I shall have placed the reader in distinct possession of the passages alluded to. Nothing can exceed the impressiveness with which he conveys at all times a consciousness of his own genius. On this score he has neither doubt nor fear. In one of those delicious effusions to his young friend which are to be found in the sonnets (I have already remarked upon them), and which in their exquisite sensibility and touching abandonment of manner always remind me of Catullus, (as indeed they bear a still more striking likeness to much of the poetry of that beautiful writer in the reception they have hitherto received, in the unaccountable construction-unaccountable both in feeling and scholarship—which scholars have put upon them;) he asks "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and at the close exclaims with proud but unselfish consciousness- So in the following sonnet. † Again, with no idle vanity, but in the confidence of surpassing genius "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme." The same feeling is expressed in the sixtieth, the sixty-third, 'the sixty-fifth, and other sonnets.§ In none of these, however, is the slightest personal association mingled with the consciousness of genius. When he suffers the idea of himself to intrude, it is by subduing within the range of a more touching unselfishness the feeling of the Homeric hymn I have quoted, where the poor blind poet desires to be remembered by the virgins of Delos "When that fell arrest Without all bail shall carry me away, My life hath in this line some interest, Which for memorial still with thee shall stay."|| This is merely the satisfaction of a private emotion. And so where he writes what he calls some poor rude lines," simply that "though they be outstripped by every pen," they should still be reserved" for my love, not for their rhyme." It is expressed variously, but always with the same submissive feeling. In the eighty-first sonnet he explicitly excepts the world from any share in these hopes of his sympathy and tenderness. Here is the detailed expression of his sentiments on the subject of public fame. It is in this sonnet he has unburdened himself so clearly on that subject, that his words cannot be misunderstood. I shall lay them before the reader entire. * Sonnet 18. + Sonnet 19. Sonnet 55. || Sonnet 74. Sonnet 32. "Or I shall live your epitaph to make, Or you survive when I in earth am rotten; You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen) Where breath most breathes-even in the mouths of men*." That is for so I believe this sonnet will be universally read-Shakspeare, intensely conscious of his genius, conscious with the first Greek writers of the power he had of conferring immortality on others, was ignorant or careless of the personal glory it would associate with his own Secure of the eternal life of his writings, he was content that "His name be buried where his body is." name. He worshipped the love of fame, as a writer, with the purest possible worship, such as I have already described the homage paid to the ideal and abstracted life of thoughts which once born can never die, but must run down in a never-ending course to distant ages. As a man, it may be, he was content with fame as the actor seeks it, in the present triumph of one glorious hour. He may have felt that it was a dangerous thing to trust to posterity the payment of such a huge debt of fame as would be due on his wonderful writings. He preferred to cancel the debt as a personal matter in favour of the great spirit of humanity of which these writings seemed the pure emanation. His personal pretensions were really nothing, in the vastness and splendour of the works his imagination had given to the world. Not that he valued fame little, or loved it less. There is no blessing we have deserved, and yet failed to set a just value on. But, as I have argued, he loved it, in reference to his writings, in its purest and most abstracted shape. Through his life he had been doomed to feel that it was the very glory of his genius, its wonderful universality, which prevented his own entire appreciation among his contemporaries. When Falstaff followed Lear, and Hamlet succeeded Falstaff, no one seems to have thought of him. They thought of nature, not of one of nature's children, a man of our infirmity." This was a lesson for himself, and he thought it wiser therefore to fling his love of personal fame during life into the immediate applauses of the actor's hour, and to leave the fame of his works to be an enduring "monument without a tomb,"-associate with no sense of mortality. 66 And this was wisdom. The world has taken care that he lost nothing by such noble carelessness and proud modesty. Let us turn for an instant to a picture of a different description drawn by the hand of a first-rate master. Fancy," says Doctor Johnson, in one of the very finest specimens of his style-" fancy can hardly forbear to conjecture with what temper Milton surveyed the silent progress of his work, and marked its reputation stealing its way in a kind of subterraneous current + Sonnet 72. *Sonnet 81. through fear and silence. I cannot but conceive him calm and confident, little disappointed, not at all dejected, relying on his own merit with steady consciousness, and waiting without impatience the vicissitudes of opinion, and the impartiality of a future generation." The result in both cases has been sanctioned by an admiring, a wondering, and most grateful posterity. And the course in each case was wisely ordered and tempered. For a patient reliance on posterity was necessary to the sustainment of Milton's works, encompassed as they were with danger and present darkness; necessary, too, to the sustainment of himself, devoted to the work of imagination as to the work of duty-a poet, a patriot, and a prophetwho had chosen in this world "labour and intense study" as his portion of life, in the ardent hope that with their assistance, and " by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and send out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases," he might "perhaps leave something so written to after times, as they should not willingly let die.” This was the religious zeal of the poetical faith of Milton; this made a far posterity the present listeners to his work; and brought to his ear from a yet remoter time, the applauses of his own "Perfect Commonwealth." (Is that anticipation to be fulfilled with the rest? "Aspice convexo nutantem pondere mundum,' Terrasque, tractusque marís, cœlumque profundum Aspice, venturo lætentur ut omnia sæclo!" But be that as it may, the hope was not denied to Milton.) His lot seemed cast like that of the old sages and poets of Greece and Rome, and he sought the glory of personal association with them-with "Blind Thamyris, and blind Mæonides, And Tiresius, and Phineus, prophets old." Shakspeare was, in all respects, the reverse of this. He was a player and a writer of plays. His desire of fame as a man (for without this, in some shape, it would be perhaps impossible to exist) was satisfied by the nature of his profession, by the triumphs which acting showers down upon the greatest actors and does not altogether withhold from the worst,-while, his personal hopes of after fame having merged into the more exalted sense of the unconfinable universality of his genius, he carelessly left his works to the mercies of his friends the players, to the criticisms of Voltaire, and Rymer, and Chateaubriand, or to any other of the accidents that might be waiting for them in their sure voyage down the stream of everlasting time. He did not care to voyage with them. If it is probable that the bad jokes in his plays were the passages most applauded by Queen Elizabeth and her maids of honour, this easy and personally indifferent conclusion he had come to, must have saved him many a heartache. In a word, the character of his life and habits-in all respects the reverse of those of Milton-were precisely of that description which forbade him to care to embody his personal identity in a reputation after death, of which he saw so much reason to be little tenacious while living-beyond the glory of an hour. And has he not in this bequeathed, in addition to his works, the great lesson to his fellow men-that they who desire to stand greatest in the eyes of others, must learn first " to be nothing in their own?" Intensely conscious of his genius, he pays to it only the purest homage. He scorns to console himself for the sneers or insults of fools while living, by fancying he might be the idol of wiser men to come; and he is the more sensible of the power those men would worship, in proportion as he is careless whether they worship him. This, after all, I take to be the truest realization of fame, rejecting personal desire. In that, it rejects also every sort of applause which may still, even in remote time, be mingled with it, and accepts only the flattery which is identified with the source of genius itself-with truth and nature. Shakspeare never thought he would be the better for the breakfasts, dinners, and suppers, that have been eaten in his personal commemoration since his death, and he is not the better for them. Shakspeare Clubs and Shakspeare Jubilees have, I verily believe, diminished the number of Shakspeare's readers. All they do is to save people the trouble of thinking precisely why and how they should admire him. They substitute literary coxcombry for a true appreciation of letters. They vulgarize genius by reducing it to the level of the stomach, and can only propose to ascend the highest heaven of a wonderful imagination by help of eating and drinking, by legs of mutton, and dainty viands. The only thing they would really care to know about Shakspeare personally, I believe to be simply whether he ever stole a buck from Sir Thos. Lucy-because that is a circumstance which falls in amazingly with their peculiar notions. But why should I do more on this subject than give Foote's inimitable description of a Shakspeare Jubilee? I quote it from one of his farces-"A jubilee, as it hath lately appeared (Foote is referring to that of 1769, but these things are all of the same sort), is a public invitation circulated and urged by puffing, to go post without horses, to an obscure borough without representatives, governed by a mayor and aldermen who are no magistrates, to celebrate a great poet whose own works have made him immortal-by an ode without poetry, music without melody, dinners without victuals, and lodging without beds a masquerade where half the people are without masks, a horserace knee deep in water-fireworks that stubbornly refuse to emit a spark-and a gingerbread amphitheatre that tumbles to pieces, like a house of card, as soon as it is finished." Such are the personal rewards with which we moderns acknowledge the glory of fame, and so we apotheosize Shakspeare! CHAPTER V. THE MELANCHOLY, DISCONTENT, AND SELF-ACCUSINGS OF SHAKSPEARE. When Dante, in his sublime PURGATORIO, discovered an exact portrait of his own sufferings by exhibiting with a terrible and designed obscurity the misery of a man who, stripping his visage of all shame, and trembling in his very vitals, places himself in the public way and stretches out his hand for charity,-he bequeathed an awful lesson to humanity. When, in the PARADISO, he meets the shade of his ancestor, and is told that he shall prove how salt is the taste of the bread of others, and how hard the road is going up and down the stairs of others, he predicted the lot of hundreds of men of genius that were to succeed him, and behold in that shape of mighty want only a terrible shadowing forth of their own. It is out of such sufferings indeed that the "medicinal gums" of poetry have been most frequently distilled. The muse gives what men deny. If she is the bane, she has the antidote-if she exaggerates the actual chances of poverty, she can annihilate at least its ideal evils. A great poet has said that men are cradled into poetry by wrong, and it is certain that, as Francis Beaumont sings, no more can the true poet, who is afflicted by poverty or wrong, withhold himself from venting his emotions in the highest strains of poetry. Thus are the noxious particles of evil in such hard destinies completely carried off from the world, and the forked shafts of misery played with unhurt! Shakspeare was not exempted from this ordinary fate of poets. His struggles with poverty, so far as they are actually known to us, I have already traced in these papers. To these I may add some illustrative passages from his own confessions. In one sonnet he exhibits to his friend the picture of his life, in hours of labour" hastening to their end". "Each changing place with that which goes before In sequent toil all forwards do contend*." and on another occasion he affectingly complains of being "debarr'd the benefit of rest," for that "day's oppression is not eas'd by night, The one by toil, the other to complain How far I toil, still farther off from thee." Struggle as he may, he cannot throw off the heavy weight of this,— 66 -day doth daily draw my sorrows longer, And night doth nightly make grief's strength seem stronger!" But yet it is not poverty and the necessities of toil that enter into the soul of the poet, so much as what he sees outside, and beyond, that "working-day world" that is immediately around him. Observe the following sonnet. It is a proof to me that there is, perhaps, more of Shakspeare's personal feeling disguised in "Hamlet" than in all the rest of his plays together : "TIRED WITH ALL THESE, FOR RESTFUL DEATH I CRY, As, to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, |