must sometimes have moralised, and the contemplative have loved to ponder.

The sufferings of a near ancestor for his religion would at once have served to root it deeply amongst his descendants; and if none of these ties exercised their powerful and almost irresistible influence over the mind of our bard, we may, at least, suppose-were it not, indeed, provable by the severest inductive evidence-that Shakspeare delighted to dwell upon the mysteries, and even errors, of a belief which ministers so largely to the imagination, which is at once picturesque and sublime, over which a trackless antiquity throws a charm, and which, if it starves the reason which a poet may spare, at least feeds the fancy, which is his most faithful ally. In several of his plays, and not always where the scene requires it, we find allusions to purgatory, baptismal regeneration, &c., and, it has been observed, that he throws an amiable light over his Roman Catholic priests, while his Protestant ministers are frequently ignorant, sometimes pompous, and generally foolish. Let us instance, in support of the one statement, Friar Patrick, in the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," the Friar Laurence, in "Romeo and Juliet," the holy father in "All's Well that Ends Well;" and of the other, Evans, Martext, Holofernes, &c. Of monastic orders he speaks with tolerance, and frequently

borrows a simile from some ceremonial of the still-remembered faith.

PURGATORY.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ;

To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot:

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those, that lawless and uncertain thoughts
Imagine howling!-'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life,
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear of death.

Measure for Measure.

Ghost.

My hour is almost come

When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames

Must render up myself.

I am thy father's spirit ;

Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night;

And, for the day, confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid,

To tell the secrets of my prison-house,

I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood;

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres ;

Thy knotted and combined locks to part,

And each particular hair to stand on end,

For ave to be in shady cloister mewed,

To live a barren sister all your life,

Chanting faint hymns to the cold, fruitless moon.

Thrice blessed they that master so their blood,

To undergo such maiden pilgrimage:

But earthly happier far the rose distilled,

Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.

Midsummer Night's Dream.

A singular passage to be found in a play which contains one of the most florid extant eulogies of the maiden queen.

We could not, perhaps, select a more suitable place than the present end of a chapter, to remark upon the effect produced on the mind of Shakspeare by the discovery of a new continent; as we might well have conjectured so great and so recent an event, which affected the age so deeply, was not without its effect on the greatest mind of the epoch. Many are the passages in his writings which allude to the Western Indies; and in the latest of his dramatic works-the "Tempest"-it is the very foundation on which the imagining is based. In one of the critical works of Hazlitt, there is an interesting passage, in which, after enumerating the various causes that conduced to make the Elizabethan era immortal, as the invention of printing, the Reformation, &c., he adds, "Fairyland was realised in a new and unknown world."

* Dying without extreme unction.

Fortunate fields, and groves, and flowery plains, and happy isles were found floating, like those

Hesperian gardens, famed of old, beyond Atlantic seas,
Dropt from the zenith.

The people, the soil, the clime-everything gave unlimited scope to the curiosity of the traveller and the reader. Chivalry, in its old age, had sprung up armed, and with more than the vigour of youth. The world, surprised by a discovery which had cast "no shadow before," grew foolishly credulous of the tale of every lying traveller. Mandevilles throve, and were to be found in every tavern; "ale-washed wits," who, when half through their stoup of Rhenish, would tell of

Countries vast, and deserts idle,

Rocks and hills, whose heads touch heaven;

and of the

cannibals, that each other eat,

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders.

The following are a few of the principal allusions to the subject to be found in Shakspeare.

While other men, of sleuder reputation,

Put forth their sons to seek preferment out;
Some to the wars, to try their fortune there;
Some to discover islands far away.

A course, more promising

Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act I., Scene 3.

Than a wild dedication of yourself

To pathless waters and undreamed shores.

More lines than the new map, with the
Augmentation of the Indies.

Antipholus.-Where America-the Indies?

Dromio.-O, sir, upon her nose, all o'er embellished with rubies, carbuncles, and sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain; who sent whole armadas of carracks, to ballast at her nose.

Comedy of Errors.

Her bed is India; there she lies a pearl.

Troilus and Cressida, Act I., Scene 1.

Hath a third for Mexico.

Merchant of Venice.

"The Tempest" was one of the last of Shakspeare's plays, written in the peaceful retirement of that village he had left, thirty years before, a vagabond and an exile. It is the most rainbow-tinted and aërial of all his plays. His imagination, like a sun on the point of setting, now blazed forth at parting in its most gorgeous colours. He played his sweetest strains ere he laid down his lyre for ever. It was the last incantation of the great wizard-his last prophetic strain ere he broke his staff

Buried it certain fathoms in the earth,

And, deeper than did ever plummet sound,
Drowned his book.

The scene opens near the "still-vexed Bermoothes," or Bermudas. A ship is driven ashore upon one of those wild islands described by our early voyagers, an island rude and rocky, but canopied by a mirage of rich phantasies. The air is instinct with life, full of noises, "sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and harm not." Its surface is haunted by spirits of the sea and air; the clouds open, and show riches ready to fall upon us.

In the rude and chaotic form of Caliban he has drawn the Carib as Balboa found him. The son of Sycorax is the savage sun-worshipper idealised. The cruelty and the sensuality of the savage state are finely contrasted with the delicate creatures of the element who play in the plighted clouds"-the sylphs of Paracelsus. It was the Spaniard taught the Indian how

To name the bigger light, and how the less,

That burn by day and night.

It was the Indian showed the Spaniard

All the qualities of the isle,

The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren places and fertile,
And brought him sea-nells from the rock.

As the Carib was to the Spaniard, so was Caliban to Prospero-" hagseed"

Abhorred slave,

Which any print of goodness would not take.

And strangely combined and fused is this with English legends of witches in the person of Sycorax, whose moonlit occupation he makes it The wicked dew to brush,

With raven feather, from unwholesome fen.

The dreams of alchemy have tended, in many ways, to enrich the modern poetic mythology.

THE MISER'S GRANDSONS.

A LEGEND OF THE THAMES.

And thus the whirligig of Time brings in his revenges.

Twelfth Night.

ABOUT the year 1700, there stood in one of those streets in the Borough that run parallel with the Thames near the remains of the palace of the Bishops of Winchester, an old dilapidated mansion. Anciently it might have been connected with the episcopal residence, for there were curious mouldings and quaint niches visible in the walls; but in those days there was no Archæological Society to bring these treasures to light, and so they crumbled away unheeded amidst dust and cobwebs. Black, decayed, gloomy as a withered ash in the autumnal forest, or a shred of Norman mail in a glittering armory, had the strange dwelling stood for years frowning on the tide of human passion, care, and interest, that passed it every day.

It was a chill October evening, and the old house looked drearier than ever in the twilight, with its latticed windows sending forth no cheerful ray, its single gable surmounted by a grim lion, the turret with the broken weather-vane, that, half-detached from its rod, hung like a knight's banderol, its group of twisted chimneys, and, lastly, the thick paneled door, like that of Giant Despair's castle in old prints.

Such was the aspect the mansion wore, when, from its unkindly portal, a mother and child were driven forth into the pitiless streets. The lady was very lovely, but as she hurried away there was a sternness in her eye and a resolute steadfastness about her lip that told of emotions very different from those that are the wonted lot of youth and beauty. She passed rapidly down the narrow lanes, stopped before a small low house at the entrance of a court, and knocked for admission. The first large drops, the forerunners of a storm, were making little circles on the pavement, and the mother stepped under the overhanging pent-house to avoid them. As she stood there with the bright-haired infant in her arms, her firmness giving way as she reflected on her real misery, and the crystal tear swelling in her eye, she might have formed a model for the outcast Hagar, or even for the more despised mother of Him who had not where to lay his head. But while she waits in all her desolate beauty, let us glance at her life's history up to that melancholy hour.

Eva was the second daughter of that Lawrence Mortlake, whose wealth and niggardliness made him a proverb in the neighbourhood. When young, she had married the son of an Antwerp merchant, with whom her father had dealings, and from that unfortunate step all her misery was to be traced. By a strange fatality, her elder sister Asenath, a woman of ungovernable temper and violent passions, loved the man who proposed to Eva; and though she concealed her partiality under an equable sternness, never did she forgive the slight shown her by Philip Rethel, or forget to avenge that slight on his unhappy wife. Circumstances soon gave her the opportunity, for the house of Rethel and Sons failed, and Mortlake was, at her suggestion, its most exacting creditor, and instrumental in causing its ultimate ruin. Eva's husband, whose health had always been delicate, soon sunk under the labour his altered fortunes rendered necessary; and when, on his death, the widow with her child