dissimilar, and apparently contradictory, ingredients, in the same works, can only be justifiable on principles reconcileable with the views of art, which I have already described. In the dramas of Shakspeare the comic scenes are the antichamber of the poetry, where the servants remain; these prosaical associates must not give such an extension to their voice as to deafen the speakers in the hall itself; however, in those intervals when the ideal society has retired they deserve to be listened to; the boldness of their raillery, the pretension of their imitations, may afford us many a conclusion respecting the relations of their mas ters. to us to be introduced in a more arbitrary manner, but which, however, is founded in imitation of an actual custom. This is the introduction of the buffoon; the fool with his cap and motley dress, called in English, Clown, who appears in several comedies though not in all, but in Lear alone of the tragedies, and who generally exercises his wit merely in conversation with the principal persons, though he is also sometimes incorporated with the action. In those times it was not only usual for princes to keep court fools, but in many distinguished families they retained, along with other servants, such an exhilarating housemate as a good antidote against the insipidity and wearisomeness of ordinary life, as a welcome interruption of established formalities. Great men, and even churchmen, did not consider it beneath their dignity to recruit and solace themselves after im Shakspeare's comic talent is equally wonderful with that which he has shown in the pathetic and tragic: it stands on an equal elevation, and possesses equal extent and profundity; all that I before wished was, not to admit that the former preponderated. He is high-portant concerns with the conver. ly inventive in comic situations and motives: it will be hardly possible to show whence he has taken any of them; whereas in the serious part of his dramas he has generally laid hold of something already known. His comic characterization is equally true, various, and profound, with his serious. So little is he disposed to caricature, that we may rather say many of his traits are almost too nice and delicate for the stage, that they can only be properly seized by a great actor, and fully understood by a very acute audience. Not only has he delineated many kinds of folly, he has also contrived to exhibit mere stupidity in a most diverting and entertaining manner. There is also a peculiar species of the farcical to be found in his pieces, which seems sation of their fools; the celebrated Sir Thomas More had his fool painted along with himself by Holbein. Shakspeare appears to have lived immediately before the time when the custom began to be abolished; in the English comic authors who succeeded him the clown is no longer to be found. The dismissal of the fool has been extolled as a proof of refinement; and our honest forefathers have been pitied for taking delight in such a coarse and farcical entertainment. I am much rather however disposed to believe, that the practice was dropped from the difficulty in finding fools able to do full justice to their parts: on the other hand, reason, with all its conceit of itself, has become too timid to tolerate such bold irony; it is always careful lest the mantle of its gravity should be disturbed in any of its folds; and rather than to allow a privileged place to folly beside itself, it has unconsciously assumed the part of the ridiculous; but, alas! a heavy and cheerless ridicule. It would be easy to make a collection of the excellent sallies and biting sarcasms which have been preserved of celebrated court fools. It is well known that they frequently told such truths to princes as are never now told to them. Shakspeare's fools, along with somewhat of an overstraining for wit, which cannot altogether be avoided when wit becomes a separate profession, have for the most part an incomparable humour and an infinite abundance of intellect, enough to supply a whole host of ordinary wise men. I have still a few observations to make on the diction and versification of our poet. The language is here and there somewhat obsolete, but on the whole much less so than most of the writers of that day, a sufficient proof of the goodness of his choice. Prose had yet been little cultivated, as the learned generally wrote in Latin: a favourable circumstance for the dramatic poet; for what has he to do with the scientific language of books? He had not only read, but studied the earlier English poets; but he drew his language immediately from life, and he possessed a masterly skill in blending the dialogical element with the highest poetical elevation. I know not what certain critics mean, when they say that Shakspeare is frequently ungrammatical. To make out this affirmation, they must prove that similar constructions never occur in his contemporaries, the direct contrary of which can be established. In no language is every thing determined on prin ciple, much is always left to the caprice of custom; and because this has since changed, do they wish to make the poet answerable for it? The English language had not then attained that correct insipidity which has been introduced into the more recent literature of the country, to the prejudice, perhaps, of its originality. As a field when first brought under the plough produces, along with the fertile shoots, many luxuriant weeds, we shall also find that the poetical diction of that day run occasionally out into extravagance, but an extravagance originating in the fulness of its strength. We may still perceive traces of a want of assistance, but no where of a laborious and spiritless display of art. In general Shakspeare's style yet remains the very best model, both in the vigorous and sublime, and the pleasing and tender. In his sphere he has exhausted all the means of language. On all, the stamp of his mighty spirit is impressed. His images and figures, in their unsought for, nay, unarbitrary singularity, have often a sweetness altogether peculiar. He becomes occasionally obscure from too great fondness for the most compressed brevity; but the poring over Shakspeare's lines affords us an ample requital for our labour. The verse of all his plays is generally the rhymeless Iambic of ten or eleven syllables, occasionally only intermixed with rhymes, but more frequently alternating with prose. No one piece is wholly written in prose; for even in those which approach the most to the pure comedy, there is always something added which elevates them to a higher rank than belong to this species. Many scenes are wholly prosaical, in others discourses in verse and prose suc ceed each other alternately. This can only appear an impropriety in the eyes of those who are accustomed to consider the lines of a drama like so many soldiers drawn up rank and file on a parade, with the same uniform, arms, and accoutrements, so that when we see one or two we may represent to ourselves thousands as being every way like them. In the use of verse and prose Shakspeare observes very nice distinctions according to the ranks of the speakers, but still more according to their characters and disposition of mind. A noble language, elevated above the usual tone, is only suitable to a certain decorum of manners, which is thrown over both vices and virtues, and which does not even wholly disappear amidst the violence of passion. If this is not exclusively possessed by the higher ranks, it still however belongs naturally more to them than to the lower; and therefore in Shakspeare dignity and familiarity of language, poetry, and prose, are in this manner distributed among the characters. Hence his tradesmen, peasants, soldiers, sailors, servants, but more especially his fools and clowns, speak almost, without exception, in the tone of their actual life. However, inward dignity of sentiment, wherever it is possessed, does not stand in need of the artificial elegancies of education and custom to display itself in a noble manner; it is a universal right of mankind, of the highest as well as the lowest; and hence also, in Shakspeare, the nobility of nature and morality is elevated above that of society. He not unfrequently also makes the very same persons express themselves at times in the most sublime language, and at others in the lowest; and this inequality is in like man ner founded in truth. Extraordi nary situations, which intensely occupy the head and throw mighty passions into play, give elevation and tension to the soul: it collects together all its powers, and exhibits an unusual energy, both in its operations and in its communi. cations by language. On the other hand, even the greatest men have their moments of remissness, when to a certain degree they forget the dignity of their character in the most unreserved carelessness. This very tone of mind is necessary to admit of their receiving amusement from the jokes of others, or passing jokes themselves, which surely cannot reflect dishonour even on a hero. Let any person, for example, go carefully through the part of Hamlet. How bold and powerful the language of his poetry when he conjures the ghost of his father, when he spurs himself on to the bloody deed, when he thunders into the soul of his mother! How he lowers his tone down to that of common life, when he has to do with persons whose station demands from him such a line of conduct; when he makes game of Polonius and the courtiers, instructs the player, and even enters into the jokes of the grave-digger. Of all the principal characters of the poet of a serious description, there is no one so rich in wit and humour as Hamlet; hence, of all of them he makes the greatest use of the familiar style. Others do not fall in it; either because they are constantly surrounded by the pomp of rank, or because a uniform seriousness is natural to them; or, in short, because they are throughout the whole piece under the dominion of a passion calculated to excite and not depress the mind, like the sorrow of Hamlet, The choice of the one form or the other is every where suitable, and so much founded in the nature of the thing, that I will venture to assert, even where the poet in the very same speech makes the speaker leave prose for poetry, or the converse, this could not be altered without the danger of injuring or destroying something or other. The blank verse has this advantage, that its tone may be elevated or lowered; it admits of approximation to the familiar style of conversation, and never forms such an abrupt contrast as that, for example, between plain prose and rhymed Alexandrines. Shakspeare's Iambics are sometimes highly harmonious and full sounding; always varied and suitable to the subject, at one time they are distinguished for ease and rapidity, at another they move along with ponderous energy. They never fall out of the dialogical character, which may always be traced even in the continued discourses of individuals, excepting when they run into the lyrical. They are a complete model of the dramatic use of this species of verse, which, in English, since Milton, has been also used in epic poetry; but in the latter it has assumed a quite different turn. Even the irregularities of Shakspeare's versification are expressive; a broken off verse, or a sudden change of rhythmus, is in unison with the pause in the progress of the thought, or the entrance of another disposition of mind. As a proof that he purposely violated the mechanical rules, in the conviction that too symmetrical a versification does not suit with the drama, and has in the long run a tendency on the stage to lull the spectators asleep, we may observe that his earlier pieces are those which he has most dili gently versified, and that in the works of a later period, when through practice he must have acquired a greater facility, we find the strongest deviations from the regulated progress of the verse. He was merely enabled by the verse to render the poetical elevation audible, but he claimed in it the utmost possible freedom. The views or suggestions of feeling by which he was guided in the use of rhyme may be traced with almost equal certainty. Not unfrequently scenes, or even single speeches, close with a few rhymed lines, for the purpose of more strongly marking the division and of giving it more rounding. This was imitated in an injudicious manner by the English tragic poets of a later period; they suddenly elevated the tone in the rhymed lines, as if the person began all at once to speak in another language. The practice was hailed by the actors from its serving as a signal for clapping when they made their exit. In Shakspeare again the transitions are more easy: all changes of forms are introduced imperceptibly, and as if of themselves. Moreover, he generally loves to elevate a series of ingenious and antithetical sayings by the use of rhyme. We find other passages in continued rhyme, where solemnity and theatrical pomp were suitable, as in the mask, as it is called, in the Tempest, and in the play introduced into Hamlet. In other pieces, for instance the Midsummer Night's Dream aud Romeo and Juliet, the rhyme constitutes a considerable part; because he wished to give them a glowing colour, or because the characters utter in a musical tone their love complaints or love suits. Here he has even introduced rhymed trophes, which approach to the form of the sonnet then usual in England. The assertion of Malone that Shakspeare in his youth was fond of rhyme, but that he afterwards rejected it, is sufficiently refuted by his own chronology of the poet's works. In some of the earliest, for instance in the Second and Third Part of Henry the Sixth, there are hardly any rhymes; in what is stated to be his last piece, The Twelfth Night, or What You Will, and in Macbeth, which is proved to have been composed under the reign of King James, we find them in no inconsiderable number. Even in the secondary matters of form Shakspeare was not guided by humour and incident, but acted like a genuine artist on solid grounds. This might also be shown in the kinds of verse which he least often used; for instance, in the rhymed verses of seven and eight syllables, were we not afraid of dwelling too long on merely technical peculiarities. The manner of handling rhymed verse, and the opinion respecting its harmony and elegance, have undergone a much greater change in England in the course of two centuries than has been the ease in the rhymeless Iambic or blank verse. In the former, Dryden and Pope have become models; these writers have communicated the utmost smoothing to rhyme, but they have also tied it down to a harmonious uniformity. A foreign er, to whom antiquated and new are the same, may perhaps feel with greater freedom the advantages of the more ancient manner. Certain it is, the rhyme of the present day, from the too great confinement of the couplet, is unfit for the drama. We must not estimate the rhyme of Shakspeare by the mode of subsequent times, but by a comparison with his contemporaries or with Spenser. The comparison will without doubt turn out to his advantage. Spenser is often diffuse; Shakspeare, though sometimes hard, is always brief and vigorous. He has much more frequently been induced by the rhyme to leave out something necessary than to insert any thing superfluous. Many of his rhymes however are yet faultless: ingenious with attractive ease, and rich without false brilliancy. The songs interspersed (namely, those of the poet himself) are generally sweetly playful and altogether musical; we hear in imagination their melody while we merely read them. The whole of Shakspeare's productions bear the certain stamp of his original genius, but yet no writer was ever farther removed from every thing like a manner acquired from habit and personal peculiarities. He is rather, from the diversity of tone and colour, which he assumes according to the qualities of objects, a true Proteus. Each of his compositions is like a world of itself, which moves in its own sphere. They are works of art, finished in the most consummate style, in which the freedom and judicious choice of their author are revealed. If the thorough formation of a work, even in its minutest parts, according to a leading idea; if the dominion of the animating spirit over all the means of execution deserves the name of correctness (and this, excepting in matters of grammar, is the only proper sense of the word); we shall then, after allowing to Shakspeare all the higher qualities which demand our admiration, be also compelled, in most cases, to allow him the name of a correct poet. It would be instructive in the |