own purposes. But the Czar wrought in the spirit of an architect who invents, arranges, and executes his own plan: Hildebrand in the spirit of a builder, erecting by the divine command a temple of which the divine hand had drawn the design and provided the materials. His faith in what he judged to be the purposes and the will of Heaven, were not merely sublime but astounding. He is every where depicted in his own letters the habitual denizen of that bright region which the damps of fear never penetrate, and the shadows of doubt never overcast. To extol him as one of those Christian stoics whom the wreck of worlds could not divert from the straight paths of integrity and truth, is a mere extravagance. His policy was Imperial; his resources and his arts Sacerdotal. Anathemas and flatteries, stern defiances and subtle insinuations, invective such as might have been thundered by Genseric, and apologies such as might have been whispered by Augustulus, succeed each other in his story, with no visible trace of hesitation or of shame. Even his professed orthodoxy is rendered questionable by his conduct and language towards Berengarius, the great opponent of transubstantiation. With William of England, Philip of France, and Robert of Apulia, and even with Henry of Germany, he temporized at the expense of his own principles as often as the sacrifice seemed advantageous. Nature gave horns to bulls :' to aspiring and belligerent Churchmen she gave Dissimulation and Artifice. Our exhausted space forbids the attempt to analyse or delineate the character of the great founder of the spiritual despotism of Rome. His acts must stand in place of such a portraiture. He found the Papacy dependent on the Empire: he sustained her by alliances almost commensurate with the Italian Peninsula. He found the Papacy electoral by the Roman people and clergy: he left it electoral by a college of Papal nomination. He found the Emperor the virtual patron of the Holy See: he wrested that power from his hands. He found the secular clergy the allies and dependents of the secular power: he converted them into the inalienable auxiliaries of his own. He found the higher ecclesiastics in servitude to the temporal sovereigns: he deli. vered them from that yoke to subjugate them to the Roman Tiara. He found the patronage of the Church the mere desecrated spoil and merchandise of princes: he reduced it within the dominion of the Supreme Pontiff. He is celebrated as the reformer of the impure and profane abuses of his age: he is more justly entitled to the praise of having left the impress of his own gigantic character on the history of all the ages which have succeeded him. ART. II.-1. The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere. Edited by CHARLES KNIGHT. Eight volumes, royal 8vo. London: 1838-1842. 2. The Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, and Poems of William Shakspere. Edited by CHARLES KNIGHT. The Second (or Library) Edition. Twelve volumes, 8vo. London: 18421844. 3. The Works of William Shakespeare. The Text formed from an entirely new collation of the old editions; with the various Readings, Notes a Life of the Poet, and a History of the English Stage. By J. PAYNE COLLIER, Esq., F.S.A. Eight volumes, 8vo. London: 1842-1844. W E have heard enough of smart talk about the eternal commentaries upon, and illustrations of Shakspeare, not to expect that the first salutation with which this Article will be greeted, among the dealers in commonplaces, will be a ready verdict of inutility, without the formality of a trial. But, disliking as much as any the ponderous and vapid commentaries, fantastic emendations, and other impertinences, with which the genius and text of the immortal Dramatist have been at different periods obscured and vexed, we are not, in a period of great and rich acquisitions, and sounder criticism, to suffer ourselves to be put aside, by shallow sneers, from the duty of making our readers acquainted with what has been recently done by two Editors, or either of them, to render the perusal of the works of the most everlasting of English writers more easy, more agreeable, and more satisfactory; or the bibliographical, literary, and progressive history of his Dramas more probable and instructive. Before proceeding farther with this task, it may be fair to let each of the two Editors explain his own understanding of that which he has done, or attempted. The prospectus of my edition of Shakspere,' says Mr Knight, 'issued in the summer of 1838, announced an intention to do something more than reprint the ordinary text with a selection of notes; nor was the chief recommendation of the new edition to consist in its pictorial illustrations. I knew, and I endeavoured to explain in that prospectus, that Shakspere had been grievously injured by those who had undertaken the office of making him understood; that they had corrupted his text, and had never rightly appreciated his consummate art. Since the publication of the posthumous edition of Malone by Boswell in 1821, there had been no attempt to produce a new critical edition, which should sedulously examine the ancient texts, instead of revelling in conjectural emendation-should avail itself of any improved facilities for illustrating the author-should exhibit something of what had been done to that end in foreign countries-and, above all, casting aside the ignorant spirit of all that species of commentary, which sought more to show the cleverness of depreciating criticism than the confiding humility of a reverential love, should represent the altered spirit of our literary tastes during the last quarter of a century. The antiquarians-the bibliographershad not come forward to do this; and I ventured to apply myself zealously but humbly to the task.'* 'I should not have ventured,' says Mr Collier in his Preface, to undertake the superintendence of a new edition of the works of Shakespeare, had I not felt confidence, arising not only out of recent, but long-continued experience, that I should enjoy some important and peculiar advantages. The Duke of Devonshire and Lord Francis Egerton, I was sure, would allow me to resort to their libraries, in cases where search in our public depositories must be unavailing, in consequence of their inevitable deficiencies: this would of itself have been a singular facility; but I did not anticipate that these two noblemen would at once have permitted me, as they have done, to take home, for the purpose of constant and careful collation, every early impression of Shakespeare's productions they possessed. The collection of the Duke of Devonshire is notoriously the most complete in the world; his grace has a perfect series, including of course every first edition, several of which are neither at Oxford, Cambridge, nor in the British Museum and Lord Francis Egerton has various impressions of the utmost rarity, besides plays, poems, and tracts of the time, illustrative of the works of our great dramatist. All these I have had in my hands during the preparation and printing of the ensuing volumes; so that I have had the opportunity of going over every line and letter of the text, not merely with one, but with several original copies, (sometimes varying materially from each other,) under my eye. Wherever, therefore, the text of the present edition is faulty, I can offer no excuse founded upon want of most easy access to the best authorities. My main object has been to ascertain the true language of the poet, and my next to encumber his language with no more in the shape of comment, than is necessary to render the text intelligible; and I may add, that I have the utmost confidence in the perspicuity of Shakespeare's mode of expressing his own meaning, when once his precise words have been éstablished. The introductions to the separate dramas are intended to comprise all the existing information regarding the origin of the plot, the period when each play was written and printed, the sources of the most accurate readings, and any remarkable circumstance attending com. position, production, or performance. I have arranged the whole for the first time, in the precise sequence observed by Heminge and Condell in * * *Postscript to the Sixth Volume of the First or Pictorial Shakspere, issued in December 1841. the folio of 1623: they were fellow-actors with Shakespeare, and had played, perhaps, in every drama they published; and, as they executed their task with intelligence and discretion in other respects, we may presume that they did not without reason settle the order of the plays in their noble monument to the author's memory. For about half the whole number, their volume affords the most ancient and authentic text; but with respect to the rest, printed in quarto before the appearance of the folio, I have in every instance traced the text through the earlier impressions, and have shown in what manner and to what degree it has been changed and corrupted. In the biographical memoir of the poet, of whom it is not too much to say, that he combined in himself more than all the excellences of every dramatist before or since the revival of letters, I have been anxious to include the most minute particles of information, whether of tradition or discovery. This information is now hardly as scanty as it was formerly represented; and by the favour of friends and my own research, I have been able to add to it some particulars entirely new, and of no little importance. count of our drama and stage, to the time of Shakespeare, is necessarily brief and summary; but it is hoped that it will be deemed sufficient. The glossarial index, which concludes the preliminary portion of this work, will perhaps demand some forbearance on the part of the reader; it is, I believe, the first time an alphabetical list of words, used by Shakespeare, has been made to answer the double purpose of a mere glossary, and of a means of reference to notes, where explanatory matter is inserted.' * * * The ac The two editors have some points in common. In the first place, they agree in discarding that ponderous mass of antiquarian and philological notes, and that interminable array of citations, which have made the name of Shakspeare's commentators a byword, and which ended in swelling out the last variorum editions of his works to the bulk of twenty-one thick volumes. In the second place, they agree in condemning the received text of the poet as in many places erroneous, and as every where made up on false principles: they alike profess to have improved the text, and to have improved it in the same way. But beyond these, and a few other points of likeness, there is between the editors a very wide dissimilarity. It is gratifying, however, to find that each of them has done service for which the students of the poet's works are bound to entertain lasting gratitude: it would be disappointing to discover that either of two men, who have otherwise deserved so well of letters, had proved quite incompetent to the task of editing Shakspeare. The systematic and business-like description given by Mr Collier himself, communicates a very accurate notion of the nature and extent, while it in no small degree anticipates the tone and character, of the illustrative matter which his edition contains. His strength lies in antiquarian research, not in eritical specula tion. Every thing is effected by him which can be effected by unwearied industry and patience in research, by accuracy almost impeccable in recording observed facts, and by extreme caution of judgment in estimating consequences. But, even when he ventures to infer, his caution is greatly in excess: he has a horror of novelty-a horror yet more lively of theorizing: even in determining questions of historical fact, (the ground on which he justly feels himself most at home,) he very seldom travels beyond the particular circumstance or its immediate relations; and, thus dealing with details each for itself, he neither forms nor expresses any systematic or consistent generalization. The value of his labours, even in his own favourite field, consists more in the materials he has collected, than in the use he has made of them. But those materials do possess a value which it is not easy to estimate too highly. They affect equally the state of the text, and the history of the poet's life. Of his collation of the old editions we shall have occasion to say something hereafter; but we are unwilling to defer expressing cordially our sense of the merit possessed by that collation, and by the editor's patient record of its results. In the matter furnished by his Life of the poet, there is something that is quite new, and very much that, though anticipated, has been anticipated only by the writer himself, in publications which have scarcely been known beyond the narrow circle formed by the systematic students of the old English drama. But here, too, he occupies a position which is whimsically rare in the annals of research. He has been, and is to this day, more reluctant than any other man to draw inferences, or to admit the soundness of inferences drawn by others, from the facts which he has himself had the undivided honour of discovering. The Life, however, when compared with some of the author's earliest writings, does exhibit such symptoms of progress in his opinions, that we are not without hopes he may one day enjoy the satisfaction of rating, nearly at their full value, the results of his own antiquarian investigations. That Life, and the prefixed History of the Early Stage, are the only treatises of considerable length which Mr Collier's volumes contain. His foot-notes are laconic, often laconic to excess; for even in that task of tracing the bibliographical history of the text, which he has performed so meritoriously, his microscopic way of taking up the readings, and of recording the variations, makes it not unfrequently difficult or impossible for the reader to gather that comprehension of the complex fact, which could easily have been furnished by a few sentences of continuous narrative. The Introductions prefixed to each play are strictly historical and bibliographical. We should therefore be spared the duty of |