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"Best state, contentless,

Hath a distracted and most wretched being,
Worse than the worst, content".

But this content Timon had possessed in his prosperity, only it could not stand by him in the overthrow of his fortunes; but the morose censurer Apemantus had never possessed it; yet, and this is the error of both these systems of life, it is not connected either with the fortune of possession, or abnegation. Again Apemantus says to him: "The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends." To this Timon might have answered, that Apemantus also had never known this middle, but only the extremity of one end.

Between these two eccentric ones Alcibiades is placed, as the man of practical life, which generally blunts extremes. He is by no means shewn in a very favourable light, lest he should prejudice the chief character. Shakespeare represents him without any ideality, as a man of coarse texture, who is in no way enthusiastic about the extreme ends of things; a complete soldier, who carries about with him the pleasures of peaceful life; who knows how to be poor, and to be rich; not the worst of Timon's friends, who, needy himself, yet willingly offers him money for his support, and though reviled by him, espouses his cause as his own. Prodigal of his blood, rich only in wounds, he has driven back the enemies of Athens, whilst the senators counted their money, and lent on usury. He is repaid with the same ingratitude, as Timon experienced from his friends; exactly like Timon's friends they refused him the smallest favour, notwithstanding his great services, and his passionate entreaties are met with a sentence of banish

ment, as Timon was forsaken and cast off by his friends. The man of action becomes "worse than mad", on this maltreatment; his principles, which he had shewn in his defence of his friend the duellist, will not suffer him to bear contumelious treatment with patience; for this injustice received, he takes up arms in rebellion against the state, whilst Timon casts forth his hatred upon the whole human race, too wide a mark to be reached. Timon's hatred would have been confined to passiveness, had not the treasure he found, given him the means of fighting mankind with gold; Alcibiades avenges his mortification on the thankless city by arms. Where Timon nourishes universal hatred, Alcibiades punishes with severity, but with discrimination; on hearing that the walls, which he is about to overthrow, were not built by those who have injured him, he desists from the attempt; "all have not offended," they tell him; they offer him decimation, "if his revenges hunger for that food, which nature loaths." The warrior throws down his glove, to certify that he will only punish his enemies; reconciliation quickly follows his substantial revenge and active hatred, whilst Timon, in his enmity against humanity, does not think decimation satisfaction enough. This limitless fury necessarily recoils fatally on the impotent hater. Fate had restored to him in a wonderful manner, the means of taking the sweetest revenge on his false friends; he despised in obstinate bitterness, what prodigal chance had freely given into his prodigal hands, and died, desolate, a subject of malicious joy perhaps to his pretended friends, while the poor Alcibiades, with unpaid soldiers, preserving moderation in his aims and in his passions, punishes ingratitude, spares the penitent, and triumphs over all.

THE TEMPEST.

"There can be little doubt," says Hazlitt in the introduction to his remarks on the Tempest, "that Shakespeare was the most universal genius, that ever lived. Either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited, he is the only man. He has not only the same absolute command over our laughter and our tears, all the resources of passion, of wit, of thought, of observation, but he has the most unbounded range of fanciful invention, whether terrible or playful, the same insight into the world of imagination, that he has into the world of reality; and over all there presides the same truth of character and nature, and the same spirit of humanity." The pertinence of these observations becomes especially evident, when we, as now, step from the antique plays, into this fanciful world of mediæval superstition, out of the sober historic matter of Roman history, into the airy kingdom of elemental spirits. A greater contrast cannot be imagined; and yet this play and the Winter's Tale lie close beside two of those historical plays, and the poet is quite as much at home in these opposite spheres, as if he had never quitted them. In the

historical plays he occupied the realistic, political, historical mind of the English people; in these he addressed the credulous imaginativeness of the existing generation, from two opposite sides and out of two equally productive sources. This was the time of a general belief throughout Europe in witchcraft and magic; in England an interest in such things, even among men of the educated classes, was kept alive by a succession of works upon magic, witchcraft, and the spirit-world; and king James, in his Demonology (1603), having ranged himself among the writers on these subjects, may well have given food and fashion to a desire for knowledge in this direction. In conjunction with these wonders of the unseen world, the populace were attracted by the accounts and evidences of so many real wonders in the newly discovered quarter of the globe; Shakespeare, in this play, hints satirically at those marvels of nature in distant countries, which were believed in England on the evidence of lying travellers, and at the eagerness, with which they rushed to see the singular forms of new animals, that were exhibited to the curious. Shakespeare himself speculated, as it were, in his Tempest on this spirit of the time. He gives us a venerable magician and his spiritworld, a distant island with an extraordinary monster, adventures of travel, shipwreck, and storm, all in one piece; seamen, the sea smell, Robinson Crusoe-like solitude, foreign nature, and air surround us sensibly in all parts of this drama. To make the play more attractive, the poet connected with it an event, that had very recently engaged all the London world. In the year 1609, Sir George Somers sailed with nine ships for Virginia; a storm dispersed the vessels, part of them reached Virginia, part

returned to England in 1610, and brought the news of the probable wreck of the Admiral's ship (the Sea-Venture), which, however, had reached the Bermudas. In the year 1610, there appeared a small pamphlet, called "the Discovery of the Bermudas or Devil's Island", in which there was a description of the storm, which had driven the Admiral's ship out of its course. The ship had sprung a leak, the sailors exhausted with working the pumps had fallen asleep, having already taken leave of one another, when Somers saw land, and the vessel was luckily jammed in between two rocks; they found the island uninhabited, the air mild, the land remarkably fruitful; these islands had hitherto been thought enchanted; and, on account of their storms, which Shakespeare also alludes to, Sir Walter Raleigh (1596) had given them a bad name. We perceive sufficiently from these notices, that Shakespeare borrowed some of the incidents in his Tempest from these reports, and it is probable enough, that they gave rise to the whole composition. We know, except this, no other origin for "The Tempest". The beautiful Sydea of our Jacob Ayrer is probably founded on an English play, from which Shakespeare may have taken his idea of the connection between Prospero and Alonzo, Miranda and Ferdinand; but beyond this the pieces have no resemblance with each other. But Shakespeare needed nothing more to aid his invention in the composition of the play, which contains very little action, and in which (as Schlegel says) the denouement is evident from the very beginning.

The date of the Tempest is decided by its undeniable connection with Jourdan's pamphlet, and besides by the notice but lately discovered: that according to the extracts

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