conveyed so pointedly in the alternative antithesis of "beast" to "man"-there is a philosophic keenness of the highest order in its rebuke. It strikes at one of the most fundamental weaknesses of Celtic nature-the yearning to blab and castle-build its enterprizes in advance; by way, no doubt, of intellectual compensation for the lack of action, and also the necessity of social communication. But the good Doctor never dreamt of such a nature in Macbeth. Indeed, he tells us in express terms, and with the usual tone of emphasis, that this play "has no nice discriminations of character.” Doctor meant by character the English or Teutonic.

The

This, however, has been improved upon by certain living

critics, in relation to the passage in question. The reader must be aware that the world of "Shakespearean literature” has recently been thrown into commotion, and also commerce, by a discovery of the usual description, an "old edition." This famous "folio," besides age, had some marginal notes, and in a hand-writing mysteriously suspected to be Shakespeare's hence a multitude of controversies, articles, even editions. From the collection of the notes, as issued apart from his edition of the poet by the immortalized discoverer, it seems the gravest has chanced to turn on the passage last examined. The amendment consists in reading boast for "beast," and thereupon the editor expatiates as follows: "It cannot be denied by the most scrupulous stickler for the purity of the text, etc., that this mere substitution of o for e as it were magically conjures into palpable existence the longburied meaning of the poet." And again: "It is quite certain that people have been in the habit of reading Macbeth for the last two hundred years, some of them for the express

purpose of detecting blunders in the text, and yet, as far as can be ascertained, have never once hit upon this improvement, so trifling as regards typography, but so valuable as regards the meaning of Shakespeare."

There is a sample at once of the discovery and of the letter-press criticism generally upon Shakespeare, some allusions to which have been inevitable in these pages. The writer, in his exultation, thinks of nothing beyond the word. He does not seem to have expected any consequences of the change upon the argument, the antithesis, the environs in general. The word is considered, like a free-born Englishman, as standing on its own bottom, independent of all around it. It was not seen that, even so, a point is turned to a platitude. A miracle is wrought by the change of a letter, and the writer is attending to orthography, not dialectic. Yet he feels himself entitled to sneer at the narrowness of "the sticklers for the purity of the text, etc." Where such a critic may set up for a latitudinarian, it is easy to judge of the rest. The only feint which he thinks it requisite to make to support the change is a sophism

1 This minuteness and materialism is, however, the real root of the "solid and business" character and capacity of the English. It is the practice of their national adage, “to take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves." Let Horace and the Celts have the comfort of proclaiming, that all the parts are not equal to the whole. The Teutons are persuaded that in the former they have the substance, and leave the sticklers for method to subsist on their alleged overplus. Horace's dictum runs as follows:

Æmilium circa ludum faber unus et ungues

Exprimet, et molles imitabitur ære capillos,

Infelix operis summa, quia ponere totum

Nesciet.

familiar as the argument ad vericundiam.

Shakespeare would not write, he says, the "vulgar” word beast, or at least would not assign it to a woman of quality. Thus the writer's principle of individualism is kept to in his notion of style as of argument. Words, he evidently thinks, are vulgar or otherwise barely in themselves, not according to the use made of them. He might, however, have observed an example at hand (as the reader of the preceding extract may have noted) of terms of a classically high respectability degraded into vulgarity by emphatic inanity. But, not to speak of principles of either taste or logic, the meetest refutation will be a plain and plump precedent. Shakespeare does then elsewhere put the alleged vulgarism in the mouth of a lady of equal rank, unmarried too, and in the soft-tempered moments of dalliance-not a matron and a murderess, like Lady Macbeth; and make her use it, moreover, not like the latter, by way of argument, but in the direct form of insulting imputation. In the Merchant of Venice, the princess Portia, sketching the various nations in the persons of her suitors, is made to characterize a member of the list (by the way, too, a kinsman of the critic, the "Prince of Saxony,”) as "being, when he is best, little better than a beast."

To conclude with an example of another of these finer features which has entirely escaped the critics in the genius they so bepraise-though on what ground they can bepraise they leave their readers at a loss to see, and must have been themselves, if challenged, found ill able to say, in terms.

And again:

cum nec pes nec caput uni

Reddatur formæ.

When the Lady breaks in on the soliloquy of Macbeth, while their royal guest is supping in the hall of the castle, the following curious colloquy takes place between them : Lady.-Why have you left the chamber? Macb.-Hath he asked for me?

Lady.-Know you not he has?

What is first to be remarked is, that the replies are not answers to the point of the interrogatories, indicated in italics. Then, moreover, that they are offered in the form of questions, and look to answers entirely different, and in the last case quite absurd; for the knowledge which the Lady asks about, or rather affirms, she knows impossible, or would have known, if her excitement allowed the least reflection, and did not pass upon her her own consciousness of the fact for universal. And yet with all these cross discordances they understood each other, and even the spectator or reader is made to feel they should, with ease. The situation is so strained, its electricity so tense, that their intelligences seem communing, not by the words, but a sort of contact.

The effect is, however, quite explicable. To distinguish the subject meant among the multitude of others that may be co-present to the mind of either party, is the principal occasion for length or logic in all colloquy. If but an object or a passion were on both sides so absorbing as to exclude the supposition of attention to any other, the communion might proceed by a sort of short-hand speech or cypher. The conscious unity of the theme supplies at once a string and clew to give connection or explanation to the interlocutory incoherences. Thus the nonsense of two lovers is full of meaning to themselves; and to pass to an illustration

which will be taken for the extreme opposite, thus it also is, that the symbolic language of mathematics is enabled, through the singleness of the subject considered, to dispense with that mass of verbiage which makes the daubing of common style. And so, to give the highest conception of an intensity of preoccupation, in which all else has been spontaneously suppressed by a conjoint feeling, the liveliest method is to paint the parties as holding converse with each other by curt enquiries, which, while they answer, look away from, one other. This moreover has the effect, in the present situation, of exhibiting that mutual shyness of a complicit and excited guiltiness which might be termed the quintessence, the aroma of its expression. It distills the physiognomy of crime from its brutality. Besides, how exquisitely are the characters maintained at this refined pitch -the evasory irresolution of Macbeth in quest of pretexts; the pursuing instigation of the wife reproving cautiously, for fear of furnishing, by provocation, such a pretext for full revolt. But above all, the power of Shakespeare and his province, as now defined, are to be noted in this scene, in that mental ventriloquism by which not only the same personage holds distinct converse with his own thoughts, but distinct persons address each other through the thoughts, more than the words.

To these few samples of the omissions and commissions of native critics, it is but fair to add, that foreigners have not done greatly better. M. Guizot, who may pass for a critic among statesmen as he passes for a statesman in the order of professors, has the following curious estimate of the character now analysed: "un caractère d' irreflexion et de