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three thousand and twenty-eight acres of land, part of the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond. There, seated at a hearth which was not his own, the rightful heirs to which were wandering in exile, he celebrated the hill of Mole, and the banks of the Mulla, without reflecting that the fugitive orphans were never to revisit their paternal haunts. The poet must have thought of the lines of Virgil :

Nos patriæ fines et dulcia linquimus arva ;
Nos patriam fugimus.

Spenser is the author of a sort of essay on the manners and antiquities of Ireland, which I prefer to his "Faerie Queene."

The English formerly traded in their children, and sold them; this commerce was carried on to a great extent with Ireland. A council held at Armagh in 1117, by the Irish ecclesiastics, declared that, in order to avert the wrath of Jesus Christ, the enemy of servitude, the English slaves throughout the whole island should be restored to their former freedom. (See Wilkin Concil. vol. i.) How have the Irish been requited for this generous resolution of their ancestors? But for them the period of the deliverance of Christ is at length arrived.

SHASKPEARE.

WE now come to Shakspeare. Let us consider him at our leisure, as Montesquieu says of Alexander.

I quote from memory the titles of two pieces: Every Man, which was performed in the reign of Henry VIII., and Gammer Gurton's Needle performed in 1552. The dramatic authors contemporary with Shakspeare, were Robert Green, Heywood, Decker, Rowley, Peele, Chapman, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher: jacet oratio! Ben Jonson's plays, entitled the Fox, and the Alchymist, are still esteemed.

Spenser was the favourite poet of the reign of Elizabeth. The author of Macbeth, and Richard III. was eclipsed by the dazzling rays of the

Shepherd's Calendar," and the "Faerie Queene." Did Montmorency, Biron, and Sully, who were by turns ambassadors from France to the courts of Elizabeth and James I., ever hear

ears ?

of a strolling actor, who performed sometimes in his own plays, and sometimes in those of other authors? Did they ever pronounce the name of Shakspeare, so barbarous to French Did they ever suspect that there was around him a glory which would outlive their honours, their pomp, their rank? Yet the mountebank player, the representative of Hamlet's Ghost, was the great phantom, the shade of the middle age, who rose upon the world like the evening star, just at a moment when the middle age had sunk among the dead; that extraordinary interval which Dante opened, and which Shakspeare closed.*

Whitelocke, a contemporary of Milton, speaking in his "Historical Sketch" of the author of "Paradise Lost," designates him as "a certain blind man, named Milton, Latin Secretary to the Parliament." Moliere, the player, acted his own Pourceaugnac, as Shakspeare, the buffoon, personated his own Falstaff. The author of the Tartufe, the comrade of poor Mondorge, changed his illustrious name of Poquelin for the humble name of Molière, that he might not disgrace his father, the Upholsterer.

*The great dramatist himself spelt his name Shakspeare. The orthography Shakespeare has been, however, very generally adopted.

Avant qu'un peu de terre, obtenu par prière,
Pour jamais sous la tombe eût enfermé Molière,
Mille de ses beaux traits, aujourd'hui si vantés,
Furent des sots esprits à nos yeux rebutés.

Thus, the veiled travellers, who come from time to time, and seat themselves at Our tables, are treated by us merely as common guests: we know not their immortal nature until the day of their disappearance. On quitting this world, they become transfigured, and say to us, as the messenger of heaven did to Tobias : “I am one of the seven, which go in and out before the glory of the Holy One."

These divinities, who are not recognised by mankind in their transitory passage through the world, are, nevertheless, recognizable to each other. Thus, Milton saw the glory of the Bard of Avon :

What needs my Shakspeare, for his honor'd bones,

The labour of an age in piled stones?

Or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid

Under a starry-pointing pyramid ?

Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,

What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?

Thou, in our wonder and astonishment,

Hast built thyself a live-long monument.

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And, so sepulchred, in such pomp dost lic,
That Kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die.

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