prejudices as the Jew for his. They had both been nurtured in evil opinions. They had both been surrounded by influences which more or less held in subjection their better natures. The honoured Christian is as intolerant as the despised Jew. The one habitually pursues with injustice the subjected man that he has been taught to loathe; the other, in the depths of his subtle obstinacy, seizes upon the occasion to destroy the powerful man that he has been compelled to fear. The companions of Antonio exhibit, more or less, the same reflection of the prejudices which have become to them a second nature. They are not so gross in their prejudices as Launcelot, to whom "the Jew is the very devil incarnation." But to Lorenzo, who is about to marry his daughter, Shylock is a "faithless Jew." When the unhappy father is bereft of all that constituted the solace of his home, and before he has manifested that spirit of revenge which might well call for indignation and contempt, he is to the gentlemanly Salanio "the villain Jew," and "the dog Jew." When the unhappy man speaks of his daughter's flight, he is met with a brutal jest on the part of Salarino, who, within his own circle, is the pleasantest of men: "I, for my part, knew the tailor that made the wings she flew withal." can understand the reproaches that are heaped upon Shylock in the trial scene, as something that might come out of the depths of any passion-stirred nature; but the habitual contempt with which he is treated by men who in every other respect are gentle and good-humoured and benevolent, is a proof to us that Shakspere meant to represent the struggle that must inevitably ensue, in a condition of society where the innate sense of justice is deadened in the powerful by those hereditary prejudices which make cruelty virtue; and where the powerless, invested by accident with the means of revenge, say with Shylock, "The villany you teach me I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction." The climax of this subjection of our higher and bet

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ter natures to conventional circumstances is to be found in the character of the Jew's daughter. Young, agreeable, intelligent, formed for happiness, she is shut up by her father in a dreary solitude. One opposed to her in creed gains her affections; and the ties which bind the father and the child are broken forever. But they are not broken without compunction:

Alack! what heinous sin is it in me
To be asham'd to be my father's child.

This is nature. But when she has fled from him-robbed him-spent fourscore ducats in one night-given his turquoise for a monkey-and, finally, revealed his secrets, with an evasion of the ties that bound them, which makes one's flesh creep,

When I was with him,

we see the poor girl plunged into the most wretched contest between her duties and her pleasures by the force of external circumstances. We grant, then, to all these our compassion; for they commit injustice ignorantly, and through a force which they cannot withstand. Is the Jew himself not to be measured by the same rule? We believe that it was Shakspere's intention so to measure him.

When Pope exclaimed of Macklin's performance of Shylock,

This is the Jew

That Shakspere drew!

the higher philosophy of Shakspere was little appreciated. Macklin was, no doubt, from all traditionary report of him, perfectly capable of representing the subtlety of the Jew's malice and the energy of his revenge. But it is a question with us, whether he perceived, or indeed if any actor ever efficiently represented, the more delicate traits of character that lie beneath these two great passions of the Jew's heart. Look, for example, at the extraordinary mixture of the per

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sonal and the national in his dislike of Antonio. He hates him for his gentle manners:

How like a fawning publican he looks!

He hates him, "for he is a Christian;" he hates him, for that "he lends out money gratis ;" but he hates him more than all, because

He hates our sacred nation.

It is this national feeling which, when carried in a right direction, makes a patriot and a hero, that assumes in Shylock the aspect of a grovelling and fierce personal revenge. He has borne insult and injury “with a patient shrug ;" but ever in small matters he has been seeking retribution:

I am not bid for love, they flatter me;
But yet I'll go in hate, to feed upon
The prodigal Christian.

The mask is at length thrown off-he has the Christian in his power; and his desire of revenge, mean and ferocious as it is, rises into sublimity, through the unconquerable energy of the oppressed man's wilfulness. "I am a Jew: Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that." It is impossible, after this exposition of his feelings, that we should not feel that he has properly cast the greater portion of the odium which belongs to his actions upon the social circumstances by which he has been hunted into madness. He has been made the thing he is by society. In the extreme wildness of his anger, when he utters the harrowing imprecation," I would my daughter were dead at my foot,

and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin;" the tenderness that belongs to our common humanity, even in its most passionate forgetfulness of the dearest ties, comes across him in the remembrance of the mother of that execrated child:-"Out upon her! Thou torturest me, Tubal: it was my turquoise ; I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor."

It is in the conduct of the trial scene that, as it appears to us, is to be sought the concentration of Shakspere's leading idea in the composition of this drama. The merchant stands before the Jew a better and a wiser man than when he called him "dog:" I do oppose My patience to his fury, and am arm'd To suffer, with a quietness of spirit, The very tyranny and rage of his.

Misfortune has corrected the influences which, in happier moments, allowed him to forget the gentleness of his nature, and to heap unmerited abuse upon him whose badge was sufferance. The Jew is unchanged. But if Shakspere in the early scenes made us entertain some compassion for his wrongs, he has now left him to bear all the indignation which we ought to feel against one “uncapable of pity." But we cannot despise the Jew. His intellectual vigour rises supreme over the mere reasonings by which he is opposed. He defends his own injustice by the example of as great an injustice of everyday occurrence-and no one ventures to answer him:

You have among you many a purchas'd slave,
Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules,
You use in abject and in slavish parts,
Because you bought them.-Shall I say to you,
Let them be free, marry them to your heirs?
Why sweat they under burdens? let their beds
Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates
Be season'd with such viands? You will answer,

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The slaves are ours.-So do I answer you:
The pound of flesh, which I demand of him,
Is dearly bought; 't is mine, and I will have it.
If you deny me, fie upon your law !

It would have been exceedingly difficult for the merchant to have escaped from the power of the obdurate man, so strong in the letter of the law, and so resolute to carry it out by the example of his judges in other matters, had not the law been found here, as in most other cases, capable of being bent to the will of its administrators. Had it been the inflexible

thing which Shylock required it to be, a greater injustice would have been committed than the Jew had finally himself to suffer. . . .

Had Shylock relented after that most beautiful appeal to his mercy, which Shakspere has here placed as the exponent of the higher principle upon which all law and right are essentially dependent, the real moral of the drama would have been destroyed. The weight of injuries transmitted to Shylock from his forefathers, and still heaped upon him even by the best of those by whom he was surrounded, was not so easily to become light, and to cease to exasperate his nature. Nor would it have been a true picture of society in the sixteenth century had the poet shown the judges of the Jew wholly magnanimous in granting him the mercy which he denied to the Christian. We certainly do not agree with the Duke, in his address to Shylock, that the conditions upon which his life, is spared are imposed

That thou shalt see the difference of our spirit.

Nor do we think that Shakspere meant to hold up these conditions as anything better than examples of the mode in which the strong are accustomed to deal with the weak. There is still something discordant in this, the real catastrophe of the drama. It could not be otherwise, and yet be

true to nature.

But how artistically has the poet restored the balance of