not deluded by the universal bigotry of an age, which looked upon a Jew as a sort of personification of Satan, does not sink the man in the usurer. Yet his Shylock is a Jew in every particular. His fervour of speech, like the lightness of his daughter Jessica, is part of the warm oriental blood that in passionate Italy has not been suppressed as it is in England by the phlegmatic ways of the people among whom he dwells. His language is biblical; he upholds the doctrine of his race, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, which, in the court of justice, by one of those grand contrasts which Shakespeare loved-(such contrasts as we have in Ariel and Caliban, in Lear with eighty years of royalty upon his front and Lear exposed to the pelting of the storm)-is brought into direct issue with the spirit of Christianity. Portia pleads, against the letter of the law, a pure doctrine of mercy. Shylock rejects it. Portia seeks to persuade, but persuasion fails. Then, by the letter of the law, parted from charity and the natural instinct of justice, its upholder is condemned. But while he contrasts the doctrines, Shakespeare does not the less lay just stress on the hard dealings of the Christians; and, while he sharply describes the love of money with which Jews are cursed, he represents it not as seen by scoffers from without, but as it is felt where it is cherished.

Shakespeare's wonderful fidelity to nature seems less the result of design than of instinct. Every character was alive for him, and he spoke for it out of the very centre of its life. Helped by his teaching, later dramatists have produced many shrewd sketches of character, but they have observed men chiefly from without, and put words into their mouths showing them as what they seem in the world's eye. Wonderful revelations of an inner being flash out of the words of Shakespeare's men and women, often to pass unheeded, as they do in the world. There is an instance of this in the gleam of Shylock's better feelings, which flickers and then dies in the storm of contending passion, to which he is wrought by Tubal's tidings of his daughter and his debtor. The Christians had torn his flesh from him-'I say my daughter my flesh and blood'—and his old hatred is worked to a passion for revenge, into the very heat of which Antonio is thrown. The bond might have been devised in malicious sport, with a purpose from which there might have been relenting even of his bitter hatred. At any rate, to have represented Shylock as insisting in cold blood upon his forfeiture, would have strained nature as Shakespeare never strained it. Therefore the light love, an Eastern Jessica became part of the story, and the Jew, brought into the court yet bleeding inwardly from the loss of his child and of his jewels, was steeled by a sharp sense of recent

is

wrong

wrong to the insisting upon vengeance. When Tubal is feeding his first passion with ill news, and tells of the ring Jessica gave for a monkey, every one has felt a pathos in Shylock's answer, Out upon her! Thou torturest me, Tubal: it was my turquoise ; I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor: I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.' Steevens here stops the text for a long note on the supposed properties of turquoises and the artificial value consequently set on them as charms. But it was for the charm of a past kiss that he remembered, and which belonged to days when avarice, the sin of age, had not grown with his years and hardened his heart, that Shylock set value on the turquoise. Partly in wrath at her offence, but partly also because his daughter belonged to him as he was in his age, not as he had been in his youth, he had just before cried, 'Would that she were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear.' But the image of Leah lay within him, bound to the thoughts of a holier and fresher time. He would not have given her ring for a wilderness of monkeys. Mindful of all that was in Shylock's nature, Shakespeare allowed the Jew to express unbounded value for the ring without being checked by the sudden image of a great treasure of gold. Sordid thoughts are cleared from around the memory of Leah; at the same time we are shown the defect in Jessica, who could exchange a ring that had belonged to her dead mother for the most frivolous amusement; a defect, again, most natural in a girl of Eastern blood, bred under an Italian sun, who was not allowed even to look out of window at the pleasures of the young. As we have said before, it was not from a reasoner's determination to be subtle, but from the innate force of instinct with which Shakespeare was so marvellously gifted, that he thus became, like Nature itself, a study for his fellow men.

Mr. Dyce has prefixed to his edition a Life of Shakespeare, which contains every known fact and avoids useless conjecture. What impression we are able to form of his personality thus becomes only the more sharply defined. Among reckless comrades, who burnt out the fire of their genius in riot and excess, the greatest of our poets lived at once a genial and prudent life. He won goodwill from the gay and the austere, and, accepting the stage as a profession, made good his ambition to earn by it a competence and retire to his own little country town to enjoy an honourable ease. His well-regulated life accords with the wisdom of his verse. He pursued his calling with a reasonable thrift, and was the first man who made a fortune by his pen. If genius must cause men to be erratic, what a social comet Shakespeare should have been! Yet he seems to have been a

person

person who, had he lived in our day, would have carefully gone through the accounts of his tradesmen and of his banker, would have preferred three per cents. to railway shares, would have dressed in the quietest manner, and of whom there is great reason to doubt whether he would have ventured to come into society with hair upon his chin. As he was, we may compare, to his credit, the trim little Elizabethan beard sculptured on his monument with what Gabriel Harvey called Greene's 'ruffianly hair.'

To 'Some Account of Shakespeare's Life' Mr. Dyce adds his will; the titles and dates of the early quarto and folio editions of his plays, and of the various editions of his poems; Heminge and Condell's Dedication and Address, with the list of actors and the commendatory verses prefixed to the folio of 1623. A summary follows of what is known about each play, as to the period when it was written or the matter upon which it was founded. The plays then succeed each other in the order of the folio of 1623, beginning therefore with the 'Tempest.'

Familiar as are the names of Warburton, Johnson, Steevens, and many more of the same corporation, there are not a few persons who begin to be confused by the long procession of successive editors, and to despair of understanding their respective claims to confidence. But we believe a brief summary of the labours of the chief of them, following the order of time, will reduce the apparent chaos to order. In his own lifetime Shakespeare was represented in print by the seventeen plays published (but not by his authority) in so many detached quartos. Seven years after his death, these plays (except 'Pericles), with twenty more, were published by two of his brother actors in the folio of 1623. In the second folio' of 1632 some of the many errors which had crept into the text of the first were corrected, but the editor made far more blunders than he mended. Thirtytwo years elapsed before another edition appeared. This was the still more corrupt folio of 1664, which included 'seven plays never before printed in folio,' namely, 'Pericles,' and six of which Shakespeare was not the author. Twenty-one more years went by when the fourth folio, that of 1685, was required to supply the public demand. From the first collection, therefore, of the works of Shakespeare, there were sold four editions in eighty-six years; and, as there was another interval of sixteen years before the next appeared, we may say five in a century; making in all less than four thousand, probably not more than three thousand, copies. How limited had been the circulation up to this period is evident from the statement of George Steevens, that Nahum Tate-in his dedication to the altered

play

play of King Lear,' which appeared in 1687-speaks of the original as of an obscure piece, recommended to his notice by a friend.

The last of the five editions was that issued in 1709 by Nicholas Rowe, a dramatist still faintly present to us as the author of 'Jane Shore.' Poor Rowe was hardly dealt with in Queen Anne's court, where he vainly sought preferment. Most persons will remember the story of the hope raised in his soul when Lord Oxford asked him solemnly one day whether he understood Spanish. Some embassy must be on foot, the poet thought, and answered: " No, but I can master it in a few weeks." He accomplished the task, and went to report progress to Lord Oxford. Then, Sir,' said the Minister, I envy you the pleasure of reading "Don Quixote" in the original.' His edition of Shakespeare was in the main printed from the fourth and most inaccurate of the folios; but in compensation he sometimes restored the true reading in passages which had been given wrongly by all his predecessors. He prefixed a Life which embodied the best extant traditions as to Shakespeare then remaining. What could pass down that uncertain channel Rowe secured for us before it was entirely closed.

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High as was the name of the great dramatist, the idolatry of his works had not yet set in, and editors did not think it necessary to bestow much pains in collecting and collating the different copies of his plays. Pendennis is represented in our day as reading Shakespeare to his mother, which she said she liked, but didn't.' At the Restoration people were not so overawed by his fame as to be afraid to express what they felt; and the sentiments of many a man of fair education may be inferred from the opinions of Pepys. He witnessed the performance of Romeo and Juliet' in March, 1762, and pronounced the play to be the worst he had ever heard.' Not long after, he went to the King's Theatre, where, he says, "we saw "Midsummer Night's Dream," which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.' In 1766, in going to Deptford by water, he read Othello, Moor of Venice,' which, he continues, I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play, but having so lately read "The Adventures of Five Hours," it seems a mean thing.' 'The Adventures of Five Hours,' which made 'Othello' appear a mean thing' by comparison, was a translation from a play of Calderon. In 1767 Pepys records that he saw the "Merry Wives of Windsor," which did not please him at all, in no part of it;' while 'Twelfth Night' he esteems the weakest play that ever he beheld on the stage.' 'The Tempest' he found full of so good variety, that I

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cannot,"

cannot,' he says, ' be more pleased almost in a comedy, only the seaman's part a little too tedious;' but then he adds that the play has no great wit, yet good, above ordinary plays.' With Hamlet' he was mightily pleased,' but, above all, with Betterton,' who personated the Prince of Denmark. When he was first present at the performance of Macbeth' in 1664, he calls it only a pretty good play.' Afterwards it rose in his favour, and in 1667 he declares it to be a most excellent play in all respects, but especially in divertisement, though it be a deep tragedy, which is a strange perfection in a tragedy, it being most proper here, and suitable.' It appears from a subsequent entry that the 'divertisement' which he considered the especial excellence of Macbeth,' meant the variety of dancing and music.'

The professed critics were sometimes not more complimentary, as may be seen in a book published in 1721, entitled The Laws of Poetry, as laid down by the Duke of Buckinghamshire in his Essay on Poetry, by the Earl of Roscommon in his Essay on Translated Verse, and by the Lord Lansdowne on Unnatural Flights in Poetry, Explained and Illustrated.'

'That famous soliloquy which has been so much cried up in "Hamlet has no more to do there than a description of the grove and altar of Diana mentioned by Horace. Hamlet comes in talking to himself, and very sedately and exactly weighs the several reasons or considerations mentioned in that soliloquy,

"To be, or not to be," &c.

As soon as he has done talking to himself, he sees Ophelia, and passes to a conversation with her, entirely different to the subject he has been meditating on with that earnestness, which, as it was produced by nothing before, so has it no manner of influence on what follows after, and is therefore a perfectly detached piece, and has nothing to do in the play. The long and tedious soliloquy of the bastard Falconbridge, in the play of " King John," just after his being received as the natural son of Cœur de Lion, is not only impertinent to the play, but extremely ridiculous. To go through all the soliloquies of Shakespeare would be to make a volume on this single head. But this I can say in general, that there is not one in all his works that can be excused by nature

or reason.

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The critic, however, who we believe was Gildon, "owned himself sensible that he should raise the anger of many readers by what he was saying, and meant further to say, upon the faults of Shakespeare. Lucilius, he adds, was the incorrect idol of Roman times, Shakespeare of ours. Both gained their reputation from a people unacquainted with art; and that reputation was a sort of traditionary authority, looked upon to be so

sacred,