the hostility of the puritans was much modified when he wrote. The controversy had raged with the greatest violence at the period when Shakspere, according to our belief, was most likely to have produced All's Well that ends Well,-perhaps not as it has been handed down to us, but in an imperfect form. That period was probably not very widely separated from the period when Love's Labour's Lost was produced; to which, as we do not hesitate to think with Coleridge, this play was the counterpart.

SUPFOSED SOURCE OF THE PLOT.

FARMER, as we have seen, says that the story of this play "came immediately to Shakspeare from Painter's Giletta of Narbon.'" The Palace of Pleasure' was printed in 1575; and no doubt Shakspere was familiar with the book. But we have yet to learn that Shakspere was not familiar with the Italian writers, who were as commonly read by the educated classes in England at the end of the 16th century as the French writers are read now. Whether received by him directly or indirectly, the story came from Boccaccio. Shakspere has made the character of Helena more interesting, in some respects, by representing her solely dependent on the bounty of the good Countess, whose character is a creation of his own; in the novel she is rich, and is surrounded with suitors. After her marriage and desertion by her husband, Giletta returns to the country of her lord, and governs it in his absence with all wisdom and goodness; Helena is still a dependant upon her kind friend and mother. The main incidents of the story are the same; the management, by the intervention of the comic characters, belongs to Shakspere.

Instead of wearying our readers by tracing the minute differences between the great Italian novelist and the greater English dramatist, we subjoin Hazlitt's spirited character of Boccaccio as a writer :

"The story of All's Well that ends Well, and of several others of Shakspere's plays, is taken from Boccaccio. The poet has dramatised the original novel with great skill and comic spirit, and has preserved all the beauty of character and sentiment without improving upon it, which was impossible. There is, indeed, in Boccaccio's serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an exquisite refinement of sentiment, which is hardly to be met with in any other prose-writer whatever. Justice has not been done him by the world. He has in general passed for a mere narrator of lascivious tales or idle jests. This character probably originated in his obnoxious attacks on the monks, and has been kept up by the grossness of mankind, who revenged their own want of refinement on Boccaccio, and only saw in his writings what suited the coarseness of their own tastes. But the truth is, that he has carried sentiment of every kind to its very highest purity and perfection. By sentiment we would here understand the habitual workings of some one powerful feeling, where the heart reposes almost entirely upon itself, without the violent excitement of opposing duties or untoward circumstances. In the way, nothing ever came up to the story of Frederigo Alberigi and his Falcon.' The perseverance in attachment, the spirit of gallantry and generosity displayed in it, has no parallel in the history of heroical sacrifices. The feeling is so unconscious, too, and involuntary, is brought out in such small, unlooked-for, and unostentatious circumstances, as to show it to have been woven into the very nature and soul of the author. The story of ‘Isabella' is scarcely less fine, and is more affecting in the circumstances and in the catastrophe. Dryden has done justice to the impassioned eloquence of the 'Tancred and Sigismunda;' but has not given an adequate idea of the wild preternatural interest of the story of Honoria.' 'Cimon and Iphigene' is by no means one of the best, notwithstanding the popularity of the subject. The proof of unalterable affection given in the story of 'Jeronymo,' and the simple touches of nature and picturesque beauty in the story of the two holiday lovers who were poisoned by tasting of a leaf in the garden at Florence, are perfect masterpieces. The epithet of divine was well bestowed on this great painter of the human heart. The invention implied in his different tales is

immense but we are not to infer that it is all his own. He probably availed himself of all the common traditions which were floating in his time, and which he was the first to appropriate. Homer appears the most original of all authors-probably for no other reason than that we can trace the plagiarism no farther. Boccaccio has furnished subjects to numberless writers since his time, both dramatic and narrative. The story of 'Griselda' is borrowed from his 'Decameron' by Chaucer; as is the 'Knight's Tale' ('Palamon and Arcite') from his poem of the 'Theseid."”

THE costume of this play, for anything that appears to the contrary, might be either of the age of Boccaccio or of Shakspere. The Florentines and the Siennois were continually at strife during the middle ages, and the mention of a "Duke of Austria" would, strictly, place its date anterior to 1457, Ladislaus, the last Duke of Austria, having died King of Hungary and Bohemia in that year; whilst the allusion to Austria as a power per se would drive the period of action still further back amongst the dukes and margraves of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is our opinion, however, that in all cases where there is no positive violence committed against historywhere the foundation of the plot is either fanciful or legendary-that the nearest possible period to that of the writing of the play should be fixed upon as that of its action, as by so doing the best illustration is obtained of the author's ideas and the manners of the age which he depicted. With this view we should place the date of All's Well that ends Well' just previous to 1557, in which year, on the 3rd of July, Sienna was given to Cosmo de Medicis, Grand Duke of Tuscany, by Philip of Spain, who had been invested with its sovereignty by his father Charles V. The last war between the Florentines and the Siennois, and in which the former were supported by the troops of the emperor, and the latter by those of France, broke out in 1552 and ended in 1555, the King of France at that period being Henry II., and the Duke of Florence Cosmo de Medicis aforesaid. Our illustrations have, therefore, been taken from Montfaucon's 'Monarchie Francaise' (sub anno), and the Florentine costume is furnished us by Vecellio, which, though a little later, is sufficiently near for the purpose.

The hair was worn very short by gentlemen in France at this time, a fashion which arose from an accident that happened to Henry's father, Francis I., who, in a twelfth-night frolic, was hurt by the fall of a lighted firebrand on his head, and was compelled in consequence to have his hair shaved off.