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least upon, fince his excellencies were all of another kind. I am very sensible that he does, in this play, depart too much from that likeness to truth which ought to be observed in these sort of writings; yet he does it so very finely, that one is easily drawn in to have more faith for his fake, than reason does well allow of. His magick has something in it very folemn, and very poetical: and that extravagant character of Caliban is mighty well sustained, shews a wonderful invention in the author, who could strike out such a particular wild image, and is certainly one of the finest and most uncommon grotesques that ever was seen. The observation, which, I have been informed, three very great men concurred in making upon this part, was extremely juft; that ShakSpeare had not only found out a new character in his Caliban, but had alfo devised and adapted a new manner of language for that character.

It is the same magick that raises the Fairies in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, the Witches in Macbeth, and the Ghost in Hamlet, with thoughts and language so proper to the parts they sustain, and so peculiar to the talent of this writer. But of the two laft of these plays I shall have occafion to take notice, among the tragedies of Mr. Shakspeare. If one undertook to examine the greatest part of these by those rules w'aich are established by Aristotle, and taken from t del of the Grecian stage, it would be no very hard task to find a great many faults; but as Shakspeare lived under a kind of mere light of r ature, and had

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the regularity of thofe those written precepts, so it would be hard to judge him by a law he knew nothing of. We are to confider him as a man that lived in a state of almost universal licence and ignorance: there was no established judge, but every one took the liberty to write according to the dictates of his own fancy. When one con siders, that there is not one play before him of a reputation good enough to entitle it to an appearance on the present stage, it cannot but be a matter of great wonder that he should advance dramatic poetry so far as he did. The fable is what is generally placed the first, among those that are reckoned the constituent parts of a tragick or heroick poem; not, perhaps, as it is the most difficult or beautiful, but as it is the first properly to be thought of in the contrivance and course of the whole; and with the fable ought to be confidered the fit disposition, order, and conduct of its several parts. As it is not in this province of the drama that the strength and mastery of Shakspeare lay, so I shall not undertake the tedious and ill-natured trouble to point out the several faults he was guilty of in it. His tales were feldom invented, but rather taken either from the true history, or novels and romances; and he commonly made use of them in that order, with those incidents, and that extent of time in which he found them in the authors from whence he borrowed them. So The Winter's Tale, which is taken from an old book, called The Delectable History of Doraftus and Fawnia, contains the space of fixteen or feventeen years, and the scene is sometimes laid

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in Bohemia, and sometimes in Sicily, according to the original order of the story. Almost all his hiftorical plays comprehend a great length of time, and very different and distinct places: and in his Antony and Cleopatra, the scene travels over the greatest part of the Roman empire. But in recompence for his carelessness in this point, when he comes to another part of the drama, the manners of his characters, in acting or speaking what is proper for them, and fit to be shewn by the poet, he may be generally justified, and in very many places greatly commended. For those plays which he has taken from the English or Roman history, let any man compare them, and he will find the character as exact in the poet as the historian. He seems indeed so far from propofing to himself any one action for a fubject, that the title very often tells you, it is The Life of King John, King Richard, &c. What can be more agreeable to the idea our hiftorians give of Henry the Sixth, than the picture Shakspeare has drawn of him! His manners are every where exactly the fame with the story; one finds him still described with fimplicity, paffive sanctity, want of courage, weakness of mind, and easy fubmiffion to the governance of an imperious wife, or prevailing faction: though at the fame time the poet does justice to his good qualities, and moves the pity of his audience for him, by shewing him pions, difinterested, a contemner of the things of this world, and wholly refigned to the severest dispensations of God's providence. There is a thort scene in The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, which I cannot but

think admirable in its kind. Cardinal Beaufort, who had murdered the Duke of Gloucester, is shewn in the last agonies on his death-bed, with the good king praying over him. There is so much terror in one, so much tenderness and moving piety in the other, as must touch any one who is capable either of fear or pity. In his Henry the Eighth, that prince is drawn with that greatness of mind, and all those good qualities which are attributed to him in any account of his reign. If his faults are not shewn in an equal degree, and the shades in this picture do not bear a just proportion to the lights, it is not that the artist wanted either colours or skill in the difpofition of them; but the truth, I believe, might be, that he forbore doing it out of regard to queen Elizabeth, fince it could have been no very great respect to the memory of his mistress, to have exposed some certain parts of her father's life upon the stage. He has dealt much more freely with the minifter of that great king; and certainly nothing was ever more juftly written, than the character of Cardinal Wolfey. He has shewn him infolent in his profperity; and yet, by a wonderful address, he makes his fall and ruin the subject of general compaffion. The whole man, with his vices and virtues, is finely and exactly described in the second scene of the fourth act. The diftreffes likewife of Queen Katharine, in this play, are very movingly touched; and though the art of the poet has screened King Henry from any gross imputation of injuftice, yet one is inclined to wish, the Queen had met with a fortune more worthy of her birth and virtue.

virtue. Nor are the manners, proper to the persons represented, less justly observed, in those characters taken from the Roman history; and of this, the fierceness and impatience of Coriolanus, his courage and disdain of the common people, the virtue and philosophical temper of Brutus, and the irregular greatness of mind in M. Antony, are beautiful proofs. For the two laft especially, you find them exactly as they are described by Plutarch, from whom certainly Shakspeare copied them. He has indeed followed his original pretty close, and taken in several little incidents that might have been spared in a play. But, as I hinted before, his design seems most commonly rather to describe those great men in the several fortunes and accidents of their lives, than to take any fingle great action, and form his work fimply upon that. However, there are some of his pieces, where the fable is founded upon one action only. Such are more especially, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello. The defign in Romeo and Juliet is plainly the punishment of their two families, for the unreasonable feuds and animofities that had been so long kept up between them, and occafioned the effusion of fo much blood. In the management of this story, he has thewn fomething wonderfully tender and paffionate in the lovepart, and very pitiful in the distress. Hamlet is founded on much the fame tale with the Electra of Sophocles. In each of them a young prince is engaged to revenge the death of his father, their mothers are equally guilty, are both concerned in the murder of their husbands, and are afterwards married to the murderers.

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