD III.

RAKENBURY. Why looks your grace so heavily to-day?
Clarence. Oh, I have passed a miserable night,

So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams,

That, as I am a Christain faithful man,

I would not spend another such a night,
Though 'twere to buy a world of happy days,
So full of dismal terror was the time!

Brak. What was your dream, my lord? I pray you
Clar. Methought that I had broken from the tower,

And was embarked to cross to Bur'gundy,

And in my company my brother Gloster,
Who from my cabin tempted me to walk

Upon the hatches. Thence we looked toward England,
And cited up a thousand heavy times,

During the wars of York and Lanc'aster,

That had befallen us. As we passed along

Upon the giddy footing of the hatches,
Methought that Gloster stumbled; and, in falling,
Struck me, that sought to stay him, o'verboard,
Into the tumbling billows of the main.

O heaven! Methought what pain it was to drown!
What dreadful noise of waters in my ears!
What sights of ugly death within my eyes!
I thought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;

tell me.

A thousand men, that fishes gnawed upon :
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,

All scattered in the bottom of the sea.

Some lay in dead men's skulls and in those holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept,
As 'twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems,
That wooed the slimy bottom of the deep,
And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by.
Brak. Had you such leisure, in the time of death,
To gaze upon the secrets of the deep?

Clar. Methought I had; and often did I strive
To yield the ghost; but still the envious flood
Kept in my soul, and would not let it fōrth
To find the empty, vast, and wandering air ;
But smothered it within my panting bulk,
Which almost burst to belch it in the sea.

Brak. Awaked you not with this sōre agony ?
Clar. No, no! my dream was lengthened after life;
Oh, then began the tempèst to my soul!

I passed, methought, the melancholy flood,
With that grim ferryman' which poets write of,
Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.

The first that there did greet my stranger soul
Was my great father-in-law, renowned Warwick,"
Who cried aloud-" What scourge for perjury
Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?"
And so he vanished. Then came wandering by
A shadow like an angel, with bright hair
Dabbled in blood, and he shrieked out aloud—
"CLARENCE is come, false, fleeting, perjured Clarence,—
That stabbed me in the field by Tewksbury!

SEIZE on him, furies! take him to your torments !”
With that, methought a legion of foul fiends

1 Charon, (karon), who, according to ancient mythology, conveyed in his boat the shades of the dead across the rivers of the lower world. For this service he was paid with an obolus, a small silver coin of about

three cents in value, which was
placed in the mouth of every corpse
previous to its burial. He is repre
sented as an aged man, with a dirty
beard and a mean dress.
1 Warwick, (wŏr rik).

Environed me, and howlèd in mine ears
Such hideous cries, that, with the very noise,
I trembling waked, and, for a season after,
Could not believe but that I was in hell;
Such terrible impression made my dream.
Brak. No marvel, lord, that it affrighted you;
I am afraid, methinks, to hear you tell it.

Clar. Ah! Brakenbury, I have done these things,
That now give evidence against my soul,

For Edward's sake; and, see how he requites me!
O God! if my deep prayers can not appease thee,
But thou wilt be avenged on my misdeeds,
Yět execute thy wrath on me ǎlone :

Oh, spare my guiltlèss wife, and my poor children !—
I prithee, Brakenbury, stay by me ;

My soul is heavy, and I fain would sleep.

Brak. I will, my lord; God give your grace good rest!— [CLARENCE reposing himself on a chair.

Sorrow breaks seasons, and reposing hours,

Makes the night morning, and the noon-tide night.
Princes have but their titles for their glōries,

An outward honor for an inward toil :

And, for unfelt imaginations,

They often feel a world of restless cares :

So that between their titles and low name,

There's nothing differs but the outward fame.

SHAKSPEARE.

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE, one of the greatest of all poets, was born at Stratfordon-Avon, Warwick County, England, in April, 1564. His father, John Shakspeare, a woolcomber or glover, rose to be high bailiff and chief alderman of Stratford. William is supposed to have received his early education at the grammar-school in his native town. We have no trace how he was employed between his school-days and manhood. Some hold that he was an attorney's clerk. Doubtless he was a hard, though perhaps an irregular student. He married Anne Hathaway in 1582, and soon after became connected with the Blackfriar's Theater, in London, to which city he removed in 1586 or 1587. Two years subsequent he was a joint proprietor of that theater, with four others below him in the list. Though we know nothing of the date of his first play, he had most probably begun to write long before he left Stratford. Of his thirty-seven plays, the existence of thirty-one is defined by contemporary records. He became rich in the theaters, with which he ceased to be connected about 1609. He had previously purchased the principal house in his native town, where he passed the residue of his life, and died in April, 1616. We can only refer students that wish to know more of this great poet, to his writings, an extended description of which is rendered unnecessary by the selection immediately preceding the above