boards, or on stools which they paid for. The pit was a dark and dusty hole, in which the audience stood crowded together. The spectators in the pit and those on the stage were like two hostile camps drawn up face to face. The pit saluted the gentlemen with hisses, threw mud at them, and addressed to them insulting outcries. The gentlemen returned these compliments by calling their assailants stinkards and brutes. The stinkards ate apples and drank ale; the gentlemen played at cards and smoked tobacco, which was then recently introduced. It was the fashion for the gentlemen to tear up the cards, as if they had lost some great stake, and then to throw the fragments angrily on the stage, to laugh, speak loud, and turn their backs on the actors. this manner were the tragedies of the great master received on their first production. John Bull threw apple-parings at the divinity at whose shrine he now offers adoration. Fortune, in her rigour to Shakspeare and Moliere, made them actors, and thus gave to the lowest of their countrymen the privilege of at once insulting the great men and their writings.

In

Shakspeare revived the dramatic art; Moliere brought it to perfection. Like two ancient philosophers, they divided between them the empire

of smiles and tears, and perhaps consoled themselves for the injustice of fate, the one by painting the absurdities and the other the sorrows of mankind.

CHARACTER OF SHAKSPEARE'S GENIUS.

SHAKSPEARE then is still admirable on account of the obstacles which he had to contend with. Never was so rare a genius obliged to avail himself of a language so faulty. Luckily, Shakspeare wanted what is termed learning, and this deficiency enabled him to escape one of the contagions of his age. Popular ballads, extracts from the History of England, collected from "Lord Buckhurst's Mirrour for Magistrates," French novels by Belleforest, and versions of the poets and tale-writers of Italy, composed his whole stock of literary erudition.

Ben Jonson, his rival, his admirer, and his detractor, was on the other hand a scholar. The fifty-two commentators on Shakspeare have industriously sought to discover all the translations of Latin authors which might have ex

isted in his time.

which I find in

The only dramatic productions the catalogue are a Jocasta,

taken from the Phoenissæ of Euripides, the Andria and the Eunuch of Terence, the Menechmes of Plautus, and the tragedies of Seneca. It is doubtful whether Shakspeare had any acquaintance with these translations; for he did not borrow the subjects of his plays from the originals translated into English, but from some English imitations of those same originals. This may be seen by Romeo and Juliet, the story of which Shakspeare did not take either from Girolamo de la Corte, or from the novel of Bandello; but from a little English poem entitled "The Tragical History of Romeo and Juliet." It is the same with Hamlet, the subject of which Shakspeare could not have taken immediately from Saxo Grammaticus.

The reformation, during the reign of Henry VIII., by banishing the Miracles and Mysteries, accelerated the revival of the drama beyond the circle of religious belief; and, had not Shakspeare found in Greek antiquity a stumblingblock, which he could not surmount, the classic style would have prevailed in English literature a century before its triumph in France.

In the opinion of Dr. Johnson, which may be

regarded as the opinion of the English in general, Shakspeare was more amply endowed with comic than with tragic genius. The great critic remarks, that in the most pathetic scenes the poet's humour gains possession of him; whilst in his comic scenes a serious thought never occurs. If we French can scarcely relish the vis comica of Falstaff, whilst we fully enter into the sorrow of Desdemona, it is because different nations have different modes of laughing and only one of weeping.

Tragic poets sometimes light upon the comic: but comic poets rarely rise to the tragic this would imply that there is something more vast in the genius of Melpomene than in that of Thalia. He who can paint the suffering side of human nature can likewise represent the gay side; because he who can reach the greater can attain the less. Thus the painter who applies himself to humorous subjects lets the more exalted ones escape him, because the faculty of distinguishing small objects is almost always accompanied by the incapability of embracing great ones. There is but one comic poet who ranks on an equality with Sophocles and Corneille, and that is Molière. It is worthy of remark, that the comic humour of the Tartufe