to explain it in the manner of the considerations we have just alleged.

There are not a few Englishmen, who have maintained. the co-operation of Shakespeare and Fletcher upon another work also. We mentioned before a small series of doubtful dramas, which were printed partly under Shakespeare's name, and which, in Germany especially, were considered to be youthful works, if not indeed master-pieces from our poet's pen. This doubt has been long ago laid aside in England. With regard alone to the Two Noble Kinsmen, which appeared in 1634 under the joint names of Shakespeare and Fletcher, men such as Spalding, Coleridge, Dyce, and Ingleby are of opinion, that no inconsiderable part of the play could have been composed by any other than by Shakespeare alone. As Dyce (Works of Beaumont and Fletcher. 1, LXXX et seq.) conceives the matter, Shakespeare's share in the play to a certain extent might be readily allowed, and yet again wholly denied. Nothing is more probable than that Shakespeare, being in the pay of his theatre, was compelled to appropriate foreign plays for representation by a remodelling of even a lighter kind, than we perceive in Titus and Pericles. Nothing would be more possible than that he may have adopted in this manner (according to Dyce's opinion) an older play of the same purport as that of the Two Noble Kinsmen, which was performed in 1594, at the Newington theatre, and that subsequently Fletcher, making use of Shakespeare's additions, may have remodelled this same older piece into the form in which it stands in the editions of his works. But that Shakespeare ever could have taken a hearty interest in this subject, is to be denied

with the greatest certainty from one single consideration : for never have his sound ethics had to do with such conventional points of honour in the style of the dramatic Romanticists of Spain, as those upon which the relation between Palamon and Arcitas, the two noble cousins (the central point of the whole play) turns. And grounds just as decisive, might readily withhold us from even attempting to divine Shakespeare's outward share in this work, the labour of so many hands. His pen has generally been. perceived most distinctly in such scenes as consist essentially in narrative and description; even Dyce, among the pas sages which appeared to him to be indisputably Shakespearian, has selected one, which is purely descriptive, for the sake of description itself; but in Shakespeare's whole dramas, with scarcely the exception of one single instance, this very manner of description is never and nowhere to be found! We are, therefore, of Staunton's opinion, who would as little impute to Shakespeare a share in this as in any other of the plays falsely awarded to him. It seems a settled matter, that the great man wrote no more for the stage after his return to Stratford in 1612. With the Winter's Tale and the Tempest, he closed his great career, and buried fathomdeep, like Prospero, his poetic wand. Happy the successor who may one day again dig up this treasure.

SHAKESPEARE.

Now that we have studied Shakespeare's works in succession and scanned the separate features one by one, it remains for us to take a retrospective view, and to bring forward and contemplate as a whole the portrait of the poet and his poetry.

The points of view from which this many-sided poet, his gifts, his character, his art, may be studied, are countless; endless is the material out of which the threads of such a universal examination may be spun. These threads are already immeasurable in extent, if we consider alone all the striking things, which intelligent judges of Shakespeare have before said. In this matter it is difficult to be both new and brief. But the more difficult it is, so much the more meritorious and to the purpose is it, to limit oneself to a few, well-chosen, and profitable points of consideration.

The points of sight, from which we intend to make our observations, have been already mentioned in the introduction to this work there pronounced the two-fold judgment, which award to Shakespeare both from an artistic and a moral point of view, the highest honour, that could be conferred upon a poet:

Firstly, That in the range of modern dramatic poetry he occupies the place of the revealing genius of this branch of art and of its laws, as Homer does in the history of epic poetry; and

Secondly, That, as the rarest judge of men and human affairs, he is a teacher of indisputable authority, and the most worthy to be chosen as a guide through the world, and through life.

From these two positions we will start in the following remarks, and endeavour continually to return to them.

High as the recognition of Shakespeare's poetic genius has lately risen, it will yet appear extremely paradoxical to many, if beside Homer, whose fame has now for nearly 3000 years survived all changes of taste, we rank a poet scarcely known to the races of the Latin tongue, to half the civilized world, concerning whom opinion in the course of three centuries has so greatly changed, and even now is so divided among the English themselves. As in his time Johnson was of opinion, that Shakespeare often did not know his own intention, that he owed his greatest beauties to mere lucky hits, so in the present day Birch and Courtenay, undeterred by the indication of deep contrivance in his dramas, deny all fixed plan in Shakespeare's works, and have even doubted, if he ever made his personages speak designedly in accordance with their characters. They have solemnly protested against the worship of his genius, and thought it blasphemy in Coleridge to call him superhuman. Tastelessness, or want of the sense of beauty; irregularity, or want of a spirit of arrangement; the realistic drawing from nature in his works, or the want of artistic ideality, were

formerly, and are still the standing objections firmly made to Shakespeare, as if deficiency in these necessary qualities, without which a real disciple of art cannot be imagined, were a matter of course in a poet, who, as an actor, lived for the multitude and for their vulgar fancies, and wrote in a rough and uncultivated age. We will go over all these points in succession, since, if a defence be not required, an explanation is at least necessary.

First, as concerns our poet's sense of beauty, we will not deny, that we ourselves have found marks of a perverted and uncultivated taste in his indelicacies, his laboured play upon words, and his odd conceits, or in the cutting off of heads, and putting out of eyes on the stage, or in those strange anachronisms; also in the number and style of metaphorical images, which characterize Shakespeare's poetical conversations. One general remark in reference to these must precede all other explanations. These censures universally refer only to isolated scenes, or to the "outward parts" of style and diction, and though we have neither concealed nor excused errors of this kind, yet looking upon them as exceptions and trifles, we have upon principle not laid more stress upon them, than was due with reference to so great a whole. All beauty depends upon symmetry and proportion. An overgrowth, which sucks out the strength of a flowering plant, and destroys its shape, may be in the oak the harmless sport of exuberance and even an ornament to its form; bushes which would be a wilderness in a garden, may enhance the beauty of the grander scenes of nature. Irregularity, when isolated and taken out of its place, will always be ugly; while in its proper connection, it may add to the charm by variety. Those

7234