adoration. Fortune, in her rigour to Shakspeare and Molière, made them actors, and thus gave to the lowest of their countrymen the privilege of at once insulting the great men and their writings." Vol. I. pp. 249-252.

Our author places Julius Cæsar and Richard III. on a par with Macbeth, Hamlet, and Othello. We believe that he is the first critic of any pretensions who ever did so-as he is assuredly the first who ever charged him with a want of variety in the delineation of female character. Our readers might scarcely credit the assertion: but so says our author. He enters into a parallel (too long to be here extracted) between the chief female characters of French tragedy and those of Shakspeare, and points out, as he supposes, the immense superiority of the former. After a number of extracts and impassioned remarks, he exclaims, "What are all Shakspeare's females in comparison with Esther?" Her speech to Elise (fine, undoubtedly) is then given, and the comparison closed by the following rapturous apostrophe to all barbarians; no doubt, including among such those who are unhappy enough to prefer Shakspeare to Racine :

“If there are any Huns, Hottentots, Hurons, Goths, Vandals, or other barbarians, insensible to the feminine modesty, the dignity, and the melody of this exquisite passage, may they be seventy times seven-fold delighted by the charms of their own native productions. 'I thought,' says Racine, in his preface to Esther, 'that I could fill up the whole of my dramatic action with such scenes as God himself has in a manner prepared.' Racine justly thought so, for he alone possessed the harp of David consecrated to the scenes prepared by God." Vol. I. pp. 284, 5.

The era of Shakspeare is well described. The author groups together in a very imposing manner all the events of the times, fancying the impressions likely to be made by them upon such a mind as that of the bard of Avon. For ourselves, we believe that Shakspeare's wonderful poetic talent was one given to him by his Creator, which would have burst forth in splendour in any age; though we should not be disposed to adopt the language which Chateaubriand professes to quote, but which we strongly suspect to be his own-"that the poet was as a solitary comet, which, having traversed the constellations of the ancient firmament, returns to the feet of the Deity, and says to him, like the thunder, here I am."'" This is precious bombast. Still it was quite fair in Chateaubriand to conjecture the influence of the occurrences of his day upon the imagination of the bard, and it affords the writer an opportunity of showing off in the kind of composition in which he excels. The extract is long, but we wished not to abridge it, as it is well worth the perusal.

"At home, Elizabeth presented in her own person an historical character. Shakspeare had attained his twenty-third year when Mary

Stuart was beheaded. The child of catholic parents, and probably himself a catholic, he had doubtless heard, among his own community, that Elizabeth had endeavoured to make Rolstone the instrument of seducing her fair captive, in order to disgrace her; and that, taking advantage of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, she had made an attempt to deliver over the Queen of Scots to the vindictive feelings of the Scotish protestants. Who knows but curiosity might have led young William from Stratford to Fotheringay to witness the catastrophe? Who can say but he may have seen the bed, the chamber, the vaults hung with black, the block, the head of Mary, into which the executioner, by his first unskilful stroke of the axe, had driven a portion of the unfortunate victim's coif and gray hair? May not the eyes of Shakspeare have rested with interest and curiosity on the beautiful and mutilated corse?

"Some time after, Elizabeth cast another head at the feet of Shakspeare. Mahomet II. had an Icoglan decapitated for the purpose of giving a painter an idea of death. Strange compound of man and woman! Elizabeth seems, during the whole of her mysterious life, to have felt but one passion, and never to have known love. The last malady of this queen, say the memoirs of her time, proceeded from a grief, the cause of which she ever kept a profound secret. She never evinced an inclination to have recourse to remedies-as if she had made up her mind long before to die-being weary of her life from some secret cause, which was said to be the death of the Earl of Essex.

"The sixteenth century, the spring-time of modern civilization, flourished in England more prosperously than in other parts of the globe. It developed those sturdy generations of men, who already bore within them the seeds of liberty, in the persons of Cromwell and Milton. Elizabeth dined to the sound of drums and trumpets, whilst her parliament was passing atrocious laws against the papists, and whilst the yoke of sanguinary oppression weighed down unhappy Ireland. The executions at Tyburn alternated with the gaieties of the fashionable ball; the austerities of the puritans with the revels of Kenilworth; comedies with sermons; lampoons with hymns; literary disquisitions with philosophical discussions and sectarian controversies.

"The spirit of adventure animated the nation, as at the period of the wars in Palestine. Protestant crusaders volunteered to combat the idolaters-that is to say, the catholics. They followed across the seas Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, who, like Peter the Hermit, were friends of Christ, but enemies of the Cross. Engaged in the cause of religious liberty, the English lent their aid to all who sought to shake off the yoke of tyranny; they shed their blood beneath the white plume of Henry IV. and the yellow flag of the Prince of Orange. Shakspeare witnessed all this, and he also was witness to those auspicious tempests which cast the wrecks of the Spanish vessels upon the shores of his delivered country.

Abroad, the picture was not less favourable to poetic inspiration. In Scotland, there were the vices and ambition of Murray-the murder of Rizzio-Darnley strangled, and his body cast to the winds-Bothwell espousing Mary in the fortress of Dunbar, and afterwards becoming a fugitive and a pirate in Norway-Morton delivered up to the executioner. "The Low Countries presented all the miseries inseparable from a nation's emancipation: Cardinal de Granvelle, the Duke of Alva-the tragic deaths of the Count d'Egmont and the Count de Horn.

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In Spain, besides the death of Don Carlos, we find Philip II. erecting the sombre Escurial, multiplying his auto-da-fés, and saying to his

physicians Are you afraid to take a few drops of blood from a man who has made it flow in rivers ?"

"In Italy, the history of the Cenci, renewing the ancient adventures of Venice, Verona, Milan, Bologna, and Florence.

"In Germany, Wallenstein's career had just commenced.

"In France, the nearest country to the native land of Shakspeare, what were the stirring events of the time?

"The tocsin of St. Bartholomew sounded when the author of Macbeth had attained his eighteenth year, and England was convulsed by the intelligence of that massacre; exaggerated accounts of it, (if exaggerated they could be,) details calculated to inflame even the imaginations of children, were printed in London and Edinburgh, and sold in every town and village throughout the country. A great deal was said about the reception given by Elizabeth to the ambassador of Charles IX. 'The silence of night reigned through the royal apartments. The ladies and courtiers were ranged in rows on each side, clothed in deep mourning; and when the ambassador passed through the midst of them, none made their obeisance, nor even turned upon him a civil look.' Marlowe brought upon the stage his play entitled The Massacre of Paris,' and possibly Shakspeare may have made his debut in one of its characters. "The reign of Charles IX. was succeeded by that of Henry III., so fertile in catastrophes: Catherine de Medicis, the favourites, the day of the barricades, the assassination of the two Guises at Blois, the death of Henry III. at St. Cloud, the agitations of the League, the murder of Henri IV., must have varied incessantly the emotions of a poet who beheld the long chain of events extending before him. The soldiers of Elizabeth, the Earl of Essex himself, took part in our civil wars, and fought at Havre, Ivry, Rouen, and Amiens. Some veterans of the English army might have recounted, at the fireside of William Shakspeare, the calamities they had witnessed in our fields of battle."

"Shakspeare was born in the interval between the religious revolution, which commenced under Henry VIII., and the political revolution which was preparing to burst forth under Charles I. Both before and after him, there was nothing throughout England but scenes of bloodshed and horror.

"In the reign of Edward VI., Somerset, the protector of the kingdom and uncle of the young king, perished on the scaffold.

"In the reign of Mary, there were the martyrs of protestantism, the beheading of Lady Jane Grey, and Philip, the exterminator of protestants, landing in England, as if to review and devote to destruction the camp of the enemy.

"With the reign of Elizabeth came the martyrs of catholicism. Elizabeth herself, anointed with the sacred oil in conformity with the Roman ritual, became the persecutrix of the faith which had placed the crown upon her head. Elizabeth! the daughter of that Anne Boleyn who caused the schism from the church of Rome, who was sacrificed after Thomas More, and who died half lunatic, praying, laughing, and contrasting the smallness of her neck with the breadth of the executioner's axe.

"Shakspeare in his youth must frequently have encountered old monks, chased from their cloisters, who had seen Henry VIII., his reforms, his destructive hand laid upon their monasteries, his court fools, his wives, his mistresses, and his executioners. When the poet died, Charles I. was in his sixteenth year.

"Thus Shakspeare might have laid one hand on the hoary heads menaced by the last but one of the Tudors, and the other on the auburn

locks of the second of the Stuarts;-on that head which was painted by Vandyke, and subsequently struck off by the parliament party. Filling this position, contemplating these tragic objects, the great poet descended into the tomb. His life was employed in drawing his spectres and his blind kings-in depicting female sorrow and the punishment of ambition-so as to unite, by analogous fictions, the realities of the past with the realities of the future." Vol. I. pp. 292–299.

Another charge is brought against Shakspeare which we feel desirous of repelling--a want of passion and true feeling. He is represented as a sceptic-a sort of abstract, metaphysicalminded man, who sported with the affections as with toys, the trifles of a vacant hour. Hear what the viscount says, after quoting some of his beautiful sonnets.

"There is more of poetry, imagination, and melancholy, in these verses than sensibility, passion, and depth. Shakspeare loved, but he believed no more in love than he believed in any thing else. A woman to him is a bird, a zephyr, a flower, which charms and passes away. Owing to his carelessness or ignorance of fame, and to his profession, which excluded him from good company and kept him aloof from the conditions which he could not attain, he seems to have taken life as a fleeting unoccupied hour, a transient and agreeable leisure.

"Poets love liberty and the muse more dearly than their mistresses. The pope offered to absolve Petrarch from his vows, in order that he might marry Laura. The bard replied to his holiness's obliging proposition, 'I have still too many sonnets to write.'

"Shakspeare, that great tragic spirit, drew his serious ideas from his scorn of himself and the human race. He doubted every thing. 'Perhaps' is a word which in his lines incessantly recurs. Montaigne, on the other side of the water, repeated: Peut-être-que sais-je? 'Perhaps -what do I know?" Vol. I. pp. 315, 316.

The deep pathos and irresistible passion of his verse is the best answer to the charge.

Again he is supposed by Chateaubriand to have been unconscious of his genius-careless about fame. The author must have forgotten, or never read, the impressive verses beginning— "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

As little of an egotist, perhaps, as any great man who ever lived, Shakspeare still possessed the sense of innate greatness, or he would not have been human. While, therefore, we differ in toto with the writer in our estimate of Shakspeare's character, still we must do justice to the beauty of the following lines, with which he closes his notice of him:

"Shakspeare, during his life, never thought of living after death. What now to him is my song of admiration? In admitting all suppositions, in reasoning on the truths or the errors with which the human mind is penetrated or imbued, what were to Shakspeare a renown whose echoes cannot reach him? If a Christian, amidst eternal felicity, can he care for the nothingness of this world? If a deist, freed from the

clouds of matter-clouds lost in the splendour of God-does he bestow one glance on the grain of sand that he has left? If an atheist, he sleeps, without breathing or awaking, the sleep called death. Nothing then is more vain than glory beyond the tomb-at least, unless it has kept friendship alive-unless it has been useful to virtue, serviceable to distress-and unless it be given us to enjoy in heaven the sense of one consoling, generous, liberating idea, left by us upon earth!" Vol. I. p. 319.

A very rapid sketch of the literature of England, from the time of Shakspeare to that of Milton, is next presented to usour author appearing desirous of hastening to his hero, to a consideration of whom he devotes most of the remainder of his work. Upon the second volume we cannot dwell so much at length as we have done upon the first, on account of the space we have already occupied, though there is in it an abundance of interesting matter to detain us. To Milton, then, the commonwealth, and Cromwell, let us direct our attention for a short time.

Milton's career is, we suppose, familiar to our readers. We shall not, therefore, present them with any part of Chateaubriand's account, except for the new dress in which he clothes. his facts-serving up old things in a style to render them doubly agreeable. With his remarks upon Milton, too, we shall have but little fault to find, our admiration for him being equal to that of our author himself.

Milton traveled on the continent after he had finished his studies, and when he had already distinguished himself by his writings. The beauty of his person and his accomplishments procured him great consideration abroad. He hastened home, however, without visiting Greece, upon news of coming disturbances in his native country. His stand was at once taken -he went for liberty. He did not, indeed, instantly assume an active part in the first movements of the revolution. Domestic duties, and his studies, engrossed him for a while; but when his thoughts were matured, he poured them out unceasingly into the ears of his countrymen. They were the notes of freedom; and they sounded sweetly in the ears of her partisans. The pen, not the sword, fell to his share in the contest.

Johnson, in his rough way, attacks Milton for his temporary inactivity; he even attempts a joke at his expense. Chateaubriand defends him; though not at all at length, nor as ably as he might. Milton's character, however, will survive the assault even of a Johnson.

In Italy, Milton fell in love. The incident is thought to have so sensibly affected his feelings as to have cooled their natural fervour; he is supposed not to have loved any of the three wives he afterwards took to himself as ardently as the Italian VOL. XXI.-No. 41.

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