embraces harmony, the result of combination, and effect of the whole.

Great as was the genius of Shakspeare, his judgment was at least equal. Of this we shall be convinced, if we look round on the age, and compare the nature of the respective dramas of Greece and England, differing from the necessary dissimilitude of circumstances by which they are modified and influenced. The Greek stage had its origin in the ceremonies of a sacrifice, such as the goat to Bacchus ;-it were erroneous to call him only the jolly god of wine: among the ancients he was venerable; he was the symbol of that power which acts without our consciousness from the vital energies of nature, as Apollo was the symbol of our intellectual consciousness. Their heroes under his influence performed more than human actions; hence tales of their favourite champions soon passed into dialogue. On the Greek stage the chorus was always before the audience-no curtain dropped-change of place was impossible; the absurd idea of its improbability was not indulged. The scene cannot be an exact copy of nature, but only an imitation. If we can believe ourselves at Thebes in one act, we can believe ourselves at Athens in the next. There seems to be no just boundary but what the feelings prescribe. In Greece, however, great judgment was necessary where the same persons were perpetually before the audience. If a story lasted twenty-four hours or twenty-four years, it was equally improbable-they never attempted to

impose on the senses by bringing places to men, though they could bring men to places.

Unity of time was not necessary, where no offence was taken at its lapse between the acts, or between scene and scene; for where there were no acts or scenes, it was impossible rigidly to observe its laws. To overcome these difficulties, the judgment and great genius of the ancients supplied music, and with the charms of their poetry filled up the vacuity. In the story of the Agamemnon of Eschylus, the taking of Troy was supposed to be announced by the lighting of beacons on the Asiatic shore: the mind being beguiled by the narrative ode of the chorus embracing the events of the siege, hours passed as minutes, and no improbability was felt at the return of Agamemnon; and yet, examined rigidly, he must have passed over from Troy in less than fifteen minutes. Another fact here presented itself, seldom noticed: with the ancients three plays were performed in one day; they were called Trilogies. In Shakspeare we may fancy these Trilogies connected into one representation. If Lear were divided into three, each part would be a play with the ancients; or take the three plays of Agamemnon, and divide them into acts, they would form one play :

1st Act would be the Usurpation of Ægisthus, and Murder of Agamemnon ;

2d. Revenge of Orestes, and Murder of his Mother;

3d. The Penance of Orestes;

consuming a time of twenty-two years: the three plays being but three acts, the dropping of the curtain was as the conclusion of a play.

Contrast the stage of the ancients with that of the time of Shakspeare, and we shall be struck with his genius: with them it had the trappings of royal and religious ceremony; with him it was a naked room, a blanket for a curtain; but with his vivid appeals, the imagination figured it out

A field for monarchs.

After the rupture of the Northern nations, the Latin language, blended with the modern, produced the Romant tongue, the language of the minstrels; to which term, as distinguishing their songs and fabliaux, we owe the word and the species of romance: the romantic may be considered as opposed to the antique, and from this change of manners, those of Shakspeare take their colouring. He is not to be tried by ancient and classic rules, but by the standard of his age. That law of unity which has its foundation, not in factitious necessity of custom, but in nature herself, is instinctively observed by Shakspeare.

A unity of feeling pervades the whole of his plays. In Romeo and Juliet all is youth and spring: it is youth with its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies; it is spring with its odours, flowers, and transiency: the same feeling commences, goes through, and ends the play. The old men, the Capulets and Montagues, are not common old men; they have an eagerness, an hastiness, a

precipitancy-the effect of spring. With Romeo, his precipitate change of passion, his hasty marriage, and his rash death, are all the-effects of youth. With Juliet, love has all that is tender and melancholy in the nightingale, all that is voluptuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in the freshness of spring; but it ends with a long deep sigh, like the breeze of the evening. This unity of character pervades the whole of his dramas.'

'This description of Romeo and Juliet is evidently founded on what Schlegel has so beautifully said on the same subject in his Dramatic Lectures, which were delivered to an admiring audience as early as 1808. It is, perhaps, the very finest passage in his characters of the plays of Shakspeare; criticisms which, though uniformly written with great eloquence, have not been unjustly charged with a tincture of mysticism, and with a spirit of indiscriminate eulogy.

"It was reserved for Shakspeare," remarks this powerful writer, "to unite, in his Romeo and Juliet, purity of heart and the glow of imagination, sweetness and dignity of manners, and passionate violence, in one ideal picture. By the manner in which he has handled it, it has become a glorious song of praise on that inexpressible feeling which ennobles the soul, and gives to it its highest sublimity, and which elevates even the senses themselves into soul, and at the same time is a melancholy elegy on its frailty from its own nature and external circumstances; at once the deification and the burial of love. It appears here like a heavenly spark that, descending to the earth, is converted into a flash of lightning, by which mortal creatures are almost in the same moment set on fire and consumed. Whatever is most intoxicating in the odour of a southern spring, languishing in the song of the nightingale, or voluptuous on the first opening of the rose, is breathed into this poem. But even more rapidly than the earliest blossoms of

Of that species of writing termed tragi-comedy, too much has been produced, but it has been doomed to the shelf. With Shakspeare, his

comic constantly re-acted on his tragic characters. Lear, wandering amidst the tempest, had all his feeling of distress increased by the overflowings of the wild wit of the Fool; as vinegar poured upon wounds exacerbates their pain, thus even his comic humour tends to the developement of tragic passion.

The next character belonging to Shakspeare as Shakspeare, was the keeping at all times the high road of life with him there were no innocent adulteries; he never rendered that amiable which religion and reason taught us to detest; he never clothed vice in the garb of virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher, the Kotzebues of his day; his fathers

youth and beauty decay, it hurries on from the first timidly-bold declaration of love and modest return to the most unlimited passion, to an irrevocable union; then, amidst alternating storms of rapture and despair, to the death of the two lovers, who still appear enviable as their love survives them, and as by their death they have obtained a triumph over every separating power. The sweetest and the bitterest, love and hatred, festivity and dark forebodings, tender embraces and sepulchres, the fulness of life and self-annihilation, are all here brought close to each other; and all these contrasts are so blended in the harmonious and wonderful work into a unity of impression, that the echo which the whole leaves behind in the mind resembles a single but endless sigh."-Vol. 2, p. 187, Black's Translation.