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And mountainous error be too highly heap'd

For truth to over-peer.

We can never sufficiently appreciate the depth of the wisdom in this wonderful man. He seems to be acquainted with every political or moral maxim, and to know what is to be said in favour of it or against it. His views are also often presented, as in this instance, with inimitable felicity, so simply, so easily, so gracefully, the metaphor so beautifully kept up to the end, and the meaning so clearly and vividly brought out. There is more of his political wisdom in this play, in Timon, and in Troilus and Cressida, than in any other of the plays. They are, indeed, studies for the politicians of every age. It is beside the purpose of this work to enter into any particular exhibition of the sentiments, not even as they illustrate the mind and opinions of the Poet, or to examine the justness of them; but on the passage here quoted I would observe, that beside the custom of which he speaks, there is another custom antagonist to it and perpetually at war with it, the custom of each current generation,

Which thinks its fathers fools,

so that there is little danger of any injurious accumulation of error from a too obstinate adherence to the customs of our ancestors. In all the arguments on this, which is, in fact, the great question of the present age, a sufficient distinction is not made between improvements which are demonstrably such, and changes which are only specious and presumed to be improvements.

ROMEO AND JULIET.

VERY little consideration can have been bestowed on the order in which it was most proper that the dramatic writings of Shakespeare should be arranged in any collected edition of them when his fellows Heminge and Condell prepared their edition. Having distributed them as Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, there they appear to have thought that their duty ended; and even that distribution can hardly be called logical, since there is no more reason for placing Julius Cæsar, or Coriolanus, or Anthony and Cleopatra under tragedies rather than histories, than there would be for so placing King John or King Henry the Eighth. But, if there had been any well-considered principle on which they proceeded in the minuter points of the arrangement, we should not, after reading Coriolanus, which is indisputably one of the later works, be carried back to Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, which are as indisputably early works; and then farther on in the volume have met with other plays on Roman story which were evidently written at nearly the same time with Coriolanus.

Titus Andronicus I have left out as a doubtful play, and as having nothing to add to what has been already said respecting it, either as a whole or on particular passages in it. It has all the usual external evidence of being his. Meres names it as one of his tragedies in 1598.

Meres also names Romeo and Juliet, and, as there is an edition with the date 1597 in the title page, we cannot err in placing the preparation of this play several years before the death of Queen Elizabeth, though in what particular year

between 1590 and 1597 there seem no sufficient indications

to guide us.

Tyrwhitt, in the infancy of criticism on the chronological order, thought that he had discovered what was little less than exact proof of the time when this play, or at least one scene of it, was composed. In the third scene of the first act the Nurse in her garrulous way is made to say

But as I said,

On Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen;

That shall she, marry; I remember it well.

'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years;

And she was wean'd-I never shall forget it, &c.

Out of this arises the question, Of what earthquake is the Nurse speaking? and Mr. Tyrwhitt, having found that the shock of an earthquake was felt in London in 1580, so severe as to be likely to be long remembered, and to form an æra in the computations of such persons as Juliet's nurse, he came to the conclusion that this was the earthquake of which Shakespeare made her speak, and that by adding on the eleven years we arrived at the date of the composition of the play,

1591.

It will not be denied that Shakespeare might make an Italian character in an Italian story allude in this way to an event which occurred at London; but it is obvious that the whole argument is of the most shadowy kind, and it seems to be entirely destroyed when the fact is introduced that in 1570 there did occur a most remarkable earthquake in the neighbourhood of Verona, so severe that it destroyed Ferrara, and which would form long after an epoch in the chronological calculations of the old wives of Lombardy. When the church of St. Stephen at Ferrara was rebuilt an inscription was placed against it, from which we may collect the terrible nature of the visitation :-"Cum anno M.D.LXX die xvii No

vembris tertia noctis hora, quam maximus terræ motus hanc præclarissimam urbem ita conquassasset, ut ejus fortissima monia, munitissimas arces, alta palatia, religiosa templa, sacratas turres, omnesque fere ædes omnino evertisset et prostrasset, una cum maximo civium damno, atque acerbâ clade." The order of towers, palaces, and temples in this inscription corresponds to the order in which they occur in the well-known passage in The Tempest. Will this come in aid of the argument of those who contend that Shakespeare must at some period of his life have breathed the air of Italy, seen the Italian palaces, and witnessed the Italian customs he has so accurately exhibited? This inscription, commemorative of an event never to be forgotten at Ferrara, appears to have been cut in 1571, or not long after. At all events, I submit that, if we must suppose that the Poet intended to make the Nurse speak according to the truth of history at all, this is the earthquake to which she alludes, and not the slight trembling which alarmed the fears of a northern people unaccustomed to such phænomena.

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This argument of Mr. Tyrwhitt's has, however, ran the course of all the editions. This has been the way. Let a conjecture be once boldly stated, and there are persons enough to lay hold upon it rather than to originate arguments of their own. Malone notices it with respect, and thinks it renders probable that the play was begun in 1591, though he assigns it in its complete state to a much later period. Mr. Chalmers assigns the play to the spring of 1592, in an argument of which Mr. Tyrwhitt's conjecture is a principal element. I have not examined Mr. Collier's edition on this point; but Mr. Knight "has no doubt that Shakespeare wrote the passage eleven years after the earthquake of 1580, and that, the passage being also meant to fix the atten

tion of an audience, the play was produced, as well as written, in 1591."

No play of Shakespeare's has been from the first more popular than this; perhaps none so popular. The interest of the story, the variety of the characters, the appeals to the hearts of all beholders, the abundance of what may be called episodical passages of singular beauty, such as Queen Mab, the Friar's husbandry, the Starved Apothecary, and the gems of the purest poetry which are scattered in rich abundance, these all concur to make it the delight of the many as it is also a favourite study for the few. But so tragical a story ministers to a depraved appetite in the many. The mass of Englishmen love scenes of horror, whether in reality or in the mimic representations on the stage. Shakespeare seems to have understood this; and both here and in Hamlet he leaves scarcely any one alive. Even the insignificant Benvolio is not permitted to live out the story. It would be profanation however to believe that this has been a principal cause of the extreme popularity of Romeo and Juliet, which began in the author's own time and is continued in ours.

If nothing else, the garden scene would claim for this dramatic piece to have been produced when the writer was in the flower of his genius. We are to read it with the impression on our minds of Italian manners, and the warm feelings of Italy; but it is of all ages and all nations, and the cold moon of England has doubtless sometimes witnessed scenes as impassioned as this.

The commentators have produced several testimonies to the popularity of this play in the times before the theatres were closed through the ascendancy of the Puritan spirit in England; a marked and very important æra in dramatic history. I add the three references to this play which follow,

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