As soon as he retires to his tent, the poet begins to put in motion his great moral machinery of the ghosts. Trifles are not made for Shakspeare; difficulties, that would have plunged the spirit of any other poet, and turned his scenery into inevitable ridicule, are nothing in his way. He brings forward a long string of ghosts, and puts a speech into each of their mouths without any fear of consequences. Richard starts from his couch, and before he has shaken off the terrors of his dream, cries out But I Give me another horse!-Bind up my wounds!- may conclude my subject; every reader can go on with the soliloquy, and no words of mine can be wanted to excite their admiration. CUMBERLAND. mous crimes; he falls not unvisited by the terrors of conscience, for, on the eve of danger and of death, the retribution of another world is placed before him; the spirits of those whom he had murdered reveal the awful sentence of his fate, and his bosom heaves with the infliction of eternal torture."Shakspeare and his Times, vol. ii. p. 373-375. The Observer, No. 58. No. XVI. CRITICAL REMARKS ON THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF. THAT "poet and creator are the same," is equally allowed in criticism as in etymology; and that, without the powers of invention and imagination, nothing great or highly delightful in poetry. can be achieved. I have often thought that the same thing holds in some measure with regard to the reader as well as the writer of poetry. Without somewhat of a congenial imagination in the former, the works of the latter will afford a very inferior degree of pleaThe mind of him who reads should be able to imagine what the productive fancy of the poet creates and presents to his view; to look on the world of fancy set before him with a native's ear; to acknowledge its manners, to feel its passions, and to trace, with somewhat of an instinctive glance, those characters with which the poet has peopled it. If in the perusal of any poet this is required, Shakspeare, of all poets, seems to claim it the most. Of all poets, Shakspeare appears to have possessed a fancy the most prolific, an imagination the most luxuriantly fertile. In this particular he has been frequently compared to Homer, though those who have drawn the parallel, have done it, I know not why, with a sort of distrust of their assertion. Did we not look at the Greek with that reverential awe which his antiquity impresses, I think we might venture to affirm that in this respect the other is more than his equal. In invention of incident, in diversity of character, in assemblage of images, we can scarcely indeed conceive Homer to be surpassed; but in the mere creation of fancy, I can discover nothing in the Iliad that equals the Tempest or the Macbeth of Shakspeare. The machinery of Homer is indeed stupendous; but of that machinery the materials were known; or though it should be allowed that he added something to the mythology he found, yet still the language and the manners of his deities are merely the language and the manners of men. Of Shakspeare, the machinery may be said to be produced as well as combined by himself. Some of the beings of whom it is composed, neither tradition nor romance afforded him; and of those whom he borrowed thence, he invented the language and the manners,-language and manners peculiar to themselves, for which he could draw no analogy from mankind. Though formed by fancy, however, his personages are true to nature; and a reader of that pregnant imagination which I have mentioned above, can immediately decide on the justness of his conceptions; as he who beholds the masterly expression of certain portraits, pronounces with confidence on their likeness, though unacquainted with the persons from whom they were drawn. But it is not only in these untried regions of magic or of witchery, that the creative power of Shakspeare has exerted itself. By a very singular felicity of invention, he has produced, in the beaten field of ordinary life, characters of such perfect originality, that we look on them with no less wonder at his invention than on those preternatural beings which are not of this earth;" and yet they speak a language so purely that of common society, that we have but to step abroad into the world to hear every expression of which it is composed. Of this sort is the character of Falstaff. 66 On the subject of this character I was lately discoursing with a friend, who is very much endowed with that critical imagination of which I have suggested the use in the beginning of this paper. The general import of his observations may form neither an useless nor unamusing field for speculation to my readers. Though the character of Falstaff, said my friend, is of so striking a kind as to engross almost the whole attention of the audience in the representation of the play in which it is first introduced, yet it was probably only a secondary and incidental object with Shakspeare in composing that play. He was writing a series of historical dramas on the most remarkable events of the English history, from the time of King John downwards. When he arrived at the reign of Henry IV., the dissipated youth and extravagant pranks of the Prince of Wales could not fail to excite his attention, as affording at once a source of moral reflection in the serious department, and a fund of infinite humour in the comic part of the drama. In providing him with associates for his hours of folly and of riot, he probably borrowed, as was his custom, from some old play, interlude, or story, the names and incidents which he has used in the first part of Henry IV. Oldcastle, we know, was the name of a character in such a play, inserted there, it is probable (in those days of the church's omnipotence in every department of writing,) in odium of Sir John Oldcastle, chief of the Lollards, though Shakspeare afterwards, in a protestant reign, changed it to Falstaff. This leader of the gang, which the wanton extravagance of the Prince was to cherish and protect, it was necessary to endow with qualities sufficient to make the young Henry, in his society, Shakspeare therefore has endowed him with infinite wit and humour, as well as an admirable degree of sagacity and acuteness in observing the characters of men; but has joined those qualities with a grossness of mind which his youthful master could |