6 SCENE I.

"The poor beetle that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies."

These lines, taken apart from the context, would indicate that the bodily pain, such as is attended with death, is felt with equal severity by a giant and a beetle. The physiologists tell us that this is not true; and that the nervous system of a beetle does not allow it to feel pain so acutely as that of a man. We hope this is correct; but we are not sure that Shakspere meant to refine quite so much as the entomologists are desirous to believe. "It is somewhat amusing," says a writer in the Entomological Magazine,' "that his words should, in this case, be entirely wrested from their original purpose. pose was to show how little a man feels in dying; that the sense of death is most in apprehension, not in the act; and that even a beetle, which feels so little, feels as much as a giant does. The less, therefore, the beetle is supposed to feel, the more force we give to the sentiment of Shakspere."

His pur

7 SCENE I.-"At the moated grange resides this dejected Mariana.”

We have before alluded to Mr. Tennyson's poem, in which the idea of loneliness and desolation, suggested by these simple words of Shakspere, is worked out with the most striking effect. We have now great pleasure in extracting these beautiful verses, which have been described as exhibiting "the power of creating scenery in keeping with some state of human feeling, so fitted to it as to be the embodied symbol of it, and to summon up the state of feeling itself with a force not to be surpassed by anything but reality." "

a

"With blackest moss the flower-pots

Were thickly crusted, one and all;
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the peach to the garden-wall.
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange,
Unlifted was the clinking latch,
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.

She only said, 'My life is dreary-
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary;
I would that I were dead!'
"Her tears fell with the dews at even,

Her tears fell ere the dews were dried; She could not look on the sweet heaven, Either at morn or eventide.

■London Review,' July, 1835.

After the flitting of the bats,

When thickest dark did trance the sky, She drew her casement-curtain by, And glanc'd athwart the glooming flats. She only said, 'The night is drearyHe cometh not,' she said; She said, 'I am aweary, aweary; I would that I were dead!'

"Upon the middle of the night,

Waking she heard the night-fowl crow;
The cock sung out an hour ere light:
From the dark fen the oxen's low
Came to her without hope of change,
In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.

She only said, 'The day is dreary-
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary;
I would that I were dead!'

"About a stone-cast from the wall,

A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,
And o'er it many, round and small,
The cluster'd marish mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree did dark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
She only said, ' My life is dreary-
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, I am aweary, aweary;
I would that I were dead!'

"And ever when the moon was low,

And the shrill winds were up an' away, In the white curtain, to and fro,

She saw the gusty shadow sway.
But when the moon was very low,
And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the poplar fell
Upon her bed, across her brow.

She only said, 'The night is dreary-
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary;
I would that I were dead!'

"All day within the dreamy house

The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
The blue-fly sung i' the pane; the mouse
Behind the mould'ring wainscot shriek'd,
Or from the crevice peer'd about.
Old faces glimmer'd through the doors,
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices call'd her from without.
She only said, My life is dreary-
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary;
I would that I were dead!'

"The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof

The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loath'd the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Down-slop'd was westering in his bower.
Then said she, 'I am very dreary-
He will not come,' she said;
She wept, 'I am aweary, aweary;
O God! that I were dead!'"

song," which would lead one to infer that, as we find it in the text, it is not complete : secondly, we have the song, apparently complete, in the tragedy of 'Rollo Duke of Nor

mandy,' ascribed to Fletcher, and printed in Beaumont and Fletcher's works. We give the song as it stands in that play:

"Take, oh, take those lips away,

That so sweetly were forsworn,
And those eyes, like break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn;
But my kisses bring again,
Seals of love, tho' seal'd in vain.
"Hide, oh, hide those hills of snow,

Which thy frozen bosom bears,
On whose tops the pinks that grow

Are yet of those that April wears;
But first set my poor heart free,
Bound in those icy chains by thee."

The question then arises, is the song to be attributed to Shakspere or to Fletcher? Malone justly observes that all the songs introduced in our author's plays appear to have been his own composition. The idea in the line

"Seals of love, but seal'd in vain,"

is found in the 142nd Sonnet :

"not from those lips of thine, That have profan'd their scarlet ornaments, And seal'd false bonds of love, as oft as mine."

The image is also repeated in the Venus and Adonis.' Weber, the editor of Beaumont and

Fletcher, is of opinion that the first stanza was Shakspere's, and that Fletcher added the second. There is no evidence, we apprehend, external or internal, by which the question can be settled.

SCENE III. "He's in for a commodity of

brown paper," &c.

The old comedies are full of allusions to the

practice of the usurer-so notorious as to acquire him the name of the brown-paper merchant-of stipulating to make his advance partly in money and partly in goods, which goods were sometimes little more than packages of brown paper. The most minute description of these practices is given in a pamphlet by Nashe, published in 1594" He (a usurer) falls acquainted with gentlemen, frequents ordinaries and dininghouses daily, where, when some of them at play have lost all their money, he is very diligent at hand, on their chains and bracelets, or jewels, to lend them half the value. Now this is the nature of young gentlemen, that where they have broke the ice, and borrowed once, they will come again the second time; and that these young foxes know as well as the beggar knows his dish. But at the second time of their coming it is doubtful to say whether they shall have money or no. The world grows hard, and we are all mortal; let him make any assurance before a judge, and they shall have some hundred pounds per consequence, in silks and velvets. The third time if they come, they shall have baser commodities: the fourth time, lute-strings and gray paper."

WE have no edition of the 'Winter's Tale' prior to that of the folio of 1623; nor was it entered upon the registers of the Stationers' Company previous to the entry by the proprietors of the folio. The original text, which is divided into acts and scenes, is remarkably correct.

The novel of Robert Greene, called 'Pandosto,' which Shakspere undoubtedly followed, with very few important deviations, in the construction of the plot of his 'Winter's Tale,' was a work of extraordinary popularity, there being fourteen editions known to exist. "In the country of Bohemia," says the novel, "there reigned a king called Pandosto." The Leontes of Shakspere is the Pandosto of Greene. The Polixenes of the play is Egistus in the novel :-"It so happened that Egistus, King of Sicilia, who in his youth had been brought up with Pandosto, desirous to show that neither tract of time nor distance of place could diminish their former friendship, provided a navy of ships and sailed into Bohemia to visit his old friend and companion." Here, then, we have the scene of the action reversed. The jealous king is of Bohemia-his injured friend of Sicilia. But the visitor sails into Bohemia. The most accomplished scholars of Shakspere's period purposely committed such apparent violations of propriety, when dealing with the legendary and romantic. The wife of Pandosto is Bellaria; and they have a young son called Garinter. Pandosto becomes jealous, slowly, and by degrees; and there is at least some want of caution in the queen to justify it. The great author of 'Othello' would not deal with jealousy after this fashion. He had already produced that immortal portrait

"Of one, not easily jealous, but, being wrought, Perplex'd in the extreme."

He had now to exhibit the distractions of a mind to which jealousy was native; to depict the terrible access of passion, uprooting in a moment all deliberation, all reason, all gentleness. The instant the idea enters the mind of Leontes the passion is at its height. The action of the novel and that of the

drama continue in a pretty equal course. Pandosto tampers with his cupbearer, Franion, to poison Egistus; and the cupbearer, terrified at the fearful commission, reveals the design to the object of his master's hatred. Eventually they escape together. Bellaria is committed to prison, where she gives birth to a daughter. The guard "carried the child to the king, who, quite devoid of pity, commanded that without delay it should be put in the boat, having neither sail nor rudder to guide it, and so to be carried into the midst of the sea, and there left to the wind and wave as the destinies please to appoint.” The queen appeals to the oracle of Apollo; and certain lords are sent to Delphos, where they receive this decree:-"Suspicion is no proof: jealousy is an unequal judge: Bellaria is chaste; Egistus blameless: Franion a true subject; Pandosto treacherous: his babe innocent; and the king shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found." On their return, upon an appointed day, the queen was "brought in before the judgmentseat." Shakspere has followed a part of the tragical ending of this scene; but he preserves his injured Hermione, to be re-united to her daughter after years of solitude and suffering.

The story of the preservation of the deserted infant is prettily told in the novel. The infant is taken to the shepherd's home, and is brought up by his wife and himself under the name of Fawnia. In a narrative the lapse of sixteen years may occur without any violation of propriety. The changes are gradual. But in a drama, whose action depends upon a manifest lapse of time, there must be a sudden transition. Shakspere is perfectly aware of the difficulty; and he diminishes it by the introduction of Time as a Chorus :

"Impute it not a crime
To me, or my swift passage, that I slide
O'er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap; since it is in my power
To o'erthrow law, and in one self-born hour
To plant and o'erwhelm custom."

Shakspere has exhibited his consummate art in opening the fourth Act with Polixenes

and Camillo, of whom we have lost sight since the end of the first. Had it been otherwise, had he brought Autolycus, and Florizel, and Perdita, at once upon the scene, -the continuity of action would have been destroyed; and the commencement of the fourth Act would have appeared as the commencement of a new play. Shakspere made the difficulties of his plot bend to his art; instead of wanting art, as Ben Jonson says. Autolycus and the Clown prepare us for Perdita; and when the third scene opens, what a beautiful vision lights upon this earth! There perhaps never was such a union of perfect simplicity and perfect grace as in the character of Perdita. What an exquisite idea of her mere personal appearance is presented in Florizel's rapturous exclamation,

"When you do dance, I wish you

A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that."

In the novel we have no trace of the inter

ruption by the father of the princely lover in the disguise of a guest at the shepherd's cottage. Dorastus and Fawnia flee from the country without the knowledge of the king. The ship in which they embark is thrown by a storm upon the coast of Bohemia. Messengers are despatched in search of the lovers; and they arrive in Bohemia with the request of Egistus that the companions in the flight of Dorastus shall be put to death. The secret of Fawnia's birth is discovered by the shepherd; and her father recognises her. But the previous circumstances exhibit as much grossness of conception on the part of the novelist, as the different management of the catastrophe shows the matchless skill and taste of the dramatist. We forgive Leontes for his early folly and wickedness; for during sixteen years has his remorse been bitter and his affection constant.