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. Extraordinary 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 communications 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 de-. press the mind, like the sorrow of Hamlet. The choice of the one form or the other is every where

so 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 and 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 case 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

highest degree, could we follow, step by step, in his career, an author who at once founded and carried his art to perfection, and to go through his works in the order of time. But, with the exception of a few fixed points, which at length have been obtained, we are here in want of the necessary materials. The diligent Malone has indeed has made an attempt to arrange the plays of Shakspeare in chronological order; but he himself only gives it out for hypothetical, and it could not possibly be attended with complete success, as he excludes from his research a considerable number of pieces which have been ascribed to the poet, though rejected as spurious by all the editors since Rowe, but which, in my opinion, must, if not wholly, at least in a great measure be attributed to him.

The best and easiest mode therefore of reviewing the dramas will be to arrange them in classes. This, it must be owned, is merely a last shift: several critics have declared that all Shakspeare's pieces substantially belong to the same species, although sometimes one ingredient, sometimes another, the musical or the characteristical, the invention of the wonderful or the imitation of the real, the pathetic or the comic, seriousness or irony, may preponderate in the mixture. Shakspeare himself, it would appear, only laughed at the petty endeavours of many critics to find out divisions and subdivisions of species, and to hedge in what had been so separated with the most anxious care; the pedantic Polonius in Hamlet recommends the players, for their knowledge of "tragedy, comedy, history,

pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical, historical-pastoral, scene-undividable, or poem unlimited." On another occasion he ridicules the limitation of tragedy to an unfortunate catastrophe:

"And tragical, my noble lord, it is; For Pyramus therein doth kill himself." However the division into comedies, tragedies, and historical dramas, according to the usual practice, may in some measure be adopted, if we do not lose sight of the transitions and affinities. The subjects of the comedies are generally taken from novels: they are romantic love tales; none are altogether confined to the sphere of common or domestic relations: all of them possess poetical ornament, some of them run into the wonderful or the pathetic. To these two of his most distinguished tragedies are immediately link. ed, Romeo and Juliet and Othello; both true novels, and composed on the same principles. In many of the historical plays a considerable space is occupied by the comic characters and scenes; others are serious throughout, and leave behind a tragical impression. The essential circumstance by which they are distinguished is, that the plot bears a reference to a poetical and national interest. This is not so much the case in Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth; and hence we do not include these tragedies among the historical pieces, though the first is founded on an old northern, the second on a national tradition; and the third comes even within the epoch of the Scottish history, after it ceased to be fabulous.