evidence have been considered in a candid and a philosophic spirit, the reader cannot well resist this double conclusion: That Shakespeare, were he born in the heart of Saxony, could be no Teuton; and that he must have been a Celt, though his birth-place were Tartary. But his actual place of birth was, on the contrary, conformable. It was not, even in Britain, in the Saxon east or south but in the west, on the border-land of Wales and the Bristol channel; on the banks of a river whose sweetly Celtic name had remained as if to vindicate the kinship of his genius. It is farther worth remarking, on this topic of locality, and as bearing on the specialty of the drama to the Celts, that most of the English playwrights before and at the time of Shakespeare, of any talent or distinction, were from the Celtic north and west. Such were Green, Peel, Nash, Ford, Massinger, etc.; Ben Jonson himself was of Scotch descent, as his wit and his tenacity of the unities would countenance. It would be silly to object, that the interior of Wales and Scotland, where the race was unequivocal, produced, however, no such writers. The answer is, that they had not the language of the metropolis; and if they had, that their confessedly belonging to a despised race would have opposed an equal barrier to their access to patronage. It was only the Borderers who could elude both obstacles, by mastery of the language and ambiguity of the extraction. Had the family of More remained in Ireland with their clan, or kept, on passing to the west of England, the Milesian index O, their great offspring, instead of being a Lord Chancellor of England, and paraded to all time as the glory of Anglo-Saxondom, might well indeed have risen to the scaffold as he did, but would have hardly descended in the memory of British annals, unless, like his kinsman "Rory," as the subject of a farce. This condition may account for the discordance of tradition with respect to even the birth-place of so many of these adventurers; among others, two or three of the writers above named, and also in Ireland, for instance, Swift and Congreve.1 It is indeed another of the marks of the race. The Celt, whose vanity, like all the rest, leans less on self than its surroundings, is inclined to veil his origin and his connexions when not brilliant.2 On the contrary, the Teuton scarcely thinks of such disguises; for in him the self-esteem is, as the word attests, quite personal. Hence the appearance, on the one side, of a vice, and on the other, of a virtue or a manly independence; yet resulting in reality, the former from a broader, the other from a narrower range of sympathy and intellect. It would be curious to expose how fundamentally the current judgments respecting the two races revolve 1 Congreve, it seems to be now agreed, was only educated in Ireland. But his family was of the west of England, and so he falls into the category of epicenes. The same may be said of Swift, who, besides, was born on Irish soil; his family, at least putative, being from the Welsh border. 2 Herodotus relates a similar trait of the Athenians, who had in his day laid aside, as being ashamed of, the name Ionians (Lib. i. 143). They endeavoured, under favour of their intermediate position, to slip from the side of the expatriated Achæans to that of the conquering Hellens. And yet a day arrived, not many generations later, when the pretension was reversed by the proudest of these Hellens, the Spartan king Cleomenes himself. When reminded of his Doric race by the priestess of a temple, he indignantly replied: "I am no Dorian, I am an Achæan"! What a glorious triumph of mind over muscle, brought about by the necessary course of civilization. on this double fallacy. But it is sufficient the Celtic foible may also serve to throw some light on a phenomenon which has been so much wondered at by critics-the scantiness of information respecting Shakespeare's life and family. So that the circumstance concurs with all the rest to the final result, that the poet was by blood as well as genius a Welshman; or rather perhaps a lingering scion of the glorious Brigantes. To all the foregoing there is only one set-off, but it seems a grave one. Not more certainly is Shakespeare Celtic by his character and mind, than the dramatic innovation he effected is Teutonic. He did precisely in the drama what Locke did in philosophy, Bacon in method, and Luther in religion. For all these are but the normal transposition of the point of view from the exterior, the ancient and the Romano-Italic, to the interior, antagonistic, analytical, and Teutonic. It is true there is a fundamental difference in the cases. The other innovators all propounded views of their own, expressed them independently, and imposed them on the 3 The late Serjeant Talfourd has some excellent remarks respecting the English bar, but which extend a good deal farther: "Mere stupidity (says he), accompanied by a certain degree of fluency, is no inconsiderable power. It enables the possessor to protract the contest long after he is beaten, because he neither understands his own case nor the arguments by which he has been answered. It is a weapon of defence behind which he obtains protection, not only from his adversary but even from the judge. If the learned person who presides, wearied out with endless irrelevancies, should attempt to stop him, he will insist on his privilege to be dull, AND OBTAIN THE ADMIRATION OF THE AUDIENCE FOR HIS FIRMNESS in supporting the rights of the bar. In those points a sensitive and acute advocate has no chance of rivalling him in the estimation of the bystanders."—Edinburgh Review. 1845. p. 159. ; public. Shakespeare, on the contrary, originated no doctrine he but adapted his genius to the practical expression, the embodiment by art of the yearnings of the English. In the philosophers, the revolution was indigenous and implied race; in the dramatist, it implies nothing more than power and adaptation. Whether this, with the triple influence of education, language, literature, be sufficient to account for the discrepancy in Shakespeare, is a point that is committed to the judgment of the reader. But he should not overlook the poet's own touching testimony : Oh! for my sake do you with fortune chide Than public means which public manners breeds. To what it works in, like a dyer's hand; etc. It will also be remarked that these scruples of dignity about the mode of "making an honest living" are scarcely English. Accordingly, so little can the English of even this day conceive these moanings which the poet gave special vent to in the sonnets-where he acted but himself—that they surmise some shameful mystery! 2. The mention of the foregoing file of analogues to Shakespeare may, at all events, have a tendency to cast a closing doubt upon the results of a theory expounded so imperfectly. It may be wondered how a race to which those great men belonged, could be inferior intellectually to that which owns the Welsh and Irish. Against an afterthought so plausible or so prevalent in public, it may be prudent to prepare a final word of explanation. It will be offered most conveniently in the form of an answer to a statement of the case made in a letter just received, and which, it will be owned, presents it with fullness, force and point. The writer, a learned Irishman, whose local information was consulted on other matters, has the goodness to add : "I am astonished at the estimate which you have formed of the English character. I always believed that they-the Saxon race-were superior to the Celts in point of genius and steadiness, and reading the biographies of their Bacons, Shakespeares, Harveys, Lockes, Newtons, convinced me that there was something in the race superior to us of Ireland; for we have never yet produced a single PHILOSOPHER except my namesake and a few others, who were certainly born in Ireland, but not of the Gaelic race. We certainly had a few remarkable characters, such as, etc. But our great men have been so few, that we can hardly consider the race clever, which has produced so few since the introduction of classical literature in the fifth century. The Saxon race produced a venerable Bede, who wrote the history of the English Church. The Irish Church produced an Adamnan, who wrote the legendary life of St. Columba. Bede recorded great events; Adamnan told, not lies, but absurdities which could not have been true at any time." This, it is perceived, is both peremptory and pointed, as the italics also belong to the writer. Yet it is really not discrepant with the doctrine now submitted. To begin with the end, or the outskirts and move inwards; if the venerable Bede has recorded but events, facts, it is just what his This, however, it is manifest, is far from being the case. There are |