voluntarily dispensed with. But this is not the question. Would not the play be better without it, more symmetrical, less disturbed in action, more entirely one, if these superfluous excellences were sacrificed?

What are the plays on which Shakespeare's fame as a tragic poet most securely rests? Five in all-' Romeo and Juliet,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet,' 'Othello,' and ' Lear.' Payne Knight, with several other critics, regards 'Macbeth' as Shakespeare's greatest work, and there are certainly passages in that play which rise to a greater elevation than anything to be found in any other play. There are in it also three characters of immense distinctness and originality-Lady Macbeth, Macbeth himself, and Banquo-around whose fates an interest of the deepest kind is thrown. Yet this interest-stormy, dark, and absorbing as it is is less absorbing than that which envelops the young, beautiful, and innocent Capulet to the latest moment of her existence. Macbeth's Queen is indisputably a magnificent woman, endowed with beauty, love, ambition, and resistless courage. But even Shakespeare's genius found it a task beyond his resources to keep her long upon the stage. She comes in like a whirlwind, exerts her baleful influence, burns herself a way into the inmost soul of spectator or reader, never again to be dislodged from thence, and then disappears as some bright and destructive meteor vanishes from the firmament. Still more than her husband she is the soul of the tragedy, which languishes in her absence, and as to interest, dies with her, since all that follows is 'stale, flat, and unprofitable.' Juliet's career doubtless contrasts with hers; she steals upon us peacefully and sweetly as some lovely star glides up into the blue; she appears at first as the incarnation of gentle love;

her passions, however, rapidly acquire force and vehemence, her soul expands, fills the theatre, excites deep emotion in a thousand hearts, flashes beauty about her like some god, fascinates her lover to madness, and then in a blaze of passion, tenderness, and magnanimity descends into the tomb. Juliet, in fact, in my opinion, is the greatest of Shakespeare's creations, and I envy few more than those who saw her impersonated as she ought to be with congenial beauty and intellect by Miss O'Neill.'

Nowhere has Shakespeare given proof of his subtle perception of the true nature of love more than in the parting scene between Juliet and Romeo A cluster of the grandest and most beautiful ideas throws splen

'Miss O'Neill, the famous actress, who married Mr., afterwards Sir H., Wrixon Becher, preserved her faculties and dramatic power to the last. The following anecdote was told me by the late Baroness Burdett-Coutts: At one time a friend who read well used to call at Stratton Street about tea time, and read to those assembled different scenes from Shakespeare's plays. One afternoon Lady Becher happened to be present, and inquired from what play the gentleman proposed to select passages that day. From "Romeo and Juliet," ," he replied. 'Then,' said she, 'let us have the balcony scene; I will take the part of Juliet to your Romeo.' All the ladies present tried to persuade her not to attempt it, but she only remarked: 'I can understand what is your object; you think I shall make myself ridiculous, but I shall not.' She left the room, and when she returned she had skilfully wrapped a lace shawl round her head, through which you could only partially distinguish her features. She stepped on to a slightly raised dais which was then in the drawing-room, and the scene began. All were astonished; her genius had not abandoned her, and she acted the part with striking effect; her voice was beautifully modulated, and it retained much of its former sweetness. The part of Juliet had evidently been a favourite one of hers, and she appeared to remember every line of it.

I used to associate this anecdote with the late Henry Irving, but the dates will not allow it, as the Baroness's intimate friendship with that distinguished man did not commence until after the death of Lady Becher. I now feel assured that it was Mr. Young, the son of the famous actor of Miss O'Neill's day, that read the words of Romeo. I may add that the part of Romeo was totally unsuited to Irving. Between the years 1860 and 1872, at which latter date Lady Becher died, I used to meet her at Stratton Street, and although in the former year Lady Becher was already seventy, she retained so much vivacity as to surprise all who heard her converse.

dour over its despair: the lark, the nightingale, the pomegranate tree, the misty mountain tops, the vaulty heavens encircle the pale beauty of the girl, as from her lattice she looks down for the last time upon her lover in the garden. The livery of past delight had settled on them both-she fancies she beholds him dead at the bottom of a tomb: he is no less struck by her colourless cheeks; and then the bright curtain of life descends, never for them to be again drawn up. But they have lived, they have loved.

The tree of knowledge has been plucked,
All's known.

Some German critics, holding a strange theory of ethics, regard the love which Shakespeare has developed in this character, as well as in that of Romeo, as corrupting and debased; but what man deserving the name would not desire to be so debased and corrupted? All that is sweet and delicate in life, all that translates it out of the region of brute matter into that of spirit, all that sheds a lustre and perfume on existence, is infused and concentrated by Shakespeare in this most perfect embodiment of the female character. If earth were peopled by Juliets, 'life would not yield to age.' Hallam, no mean name in literature, refuses to reckon Juliet among Shakespeare's great women. Perhaps, indeed, she ought not to be reckoned among any women, great or little, but to form a class apart, above and superior to them all. To prove her close relationship to us, however, she has her weaknesses, her failings, her little vices: she equivocates with her mother, is imperious with her nurse, froward with her father, and too submissive to the friar.

How far Shakespeare was acquainted with antiquity and through what channels he studied it, is of no

moment, but that after a fashion he did study it, and derive much benefit from the study, may be regarded as past doubt.

The calamities and sorrows of the house of Atreus appear to have made a powerful impression on his mind and to have inspired him with a wish to reproduce, through some analogous circumstances in modern times, a tragic story involving the same elements, and resulting in a similar catastrophe. In the trilogy of Eschylus we have a wife who, in conjunction with her paramour, murders her husband. The son of the adulteress, returning home from a foreign country, determines at the instigation of the gods to avenge his father's murder, and with the aid of a friend accomplishes his purpose by killing both the guilty individuals.

This subject struck Shakespeare as pre-eminently susceptible of tragic development, and out of this conviction arose the tragedy of 'Hamlet.' Claudius is Ægistheus, Gertrude is Clytemnestra, Hamlet just returned from abroad is Orestes, and Horatio is Pylades. In the Greek poet there is no love save of that dignified and exalted kind which subsists between brother and sister, for Electra stands in the place of Ophelia, except that her consuming energy transcends the utmost conception of the Danish maiden. When Shakespeare had shadowed forth this plan in his mind, he was too full of genius and original resources to sink into the character of an imitator; but he could only escape this by making some of his principal personages tame and insipid, while the chief actor, like Aaron's serpent, swallows up the rest.

The warlike majesty of Denmark has just returned, like Agamemnon, from foreign wars, when his brother

and Queen compass his destruction; but instead of making Gertrude a high-souled, fierce, impassioned, reckless assassin, like Clytemnestra, Shakespeare represents her as a puny, mawkish adulteress, who, through her own base passions, becomes subservient to the lust of a man still baser and more worthless, since, while he exhibits not even the semblance of any virtue, she, in the depths of the Circean sty, preserves the love of a mother for her son. This modification in her character necessitated a modification in that of Hamlet. Clytemnestra has quenched in her heart a mother's love, otherwise Orestes, in spite of every other motive, could not have slain her; and the modern Orestes, who by all forms of intelligence, both natural and supernatural, might have been expected to become a matricide upon learning the real circumstances of his father's murder, is withheld from the fulfilment of that part of his design by the peremptory injunctions of his father's spirit:

Let not thy soul contrive

Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven
And to the thorns that in her bosom lodge

To prick and sting her.

From this it is clear that Hamlet's father discerned in his son's mind ideas which might have resulted in the death of both the guilty individuals. Assuming the truth of the historical event commemorated, Eschylus has no choice, but must make Orestes kill his mother; but Shakespeare, finding the whole field of tradition left open to him, exhibits superior art in making accident, not her son, the instrument of Gertrude's punishment. He kills the Danish Ægistheus, as was right, but only in that disastrous mêlée the production of which Shakespeare thought necessary