O Theobald! what a commentator wast thou, when thou wouldst affect to understand Shakspeare, instead of contenting thyself with collating the text! The meaning here is too deep for a line ten-fold the length of thine to fathom.

Ib. sc. 3.

Cæsar's speech:

Be factious for redress of all these griefs;
And I will set this foot of mine as far,

As who goes farthest.

I understand it thus: You have spoken as a conspirator; be so in fact, and I will join you. Act on your principles, and real

ize them in a fact.'

Act ii. sc. 1. Speech of Brutus :—

It must be by his death; and, for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,

But for the general. He would be crown'd:

How that might change his nature, there's the question.

And, to speak truth of Cæsar,

I have not known when his affections sway'd

This speech is singular;—at least, I do not at present see into Shakspeare's motive, his rationale, or in what point of view he meant Brutus' character to appear. For surely-(this, I mean, is what I say to myself, with my present quantum of insight, only modified by my experience in how many instances I have ripened into a perception of beauties, where I had before descried faults)-surely, nothing can seem more discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to the intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here attributed to him-to him, the stern Roman republican; namely, that he would have no objection to a king, or to Cæsar, a monarch in Rome, would Cæsar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be! How, too, could Brutus say that he found no personal cause-none in Cæsar's past conduct as a man? Had he not passed the Rubicon? Had he not entered Rome as a conqueror? Had he not placed his Gauls in the Senate ?-Shakspeare, it may be said, has not brought these things forward— True; and this is just the ground of my perplexity. What character did Shakspeare mean his Brutus to be?

Ib. Speech of Brutus :—

For if thou path thy native semblance on

Surely, there need be no scruple in treating this 'path' as a mere misprint or mis-script for put.' In what place does Shakspeare, where does any other writer of the same age-use 'path' as a verb for walk?' (7)

Ib. sc. 2.

Cæsar's speech :

She dreamt last night she saw my statue

No doubt, it should be statua, as in the same age, they more often pronounced heroes' as a trisyllable than dissyllable. A modern tragic poet would have written,

Last night she dreamt, that she my statue saw—

But Shakspeare never avails himself of the supposed license of transposition, merely for the metre. There is always some logic either of thought or passion to justify it.

Pardon me, Julius-here wast thou bay'd, brave hart;
Here didst thou fall; and here thy hunters stand
Sign'd in thy spoil, and crimson'd in thy death.
O world! thou wast the forest to this hart,
And this, indeed, O world! the heart of thee.

I doubt the genuineness of the last two lines ;-not because they are vile; but first, on account of the rhythm, which is not Shaksperian, but just the very tune of some old play, from which the actor might have interpolated them; and secondly, because they interrupt, not only the sense and connection, but likewise the flow both of the passion, and (what is with me still more decisive) of the Shaksperian link of association. As with many another parenthesis or gloss slipt into the text, we have only to read the passage without it, to see that it never was in it. I venture to say there is no instance in Shakspeare fairly like this. Conceits he has; but they not only rise out of some word in the lines before, but also lead to the thought in the lines following. Here the conceit is a mere alien: Antony forgets an image, when he is even touching it, and then recollects it, when the thought last in his mind must have led him away from it.

Act iv. sc. 3. Speech of Brutus :—

What, shall one of us,

That struck the foremost man of all this world,

But for supporting robbers.

This seemingly strange assertion of Brutus is unhappily verified in the present day. What is an immense army, in which the lust of plunder has quenched all the duties of the citizen, other than a horde of robbers, or differenced only as fiends are from ordinarily reprobate men? Cæsar supported, and was supported by, such as these; and even so Bonaparte in our days.

I know no part of Shakspeare that more impresses on me the belief of his genius being superhuman, than this scene between Brutus and Cassius. In the Gnostic heresy it might have been credited with less absurdity than most of their dogmas, that the Supreme had employed him to create, previously to his function of representing, characters.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA.

SHAKSPEARE can be complimented only by comparison with himself: all other eulogies are either heterogeneous, as when they are in reference to Spenser or Milton; or they are flat truisms, as when he is gravely preferred to Corneille, Racine, or even his own immediate successors, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and the rest. The highest praise, or rather form of praise, of this play, which I can offer in my own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether the Antony and Cleopatra is not, in all exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and vigor of maturity, a formidable rival of Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. Feliciter audax is the motto for its style comparatively with that of Shakspeare's other works, even as it is the general motto of all his works compared with those of other poets. Be it remembered, too, that this happy valiancy of style. is but the representative and result of all the material excellences so expressed.

This play should be perused in mental contrast with Romeo and Juliet-as the love of passion and appetite opposed to the love of affection and instinct. But the art displayed in the char

E

acter of Cleopatra is profound; in this, especially, that the sense of criminality in her passion is lessened by our insight into its depth and energy, at the very moment that we can not but perceive that the passion itself springs out of the habitual craving of a licentious nature, and that it is supported and reinforced by voluntary stimulus and sought-for associations, instead of blossoming out of spontaneous emotion.

Of all Shakspeare's historical plays, Antony and Cleopatra is by far the most wonderful. There is not one in which he has followed history so minutely, and yet there are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic strength so much ;—perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly. This is greatly owing to the manner in which the fiery force is sustained throughout, and to the numerous momentary flashes of nature counteracting the historic abstraction. As a wonderful specimen of the way in which Shakspeare lives up to the very end of this play, read the last part of the concluding scene. And if you would feel the judgment as well as the genius of Shakspeare in your heart's core, compare this astonishing drama with Dryden's All For Love. Act i. sc. 1. Philo's speech:

His captain's heart

Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper—

It should be 'reneagues,' or 'reniegues,' as fatigues,' &c.
Ib.

Take but good note, and you shall see in him

The triple pillar of the world transform'd
Into a strumpet's fool.

Warburton's conjecture of 'stool' is ingenious, and would be a probable reading, if the scene opening had discovered Antony with Cleopatra on his lap. But, represented as he is walking and jesting with her, 'fool' must be the word. Warburton's objection is shallow, and implies that he confounded the dramatic with the epic style. The pillar' of a state is so common a metaphor, as to have lost the image in the thing meant to be imaged.

Ib. sc.

2.

Much is breeding;

Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life,
And not a serpent's poison.

This is so far true to appearance, that a horse-hair, ‘laid,' as Hollinshed says, 'in a pail of water,' will become the supporter of seemingly one worm, though probably of an immense number of small slimy water-lice. The hair will twirl round a finger, and sensibly compress it. It is a common experiment with school-boys in Cumberland and Westmoreland. Act ii. sc. 2. Speech of Enobarbus:

Her gentlewomen, like the Nereids,

So many mermaids, tended her i' th' eyes,

And made their bends adornings. At the helm

A seeming mermaid steers.

I have the greatest difficulty in believing that Shakspeare wrote the first mermaids.' He never, I think, would have so weakened by useless anticipation the fine image immediately following. The epithet seeming' becomes so extremely improper after the whole number had been positively called 'so many mermaids.'

Act i. sc. 1.

TIMON OF ATHENS.

Tim. The man is honest.

Old Ath. Therefore he will be, Timon.

His honesty rewards him in itself.

WARBURTON'S comment- If the man be honest, for that reason he will be so in this, and not endeavor at the injustice of gaining my daughter without my consent-is, like almost all his comments, ingenious in blunder; he can never see any other writer's thoughts for the mist-working swarm of his own. The meaning of the first line the poet himself explains, or rather unfolds, in the second. The man is honest!'-True ;-and for that very cause, and with no additional or extrinsic motive, he will be so. No man can be justly called honest, who is not so for honesty's sake, itself including its own reward. Note, that honesty' in Shakspeare's age retained much of its old dignity, and that contradistinction of the honestum from the utile, in which its very essence and definition consist. If it be honestum, it can not depend on the utile.