Catherine de Medicis, the favourites, the day of the barricades, the assassination of the two Guises at Blois, the death of Henry III at St. Cloud, the agitations of the League, the murder of Henri IV, must have varied incessantly the emotions of a poet who beheld the long chain of events extending before him. The soldiers of Elizabeth, the Earl of Essex himself took part in our civil wars, and fought at Hâvre, Ivry, Rouen, and Amiens. Some veterans of the English army might have recounted at the fire-side of William Shakspeare the calamities they had witnessed in our fields of battle.

Thus it may be said that the very genius of the age wakened the genius of Shakspeare. The memorable dramas which were performing around him have furnished subjects on which the heritors of their art have exercised their skill: thus Charles IX, the Duke de Guise, Mary Stuart, Don Carlos, the Earl of Essex, were destined to inspire Schiller, Otway, Alfieri, Campistron, Thomas Corneille, Chénier, and Raynouard.

Shakspeare was born in the interval between the religious revolution which commenced under Henry VIII, and the political revolution which

was preparing to burst forth under Charles I. Both before and after him, there was nothing throughout England but scenes of bloodshed and

horror.

In the reign of Edward VI, Somerset, the Protector of the kingdom and uncle of the young King, perished on the scaffold.

In the reign of Mary, there were the martyrs of Protestantism, the beheading of Lady Jane Grey, and Philip, the exterminator of protestants, landing in England, as if to review and devote to destruction the camp of the enemy.

With the reign of Elizabeth came the martyrs of catholicism. Elizabeth herself, anointed with the sacred oil in conformity with the Roman ritual, became the persecutrix of the faith which had placed the crown upon her head. Elizabeth! the daughter of that Anne Boleyn who caused the schism from the church of Rome, who was sacrificed after Thomas More, and who died half lunatic, praying, laughing, and contrasting the smallness of her neck with the breadth of the executioner's axe.

Shakspeare in his youth must frequently have encountered old monks, chased from their cloisters, who had seen Henry VIII, his reforms, his destructive hand laid upon their

monasteries, his court fools, his wives, his mistresses-and his executioners. When the poet died, Charles I was in his sixteenth year.

Thus Shakspeare might have laid one hand on the hoary heads menaced by the last but one of the Tudors, and the other on the auburn locks of the second of the Stuarts;-on that head which was painted by Vandyke and subsequently struck off by the Parliament party. Filling this position, contemplating these tragic objects, the great poet descended into the tomb. His life was employed in drawing his spectres and his blind kings, in depicting female sorrow and the punishment of ambition, so as to unite by analogous fictions the realities of the past with the realities of the future.

POETS AND OTHER WRITERS CONTEMPORARY WITH

SHAKSPEARE.

JAMES I. reigned between the sword, which terrified him while yet unborn, and the axe, which slew, but could not terrify his son. His reign separated the scaffold of Fotheringay from that of Whitehall: a gloomy period, in which Bacon and Shakspeare were extinguished.

Those two illustrious contemporaries trod the same ground: I have already mentioned the foreigners who were their companions in glory. France, which was then behindhand in letters, presents to us only Amyot, de Thou, Ronsard, and Montaigne, minds of humbler flight. Hardy and Garnier had scarcely begun to lisp the first accents of our Melpomene. Rabelais indeed had been dead but fifteen years when Shakspeare was born. The buffoon would have proved qualified to measure himself with the tragic dramatist.

The latter had already passed thirty-one years on earth, when the unfortunate Tasso and the heroic Ercilla left it, both dying in 1595. The English poet founded the theatre of his nation, whilst Lope de Vèga established that of Spain; but Lope had a rival in Calderon. The author of the "Meilleur Alcade" had embarked as a volunteer, in the the invincible Armada, at the very time when the author of Falstaff was calming the inquietudes of the

"Fair vestal throned in the West "

The Castilian dramatist alludes to this famed Armada in his "Fuerza lastimosa." "The winds," he says, destroyed the finest naval armament that was ever seen." Lope was coming, sword in hand, to assault Shakspeare on his own hearth, as the minstrels of William the Conqueror attacked the Scalds of Harold. Lope has treated religion as Shakspeare treated history. The characters of the first chant on the stage the Gloria Patri, interspersed with songs. Those of the second sing lively ballads, the lazzi of the grave-digger.

Cervantes, wounded at Lepanto, in 1570, a slave in Algiers, in 1575, ransomed in 1581, began in a prison his inimitable comic work, and dared not continue it till long afterwards, so