guishes him from man, and prevents him from being human: accordingly he has all the moral vices without one of the moral virtues, and is ready to fall down and worship anyone who can gratify his brutish appetites, and, embodiment of low aims and low ideals as he is, he finds his god in a drunken butler. In every man there is a spark of divinity: Caliban remains the type of what man would be without it.

To return to Prospero, the very first words he utters strike the keynote of his character,

66 Be collected:

No more amazement: tell your piteous heart
There's no harm done."

We feel at once that we have to do with a man we can reverence and trust, a man whose bearing is princely and whose words have power. Prospero's power has been won by patient study and self-discipline, by years dedicated to "closeness and the bettering of his mind": his life has been that of the student rather than that of the soldier or the politician. Want of attention to practical affairs had lost him his dukedom, but his studies brought their reward and knowledge triumphed in the end. Prospero found, if anyone ever did, that knowledge is power, but his greatness is not merely intellectual; it is moral as well. We see this in his generous treatment of the men who had wronged him. His noble nature is capable of no vindictive feelings: he employs his power to bring his enemies to repentance, and he then extends to them the amplest forgiveness. The arch-plotter, Antonio, and his weaker accomplice Sebastian may seem to get less than they deserve, but we may leave

them to writhe under the generosity of the man they had so deeply injured. The repentance of Alonso on the other hand is evidently sincere; the supposed loss of his son has had its due effect upon him, and we are not more disposed than Prospero to "burthen our remembrance with a heaviness that's gone."

There was one other object, dear to Prospero's heart, for the furtherance of which he used his power. This was the union between his daughter and the son of his old enemy. It would be something like sacrilege to attempt to criticise the beautiful scenes between Ferdinand and Miranda, the ideal presentments of chivalrous-hearted youth and maiden. loveliness. The exquisite scene with which the third Act opens stands alone in all literature.

We may now leave the reader to the undisturbed enjoyment of the play, assuring him that the more attentively he studies it the more deeply will he be impressed by its wonderful beauty and power. In its exaltation of tone, in its seriousness of purpose it differs from an ordinary comedy, while it differs from a tragedy, inasmuch as it exemplifies not the triumph of evil over good, but the triumph of good over evil. In a tragedy, through his sins or through his weak `ness, the hero falls, and pays with his death the penalty for his failure to comply with the moral law, and hence it is that in a tragedy, as far as this life is concerned, evil often seems to triumph, and our sense of justice would be grievously offended did we not know that worse evils than death can happen to man. In the Tempest justice is meted out to all in this life: sorrow and death are replaced by penitence and the end is joy. Let Prospero himself point the moral :

"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury

Do I take part: the rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend

Not a frown further."

Westward Ho,

North Devon,

April 22, 1839.

H. A. EVANS.

xvii

APPENDIX.

ON THE SEAMANSHIP OF ACT I, SCENE I.

MALONE received through Sir George Beaumont the following explanation of the manoeuvring of the ship in the first scene of the play from the pen of the second Lord Mulgrave, a distinguished naval officer, who died in 1792

The first scene of The Tempest is a very striking instance of the great accuracy of Shakspeare's knowledge in a professional science, the most difficult to attain without the help of experience. He must have acquired it by conversation with some of the most skilful seamen of that time. ...

The succession of events is strictly observed in the natural progress of the distress described; the expedients adopted are the most proper that could have been devised for a chance of safety and it is neither to the want of skill of the seamen or the bad qualities of the ship, but solely to the power of Prospero, that the shipwreck is to be attributed.

The words of command are not only strictly proper, but are only such as point the object to be attained, and no superfluous ones of detail. Shakspeare's ship was too well manned to make it necessary to tell the seamen how they were to do it, as well as what they were to do.

He has shown a knowledge of the new improvements, as well as the doubtful points of seamanship; one of the latter he has introduced, under the only circumstances in which it was indisputable.

The events certainly follow too near one another for the strict time of representation; but perhaps if the whole length of the play was divided by the time allowed by the critics, the portion allotted to this scene might not be too little for the whole. But he has taken care to mark intervals between the different operations by exits.

A