1; where we see not merely the nearest objects, but are allowed the prospect of a considerable distance, and all this under a magical light, which assists in giving to the impression that particular determination which may be wanted.

Such a picture must be bounded in a less perfect manner than the group; for it is like a fragment cut out of the optic scene of the world. However the painter, by enclosing his foreground, by throwing the whole of his light and other means of giving due stability to the view towards the middle, will know that he must neither wander beyond the composition, nor omit any thing within it.

In the representation of the figure, painting cannot compete with sculpture, while the former only exhibits it by a deception and from a single point of view; but, on the other hand, it communicates more life to its imitations, by colours which are made to express the finest gradations of mental expression in the countenance. The look which can be given only in a very imperfect manner by sculpture enables us in painting to read much deeper in the mind, and to perceive its lightest movements. Its peculiar charm, in short, consists in this, that it enables us to see in bodily objects what is least corporeal, namely, light and air.

The very same description of beauties are peculiar to the romantic drama. It does not, like the old tragedy, separate seriousness and the action in a rigid manner from among the ingredients of life; it embraces at once the whole of the checkered drama with all its circumstances; and while it seems only to represent subjects brought accidentally together, it satisfies the indefinite demands of fancy, buries us in reflections on the in

expressible signification of the objects which we view blended by distribution, proximity and distance, light and colouring, into one harmonious whole; and thus lends, as it were, a soul to the prospect before us.

The alternation of times and places, supposing its influence on the mind to be included in the picture, and that it comes to the aid of the theatrical perspective with reference to what is indicated in the distance or half-concealed by the objects under which it is covered; the contrast of mirth and seriousness, supposing that in degree and kind they bear a relation to each other; finally, the mixture of dialogical and lyrical ingredi ents, by which the poet is enabled to transform, in a greater or less degree, his characters into poetical natures: these, in my opinion, are not mere licenses but true beauties in the romantic drama. In all these points, and in many others besides, we shall find the English and Spanish works, which are particularly deserving of that name, fully alike to each other, however different they may be in other respects.

We proceed first to the English theatre, as it more early arrived at maturity than the Spanish. In both we must occupy ourselves more particularly with Shakspeare and Calderon, but in an inverted order. Shakspeare may be considered as the first of the English; any remarks on the earlier or contemporary antiquities of the English stage may be made in a review of its history. But Calderon had many predecessors; he is at once the summit and almost the conclusion of the dramatic art among the Spaniards.

While I wish to speak with that brevity which the nature of my subject requires of a poet in the

study of whom I have employed many years of my life, I find myself in no small degree of embarrassment. I know not where to begin; for I should never be able to end, were I to say all that I have felt and thought on the perusal of his works. A more than ordinary intimacy with a poet prevents us, perhaps, from placing ourselves in the situation of those who sit down to him for the first time: we are too familiar with his most striking peculiarities, to be able to pronounce upon the first impression which they are calculated to make on others. On the other hand we ought to possess, and to have the power of communicating, more correct ideas of his mode of procedure, of his concealed or less obvious views, and of the meaning and import of his united efforts, than others whose acquaintance with him is more limited.

Shakspeare is the pride of his nation. A late poet has, with propriety, called him the genius of the British isles. He was the idol of his contemporaries; and after the interval of puritanical fanaticism, which commenced in a succeeding age, and put an end to every thing like liberal knowledge; after the reign of Charles the Second, during which his works were either not acted, or very much disfigured, his fame began to revive with more than its original brightness towards the beginning of the last century; and since that period it has increased with the progress of time; and for centuries to come, I speak with the greatest confidence, it will continue to gather strength like an Alpine avalanche, at every period of its descent. As an important earnest of the future extension of his fame, we may allude to the

enthusiasm with which he was naturalised in Germany, the mo ment that he was known. The language, and the impossibility of translating him with fidelity, will be for ever, perhaps, an invincible obstacle to his general diffusion in the south of Europe. In England, the greatest actors vie with each other in the characters of Shakspeare; the printers in splendid editions of his works; and the painters in transferring his scenes to the canvass. Like Dante, Shakspeare has received the indispensa ble but cumbersome honour of being treated like a classical author of antiquity. The oldest editions have been carefully collated, and where the readings seemed corrupted many improvements have been attempted; and the whole literature of his age has been drawn forth from the oblivion to which it had been consigned, for the sake of explaining the phrases, and illustrating the allusions, of Shakspeare. Commenta

tors have succeeded one another in such numbers, that their labours, with the critical controversies to which they have given rise, constitute of themselves a library of no inconsiderable magnitude. These labours are deserving of our praise and gratitude; and more especially the historical inquiries into the sources from which Shakspeare drew his materials, and into the former state of the English stage. But with respect to the criticisms which are merely of a philological nature, I am frequently compelled to differ from the commentators; and where they consider him merely as a poet, endeavour to pronounce upon his merits, and to enter into his views, I must separate myself from them entirely. I have hardly ever found either truth or profundity in their obser

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vations; and these critics seem to me to be but stammering interpreters of the general and almost idolatrous admiration of his countrymen. There may be people in England, who entertain the same views with themselves; and we know that a satirical poet has represented Shakspeare, with refer. ence to his commentators, as Actæon devoured by his own dogs; and, following up the story of Ovid, exhibited a female that had written on the great poet under the figure of the snarling Lycisca.

We shall endeavour, in the first place, to remove some of the false views which have been adopted, that we may clear the way for our pure admiration, and be enabled to offer it without any hesitation

or reserve.

S From all the accounts which i have come down to us, we learn that the contemporaries of Shakspeare knew well what they possessed in him; and that they felt and understood him better than they did the most of those who succeed. ed him. In those days a work was generally ushered into the world with recommendatory verses; and 0 one of the productions of this nature, in an early edition of Shakspeare, by an unknown author, contains some of the most beautiful and happy lines that ever were applied to any poet. An idea, how ever, soon became prevalent that Shakspeare was a rude and wild genius, who poureth forth at random and without aim or object his unconnected compositions. Ben Jonson, a younger contemporary and rival of Shakspeare, who laboured in the sweat of his brow, but with no great success, to form the English stage on the model of the ancients, was of opinion that he did not blot enough, and because he did ot possess much VOL. I.

school-learning, that he owed more to nature than to art. The learned, and sometimes rather pe dantic, Milton was also of this opinion, when he says,

Our sweetest Shakspeare, faney's child,
Warbles his native wood-notes wild.

Yet it is highly honourable to Mil. ton, that the sweetness of Shakspeare, the quality which of all others has been least allowed, was felt and acknowledged by him. The modern editors, both in their prefaces, which may be considered as so many rhetorical exercises in praise of the poet, and in their separate observations, go still a great deal farther. They not only admit the irregularity of his pieces, according to principles which are not applicable to them, but they accuse him of bombast, of a confused, ungrammatical, and conceited mode of writing, and even of the most contemptible buffoonery. Pope asserts, that he wrote both better and worse than any other man. All the scenes and passages which did not suit the littleness of his taste he wished to place to the account of interpolating players; and he was in the right road, had his opinion been taken, of mangling Shakspeare in a most disgraceful manner. We are not therefore to be astonished if foreigners, with the exception of Germans of latter times, have, from ignorance, improved upon these opinions. They speak of Shakspeare's plays as monstrous productions, which could only have been given to the world by a disordered imagination in a barbarous age; and Voltaire crowns the whole with more than usual assurance, when he observes that Hamlet, the profound masterpiece of the philosophical poet, appears the work of a drunken "savage" That foreigners, and 2 I

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Frenchmen in particular, who frequently speak in the most strange language of antiquity and the middle ages, as if cannibalism had been first put an end to in Europe by Louis XIV. should entertain this opinion of Shakspeare, might be pardonable; but that Englishmen should adopt such a calumniation of that glorious epoch of their history, in which the foundation of their greatness was laid, is to me incomprehensible. Shakspeare flourished and wrote in the last half of the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the first half of that of James I.; and consequently under monarchs who were learned themselves, and held literature in honour. The policy of modern Europe, by which the relations of its different states have been so variously interwoven, commenced a century before. The cause of the protestants was decided by the accession of Elizabeth to the throne; and the attachment to the ancient belief cannot therefore be urged as a proof of the prevailing darkness. Such was the zeal for the study of the ancients, that even court ladies, and the Queen herself, were intimately acquainted with Latin and Greek, and could speak the former with fluency; a degree of knowledge which we should in vain seek for in the European courts of the present day. The trade and navigation of the English, which they carried on with all the four quarters of the world, made them acquainted with the customs and mental productions of other nations; and it would appear that they were then more indulgent to foreign manners than they are in the present day. Italy had already produced nearly all for which her literature is distinguished; and translations were diligently, and even successfully, executed in verse from the Itali

ans. They were not unacquainted with the Spanish literature, for it is certain that Don Quixote was read in England soon after its first appearance. Bacon, the founder of modern experimental philosophy, and of whom it may be said, that he carried in his pocket all that merits the name of philosophy in the eighteenth century, was a contemporary of Shakspeare. His fame, as a writer, did not indeed burst forth till after his death; but what a number of ideas must have been in circulation before such an author could arise! Many branches of human knowledge have, since that time, been cultivated to a greater extent, but merely those branches which are totally unproductive to poetry: chemistry, mechanics, manufactures, and rural and political economy, will never enable a man to become a poet. I have elsewhere examined into the pretensions of modern cultivation, as it is called, which looks down with such contempt on all preceding ages; I have shown that it is all little, superficial, and unsubstantial at bottom. The pride of what has been called the present maturity of human reason has come to a miserable end; and the structures erected by those pedagogues of the human race have fallen to pieces like the babyhouses of children.

The tone of society at present compels us to remark, that there is a wide difference between cultivation and what is called polish. That artificial polish which puts an end to every thing like original communication, and subjects all intercourse to the insipid uniformity of certain rules, was undoubtedly unknown in the age of Shakspeare, as it is still in a great measure in England in the present day. They possessed the consciousness of healthful energy, which