with that profoundest insight and determination of his which taught him to put physical nature to the question that he might wring from her her secrets; but humanity, human nature, of course, had none worth noting for him;-oh no; he, with his infinite wit and invention, with his worlds of covert humor, with his driest prose, pressed, bursting with Shakspearean beauty, he could not do it; nor he, with his Shakspearean acquaintance with life, with his Shakespearean knowledge of men under all the differing social conditions, at home and abroad, by land and by sea, with his world-wide experiences of nature and fortune, with the rush and outbreak of his fiery mind kindling and darting through all his time; he, with his Shakespearean grace and freedom, with his versatile and profound acquirements, with his large, genial, generous, prodigal, Shakespearean soul that would comprehend all, and ally itself with all, he could not do it; neither of these men, nor both of them together, nor all the wits of the age together :-but this Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe, this mild, respectable, obliging man, this 'Johannes Factotum" (as a cotemporary calls him, laughing at the idea of his undertaking " a blank verse,") is there any difficulty here? Oh no! None in the world: for, in the impenetrable obscurity of that illimitable green-room of his, "by the mass, he is anything, and he can do anything and that roundly too,"

66

Is it wonderful? And is not that what we like in it? Would you make a man of him? With this miraculous inspiration of his, would you ask anything else of him? Do you not see that you touch the Shakespearean essence, with a question as to motives, and possibilities? Would he be Shakespeare still, if he should permit you to hamper him with conditions? What is the meaning of that word, then? And will you not leave him to us? Shall we have no Shakespeare? Have not we scholars enough, and wits enough, and men, of every other kind of genius, enough, --but have we many Shakespeares ? that you should wish to run this one through with your questions, this one, great, glorious, infinite impossibility, that has had us in its arms, all our lives from the beginning. If you dissolve him do you not dissolve us with him? If you take him to pieces, do you not undo us, also?

Ah, surely we did not need this master spirit of our race to tell us that there is that in the foundation of this human soul, that loves to apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends," nay, that there is an infinity in it, that finds her ordinances too straight, that will leap from them when it can, and shake the head at her. And have we not all lived once in regions full of people that were never compelled to give an account of themselves in any of these matters ? And when, precisely, did we pass that charmed line, beyond which these phantoms cannot come? When was the word definitively spoken which told us that the childhood of the race was done, or that its grown-up children were to have henceforth no conjurors? Who yet has heard the crowing of that cock, "at whose warning, whether in earth or air, the extravagant and erring spirit hies to his confine?" The nuts, indeed, are all cracked long ago, whence of old the fairy princess, in her coach and six, drove out so freely with all her regal retinue, to crown the hero's fortunes; and the rusty lamp, that once filled the dim hut of poverty with eastern splendors, has lost its capabilities. But, when our youth robbed us of these. had it not marvels and impossibilities of its own to replace them with, yet more magical; and surely, manhood itself, the soberest maturity, can not yet be without these substitutes; and it is nature's own voice and outcry that we hear whenever one of them is taken from us.

Let him alone! We have lecturers enough and professors enough already. Let him alone! We will keep this one mighty conjuror, still, even in the place where men most do congregate, and nobody shall stir a hair on his impossible old head, or trouble him with a question. He shall stand there still, pulling interminable splendors out of places they never could have been in; that is the charm of it; he shall stand there rubbing those few sickly play-house manuscripts of his, or a few old, musty play-house novels, and wringing from them the very wine of all our life, showering from their greasy folds the gems and gold of all the ages! He shall stand there spreading, in the twinkling of an eye, for a single night in a dirty theatre, "to complete a purchase that he has a mind to," the feasts of the immortal gods; and before our lips can, by any chance, have reached even the edge of

those cups, that open down into infinity, when the show has served his purpose, he shall whisk it all away again,. and leave no wreck behind, except by accident; and none shall remonstrate, or say to him, "wherefore?" He shall stand there, still, for us all-the magician; nature's one, complete, incontestible, gorgeous triumph over the impossibilities of reason.

For the primary Shakspearean condition involves at present, not merely the accidental absence of those external means of intellectual enlargement and perfection, whereby the long arts of the ages are made to bring to the individual mind their last results, multiplying its single forces with the life of all ;—but it requires also, the absence of all personal intellectual tastes, aims, and pursuits; it requires that this man shall be below all other men, in his sordid incapacity for appreciating intellectual values; it requires that he shall be able, not merely to witness the performance of these plays, not merely to hear them and read them for himself, but to compose them; it requires him to be able to compose the Tempest, and Othello, and Macbeth, without suspecting that there is anything of permanent interest in them-anything that will outlast the spectacle of the hour.

The art of writing had been already in use, twenty-five centuries in Europe, and a Shakespeare, one would think, might have been able to form some conception of its value and applications; the art of printing had been in use on the continent a century and a half, and it was already darting through every civilized corner of it, and through England, too, no uncertain intimations of its historic purport-intimations significant enough "to make bold power look pale" already-and one would think a Shakespeare might have understood its message. But no! This very spokesman of the new era it ushers in, trusted with this legacy of the new-born times; this man, whom we all so look up to, and reverence, with that inalienable treasure of ours in his hands, which even Ben Jonson knew was not for him, "nor for an age-but for all time," why this Jack Cade that he is must needs take

us back three thousand years with it, and land us at the gates of Ilium ! The arts of humanity and history, as they stood when Troy was burned, must save this treasure for us, and be our means of access to it! He will leave this work of his, into which the ends of the world have come to be inwrought for all the future, he will leave it where Homer left his, on the lips of the mouthing "rhapsodists!"

Apparently, indeed, he will be careful to teach these "robustious, periwigpated fellows" their proper relations to him. He will industriously instruct them how to pronounce his dialogue, so as to give the immediate effect intended; controlling even the gesticulations, insisting on the stops, ruling out utterly the town-crier's emphasis; and, above all, protesting, with a true author's jealousy, against interpolation or any meddling with his text. Indeed, the directions to the players, which he puts into the mouth of Hamlet-involving, as they do, not merely the nice sensibility of the artist, and his nervous, instinctive, esthetic, acquaintance with his art, but a thorough scientific knowledge of its principles-these directions would have led us to infer that he would, at least, know enough of the value of his own works to avail himself of the printing press, for their preservation, and not only that, they would have led us to expect from him a most exquisitely careful revision of his proofs. But how is it? He destroys, we are given to understand, the manuscripts of his un- · published plays, and we owe to accident, and to no care of his whatever, his works as they have come to us. Did ever the human mind debase itself to the possibility of receiving such nonsense as this, on any subject, before ?*

He

He had those manuscripts! had those originals which publishers and scholars would give millions now to purchase a glimpse of; he had the original Hamlet, with its last finish; he had the original Lear, with his own final readings; he had them all-all, pointed, emphasized, directed, as they came from the gods; he had them all, all finished as the critic of "Hamlet" and "Midsummer Night's

Dream" must have finished them; and he left us to wear out our youth, and squander our lifetime, in poring over and setting right the old, garbled copies of the play-house! He had those manuscripts, and the printing-press had been at its work a hundred years when he was born, but he was not ashamed to leave the best wits and scholars of all succeeding ages, with Pope and Johnson at their head, to exhaust their ingenuity, and sour their dispositions, and to waste their golden hours, year after year, in groping after and guessing out his hidden meanings!

He had those manuscripts! In the name of that sovereign reason, whose name he dares to take upon his lips so often, what did he do with them? Did he wantonly destroy them? No! Ah, no! he did not care enough for them to take that trouble. No, he did not do that! That would not have been in keeping with the character of this most respectable impersonation of the Genius of the British Isle, as it stands set up for us at present to worship. Some worthy, domestic, private, economic use, doubtless, they were put to. For, is not he a private, economical, practical man -this Shakespeare of ours-with no stuff and nonsense about him-a plain, true-blooded Englishman, who minds his own business, and leaves other people to take care of theirs? Is not this our Shakespeare? Is it not the boast of England, that he is just that, and nothing else? "What did he do with them?" He gave them to his cook, or Dr. Hale put up potions for his patients in them, or Judith, poor Judith—who signified her relationship to the author of "Lear," and the " Tempest," and her right to the glory of the name he left her, by the very extraordinary kind of "mark" which she affixes to legal instruments-poor Judith may have curled her hair to the day of her death with them, without dreaming of any harm. "What did he do with them?" And whose business is it? Weren't they his own? If he chose to burn them up, or put them to some private use, had not he a perfect right to do it?

No! Traitor and miscreant! No! What did you do with them? You have skulked this question long enough. You will have to account for them. You will have to tell us what you did with them. The awakening ages will put you on

the stand, and you will not leave it until you answer the question, "What did you do with them?"

And yet, do not the critics dare to boast to us, that he did compose these works for his own private, particular ends only? Do they not tell us, as if it were a thing to be proud of, and "a thing to thank God on," with uplifted eyes, and speechless admiration points, that he did "die, and leave the world no copy?" But who is it that insists so much, so strangely, so repetitiously, upon the wrong to humanity, the fraud done to nature, when the individual fails to render in his account to time of all that nature gives him? Who is it that writes, obscurely, indeed, so many sonnets, only to ring the changes on this very subject, singing out, point by point, not the Platonic theory, but his own fresh and beautiful study of great nature's law, and his own new and scientific doctrine of conservation and advancement? And who is it that writes, unconsciously, no doubt, and without its ever occurring to him that it was going to be printed, or to be read by any one?

"Thyself and thy belongings Are not thine own so proper, as to waste Thyself upon thy virtues, them on thee."

For here is the preacher of another doctrine, which puts the good that is private and particular where the sovereignty that is in nature puts it:

"Heaven doth with us, as we with torches do; Not light them for themselves. For if our virtues

Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not. Spirits are not
finely touched

But to fine issues, and nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence,
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor,
Both thanks and use."

Truly the man who writes in this style, with such poetic iteration, might put in Hamlet's plea, when his critics accuse him of unconsciousness:

'Bring me to the test And I the matter will reword; which madness Would gambol from."

What infirmity of blindness is it, then, that we charge upon this "god of our idolatry!" And what new race of Calibans are we, that we should be called upon to worship this monstrous incongruity-this Trinculo-this impersonated moral worthlessness? Oh, stu

pidity, past finding out! "The myriadminded one," the light of far-off futurities was in him, and he knew it not! While the word was on his lips, and he reasoned of it, he heeded it not! He, at whose feet all men else are proud to sit, came to him, and found no reverence. The treasure for us all was put into his hands, and-he did not waste it-he did not keep it laid up in a napkin, he did not dig in the earth, and hide his lord's money; no, he used it! he used it for his own despicable and sordid ends, "to complete purchases that he had a mind to," and he left us to gather up "the arts and fragments as best we may. And they dare to tell us this of him, and men believe it, and to this hour his bones are canonized, to this hour his tomb is a shrine, where the genius of the cool, sagacious, clearthoughted Northern Isle is worshiped, under the form of a mad, unconscious, intellectual possession-a dotard inspiration, incapable of its own designs, wanting in the essential attribute of all mental power-self-cognition.

And yet, who would be willing to spare, now, one point in that timehonored, incongruous whole? Who

would be willing to dispense with the least of those contradictions, which have become, in the progressive development of our appreciation of these works, so inextricably knit together, and thereby inwrought, as it were, into our inmost life? Who can, in fact, fairly convince himself, now, that deerstealing and link-holding, and the name of an obscure family in Stratfordcommon enough there, though it means what it does to us-and bad, or indifferent performances, at a Surrey theatre, are not really, after all, essential preliminaries and concomitants to the composition of a Romeo and Juliet, or a Midsummer Night's Dream, or a Twelfth Night? And what Shakespeare critic, at least, could persuade himself, now, that any other motive than the purchase of the Globe theatre, and that capital messuage or tenement in Stratford, called the New Place, with the appurtenances thereof, and the lands adjoining, and the house in Henley street, could by any possibility have originated such works as these?

And what fool would undertake to prove, now, that the fact of the deerstealing, or any other point in the traditionary statement, may admit of question? Certainly, it we are to have an historical or traditionary Shakespeare of any kind, out of our present materials, it becomes us to protest, with the utmost severity, against the least meddling therewith. If they are not sufficiently meagre already-if the two or three historical points we have, or seem to have, and the miserable scraps and fragments of gossip, which the painful explorations of two centuries have, at length, succeeded in rescuing from the oblivion to which this man's time consigned him*-if these points are to be encroached upon, and impaired by criticism, we may as well throw up the question altogether. In the name of all that is tangible, leave us what there is of affirmation here. Surely we have negations enough already. If he did not steal the deer, will you tell us what one mortal thing he did do? He wrote the plays. But, did the man who wrote the plays do nothing else? Are there not some foregone conclusions in them ?--some intimations, and round ones, too, that he who wrote them, be he who he may, has had experiences of some sort? Do such things as these, that the plays are full of, begin in the fingers' ends? Can you find them in an ink-horn? Can you sharpen them out of a goose-quill? Has your Shakespeare wit and invention enough for that?

But the man was a player, and the manager of a play-house, and these are plays that he writes. And what kind of play is it that you find in them -and what is the theatre-and who are the actors? Has this man's life been all play? Has there been no earnest in it?-no acting in his own name? Had he no part of his own in time, then? Has he dealt evermore with second-hand reports, unreal shadows, and mockeries of things? Has there been no personal grapple with realities, here? Ah, let him have that one living opposite. Leave him that single shot "heard round the world." Did not Eschylus fight at Salamis? Did not Scipio teach Terence how to

marshal his men and wing his words? (A cotemporary and confidant of Shakespeare's thinks, from internal evidence, that the patron wrote the plays, in this case, altogether.) And was not Socrates as brave at Potidea and Delium as he was in the market-place; and did not Cæsar, the author, kill his millions? But, this giant wrestler and warrior of ours, with the essence of all the battles of all ages in his nerves-with the blood of a new Adam bubbling in his veins he cannot be permitted to leap out of those everlasting buskins of his, long enough to have a brush with this one live deer, but the critics must have out their spectacles, and be down upon him with their objections.

And what honest man would want a Shakespeare at this hour of the day, that was not written by that same irregular, lawless, wild, reckless, facetious, law-despising, art-despising genius of a "Will" that did steal the deer? Is not this the Shakespeare we have had on our shelves with our bibles and prayer-books, since our great grandsires' times? The next step will be to call in question Moses in the bulrushes, and Pharaoh's daughter.

And what is to become, too, under this supposition, of that exquisite specimen of the player's merciless wit, and "facetious grace in writing," which attracted the attention of his cotemporaries, and left such keen impressions on the minds of his fellow-townsmen? What is to become, in this case, of the famous lampoon on Sir Thomas Lucy, nailed up on the park gate, rivaling in Shakespearean grace and sharpness another Attic morceau from the same source-the impromptu on "John-aCombe?" These remains of the poet, which we find accredited to him in his native village, "with likelihood of truth enough," among those who best knew him, have certainly cost the commentators too much trouble to be lightly relinquished; and, unquestionably, they do bear on the face of them most unmistakable symptoms of the player's wit and the Stratford origin.

No! no! We cannot spare the deerstealing. As the case now stands, this one, rich, sparkling point in the tradition, can by no means be dispensed with. Take this away, and what becomes of our traditional Shakespeare? He goes! The whole fabric tumbles to pieces, or sottles at once into a

hopeless stolidity. But for the mercurial lightning, which this youthful reminiscence imparts to him-this single indication of a suppressed tendency to an heroic life-how could that heavy, retired country gentleman, late manager of the Globe and the Blackfriars theatres, be made to float at any convenient distance above the earth, in the laboring conceptions of the artists. whose business it is to present his apotheosis to us? Enlarge the vacant platitudes of that forehead as you will -pile up the artificial brains in the frontispiece to any height which the credulity of an awe-struck public will hesitate to pronounce idiotic-huddle the allegorical shapes about him as thickly as you will, and yet, but for the twinkle which this single reminiscence leaves, this one solitary "proof of liberty," "the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind of general assault," how could the old player and showman be made to sit the bird of Jove so comfortably as he does, on his way to the waiting Olympus?

But, after all, it is not this old actor of Elizabeth's time, who exhibited these plays at his theatre in the way of his trade, and cared for them precisely as a tradesman would-cared for them as he would have cared for tin kettles, or earthen pans and pots, if they had been in his line, instead; it is not this old tradesman; it is not this old showman and hawker of plays; it is not this old lackey, whose hand is on all our heartstrings, whose name is, of mortal names, the most awe-inspiring.

The Shakespeare of Elizabeth and James, who exhibited at his theatre as plays, among many others surpassing them in immediate theatrical success, the wonderful works which bore his name-works which were only half printed, and that surreptitiously, and in detached portions during his life-time, which, seven years after his death, were first collected and published by authority in his name, accompanied, according to the custom of the day, with eulogistic verses from surviving brother poets -this yet living theatrical Shakespeare, is a very different one from the Shakespeare of our modern criticism;-the Shakespeare, brought out, at length, by more than two centuries of readings and the best scholarly investigation of modern times, from between the two lids of that wondrous folio.