sought for resemblance in the words, as, for instance, in the third line of the play,—

And then grace us in the disgrace of death;—

this being a figure often having its force and propriety, as justified by the law of passion, which, inducing in the mind an unusual activity, seeks for means to waste its superfluity,-when in the highest degree-in lyric repetitions and sublime tautology-(at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down'; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he' bowed, there he fell down dead),—and, in lower degrees, in making the words themselves the subjects and materials of that surplus action, and for the same cause that agitates our limbs, and forces our very gestures into a tempest in states of high excitement.

The mere style of narration in Love's Labour's Lost, like that of Egeon in the first scene of the Comedy of Errors, and of the Captain in the second scene of Macbeth, seems imitated with its defects and its beauties from Sir Philip Sidney; whose Arcadia, though not then published, was already well known in manuscript copies, and could hardly have escaped the notice and admiration of Shakspeare as the friend and client of the Earl of Southampton. The chief defect consists in the parentheses and parenthetic thoughts and descriptions, suited neither to the passion of the speaker, nor the purpose of the person to whom the infor

mation is to be given, but manifestly betraying the author himself,-not by way of continuous undersong, but-palpably, and so as to show themselves addressed to the general reader. However, it is not unimportant to notice how strong a presumption the diction and allusions of this play afford, that, though Shakspeare's acquirements in the dead languages might not be such as we suppose in a learned education, his habits had, nevertheless, been scholastic, and those of a student. For a young author's first work almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits, and his first observations of life are either drawn from the immediate employments of his youth, and from the characters and images most deeply impressed on his mind in the situations in which those employments had placed him; or else they are fixed on such objects and occurrences in the world, as are easily connected with, and seem to bear upon, his studies and the hitherto exclusive subjects of his meditation. Just as Ben Jonson, who applied himself to the drama after having served in Flanders, fills his earliest plays with true or pretended soldiers, the wrongs and neglects of the former, and the absurd boasts and knavery of their counterfeits. So Lessing's first comedies are placed in the universities, and consist of events and characters conceivable in an academic life.

I will only further remark the sweet and tempered gravity, with which Shakspeare in the end

draws the only fitting moral which such a drama
afforded. Here Rosaline rises up to the full height
of Beatrice:-

Ros. Oft have I heard of you, my lord Biron,
Before I saw you, and the world's large tongue
Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks;
Full of comparisons, and wounding flouts,
Which you on all estates will execute
That lie within the mercy of your wit:

To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain,
And therewithal, to win me, if you please,
(Without the which I am not to be won,)
You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day
Visit the speechless sick, and still converse
With groaning wretches; and your talk shall be.
With all the fierce endeavour of
your wit,

To enforce the pained impotent to smile.

Biron. To move wild laughter in the throat of death? It cannot be; it is impossible;

Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.

Ros. Why, that's the way to choke a gibing spirit,

Whose influence is begot of that loose grace,
Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools:
A jest's prosperity lies in the ear

Of him that hears it, never in the tongue

Of him that makes it: then, if sickly ears,
Deaf'd with the clamors of their own dear groans,
Will hear your idle scorns, continue then,

And I will have you, and that fault withal;
But, if they will not, throw away that spirit,

And I shall find you empty of that fault,
Right joyful of your reformation.

Act v. sc. 2. In Biron's speech to the Princess:

and, therefore, like the eye,

Full of straying shapes, of habits, and of forms

Either read stray, which I prefer; or throw full back to the preceding lines,

like the eye, full

Of straying shapes, &c.

In the same scene:

Biron. And what to me, my love? and what to me? Ros. You must be purged too, your sins are rank; You are attaint with fault and perjury:

Therefore, if you my favour mean to get,

A twelvemonth shall you spend, and never rest,
But seek the weary beds of people sick.

There can be no doubt, indeed, about the propriety of expunging this speech of Rosaline's; it soils the very page that retains it. But I do not agree with Warburton and others in striking out the preceding line also. It is quite in Biron's character; and Rosaline not answering it immediately, Dumain takes up the question for him, and, after he and Longaville are answered, Biron, with evident propriety, says;

Studies my mistress? &c.

MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

ACT i. sc. 1.

Her. O cross! too high to be enthrall'd to low-
Lys. Or else misgrafted, in respect of years;
Her. O spite! too old to be engag'd to young-
Lys. Or else it stood upon the choice of friends
Her. O hell! to chuse love by another's eye!

I

Tinerer can help feeling how great an improve

HERE is no authority for any alteration;-but

ment it would be, if the two former of Hermia's exclamations were omitted;—the third and only appropriate one would then become a beauty, and most natural. Ib. Helena's speech :—

I will go tell him of fair Hermia's flight, &c.

I am convinced that Shakspeare availed himself of
the title of this play in his own mind, and worked
upon it as a dream throughout, but especially, and,
perhaps, unpleasingly, in this broad determination
of ungrateful treachery in Helena, so undisguisedly
avowed to herself, and this, too, after the witty cool
philosophizing that precedes. The act itself is
natural, and the resolve so to act is, I fear, likewise
too true a picture of the lax hold which principles
have on a woman's heart, when opposed to, or even
separated from, passion and inclination. For women
are less hypocrites to their own minds than men
are, because in general they feel less proportionate
abhorrence of moral evil in and for itself, and more
of its outward consequences, as detection, and loss
of character than men,—their natures being almost
wholly extroitive. Still, however just in itself, the
representation of this is not poetical; we shrink
from it, and cannot harmonize it with the ideal.
Act. ii. sc. 1. Theobald's edition.

Through bush, through briar