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.

were roused by ingratitude, his husbands were stung by unfaithfulness; the affections were wounded in those points where all may and all must feel. Another evidence of exquisite judgment in Shakspeare was, that he seized hold of popular tales. Lear and the Merchant of Venice were popular tales, but so excellently managed, both were the representation of men in all ages and at all times.

His dramas do not arise absolutely out of some one extraordinary circumstance; the scenes may stand, independently of any such one connecting incident, as faithful reflections of men and manners. In his mode of drawing characters, there were no pompous descriptions of a man by himself; his character was to be drawn as in real life, from the whole course of the play, or out of the mouths of his enemies or friends: this might be exemplified in the character of Polonius, which actors have often misrepresented. Shakspeare never intended to represent him as a buffoon: it was natural that Hamlet, a young man of genius and fire, detesting formality, and disliking Polonius

What is here, and subsequently, said by Mr. Coleridge on the morality and comparative purity of Shakspeare, ought never to be forgotten. It is one of those admirable features in this great poet which has rendered his plays not merely, like those of his contemporaries and successors, a source of gratification for the feelings and imagination, but has stamped them as the vehicle of the noblest lessons of practical wisdom and virtue.

allow that his images were incomparably less so than those of his contemporaries; even the letters of females in high life were coarser than his writings.

The writings of Beaumont and Fletcher bear no comparison; the grossest passages of Shakspeare were purity to theirs; and it should be remembered that, though he might occasionally disgust a sense of delicacy, he never injured the mind; he caused no excitement of passion which he flattered to degrade; never used what was faulty for a faulty purpose; carried on no warfare against virtue, by which wickedness may be made to appear as not wickedness, and where our sympathy was to be entrapped by the misfortunes of vice: with him vice never walked, as it were, in twilight. He never inverted the order of nature and propriety, like some modern writers, who suppose every magistrate to be a glutton or a drunkard, and every poor man humane and temperate; with .him we had no benevolent braziers or sentimental rat-catchers. Nothing was purposely out of place.

If a man speak injuriously of a friend, our vindication of him is naturally warm: Shakspeare had been accused of profaneness; he (Mr. C.), from the perusal of him, had acquired a habit of looking into his own heart, and perceived the goings on of his nature; and confident he was, Shakspeare was a writer of all others the most

great characters of Othello, Iago, Hamlet, and Richard the Third, as he never could have witnessed any thing similar, he appears invariably to have asked himself, How should I act or speak in such circumstances ?-His comic characters were also peculiar a drunken constable was not uncommon; but he could make folly a vehicle for wit, as in Dogberry; every thing was as a sub-stratum on which his creative genius might erect a superstructure.

To distinguish what is legitimate in Shakspeare from what does not belong to him, we must observe his varied images symbolical of moral truth, thrusting by and seeming to trip up each other, from an impetuosity of thought, producing a metre which is always flowing from one verse into the other, and seldom closing with the tenth syllable of the line; an instance of which may be found in the play of Pericles, written a century before, but which Shakspeare altered, and where his alteration may be recognised even to half a line: this was the case not merely in his later plays, but in his early dramas, such as Love's Labour Lost, the same perfection in the flowing continuity of interchangeable pauses is constantly perceptible.

Lastly, contrast his morality with the writers of his own or the succeeding age, or with those of the present day, who boast of their superiority: he never, as before observed, deserted the high road of life; he never made his lovers openly gross or profane; for common candour must