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In this fine drama of "Horace" our sympathies, unless borne along by the power of some great actor, entirely break down. We admire the elevation of mind, half patriotism, half stoicism, which Horace displays in that interview with his sister which occurs before the battle. He tells Camille that if Curiace, her lover, shall return the conqueror, not to reproach him with the death of her brother-to love and to marry him as a man who had only fulfilled his duty. But, on the other hand, if he (Horace) should return the victor, to give him the like welcome.

"Ne me reprochez point la mort de vôtre

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These are natural sentiments, and naturally expressed; he is strong at heart himself, and he would fortify his sister against the approaching calamity; but when he in fact returns the victor, we feel that this stoical elevation degenerates into a harsh and boastful manner, devoid of the least trait of heroic, or any other, nature. He at once challenges his sister's joyful reception! He points to the swords of the slain

"Vois ces marques d'honneur, ces témoins de ma gloire,

Et rends ce que tu dois à l'heur de ma victoire."

It is brutal; and, on the other hand, the conduct of Camille is a sort of suicidal rage; for she not only laments her lover, which was natural, but rushes into a general abuse of

Rome!-which is quite inexplicable, unless it was intended to inflame the anger of her brother.

It is rarely that the natural and spontaneous passions, whether good or ill, have their fair play and development in the dramas of Corneille. What he delights to do is to raise up some principle of honour, or of loyalty, and then to break the heart against it. His Chimène loves; but her idea of honour requires that she should revenge her father, and she goes before the king, clamorously petitioning for the execution of her lover! And Chimène is the tenderest of his heroines. If we look at his "Emilia" in Cinna we absolutely recoil, as before some beautiful tigress; nay, as far as we see, there is more of ferocity than beauty of any description. If the general effect of Corneille's dramas be to elevate the mind into certain heroic moods, we may add, with quite as much truth, that another general effect is to indurate the heart. So far from doing, as his master Aristotle would have told him—so far from softening the spectator by the means of pity and terror, he succeeds, as we say, in hardening the heart. He teaches us to throw aside and trample upon natural goodness, or natural weakness; but he is far from teaching us to do this in obedience to ennobling or steadfast sentiments of duty. While he tortures our feelings, he plays with our principles. We cannot but think that a great poet of this kind was, upon the whole, a national misfortune.

We shall return again, if space permits us, to some examination of the dramas of Corneille. These few specimens will justify the general remark we have made on the character of the influence he habitually exercised upon his audience. Let us look, for a moment, at our Shakspeare, and the national influence which he appears to have exercised.

Beyond some appeals to our patriotism, or national vanity, it may at first appear that there is nothing in the drama of Shakspeare to exercise an influence on the national character. He presents to us human life and human passions in all their varieties; and the boast which his critics have made in his name is precisely

this, that he is so universal, so impartial, that, in his mimic world, you see humanity, but you do not see William Shakspeare. Any other influence, therefore, except the beneficial results that attend upon the wide exercise and development of our sympathies, it may seem difficult to specify.

But notwithstanding this character not unjustly ascribed to him, of dramatic universality, we think the mind of Shakspeare himself is seen and felt throughout his dramas, and that there are prevailing trains of thought which have had a permanent influence on his countrymen. How are Englishmen characterised abroad, and by neighbouring nations? A practical people, marvellously industrious, but withal a melancholy and reflective people; given more than any other, that ever led so active and strenuous life, to meditation. Serious and taciturn, we are supposed to be peculiarly subject to ennui, and to have a great tendency to suicide. This last we dispute. But that a strain of serious and of melancholy reflection runs through the national character, and through the English literature, will be generally admitted. Where did it begin? Next to our seas and our skies, and that infinity which surrounds all human life, we trace it to William Shakspeare. What young poet, after having read his Shakspeare through and through, does not begin with something which, consciously or unconsciously, is an imitation of Hamlet ?

There is much of Hamlet in many other characters than the Prince of Denmark much of the same deep unsatisfied reflection, leaning more to despondency than to hope, and dwelling much with doubt, though never throwing faith aside. How, indeed, could a man of keen and pensive observation on human life, of habitual reflection upon himself and the strange scene around him, fail to introduce traits of his own mode of thinking? He has diffused them more copiously through his Hamlet than elsewhere; but in many other characters it is Shakspeare that speaks, and not the hero of the piece. The strain of sentiment was never suggested by a dramatic exercise of his mind, but thoughts and images which had oc

curred to him in some observant or meditative hour are reproduced, with or without much dramatic propriety. What gave Claudio in Measure for Measure that thrilling passage—

"Ay, but to die, to go we know not where"? The situation of Claudio, who is condemned to die, wonld give rise naturally enough to reflections upon death; but what was there in the character of Claudio to suggest this tone of reflection? An ordinary Italian takes the priest's account of what happens after death. It was not Claudio that was speaking here. When Romeo, the fond and despairing lover, has heard of Juliet's death-he too will die-he will procure some poison, carry it to Juliet's tomb, and drink it there. Was that description, which lives in the memory of every one of us, of the starved apothecary, introduced for the exigencies of the drama? On the contrary, more than one critic has observed, that no man in the affliction of Romeo could possibly have so far abstracted his mind from his own personal distress as to have then dwelt upon the condition of another, and drawn this faithful picture of him. It was not Romeo, it was Shakspeare, that had seen and noted the apothecary.

What had Macbeth, assassin and usurper, to do with that pensive moralising

"Life's but a walking shadow "? We do not say here that there is any dramatic discrepancy. Shakspeare has given throughout his Macbeth softening touches of reflection. He could not help it. This reflective tendency was so strong in his mind that it throws its light over all his pictures. There is more of this cast of thought in one play of Shakspeare than in all the dramas of Corneille. Such a character of Jacques can have been introduced for no other purpose than to unburden the poet's mind of these pensive, meditative, poetic thoughts that were crowding in upon it.

But even where his creations are eminently dramatic, he still carries with him his own peculiar thoughtfulness, that sad and marvelling inquisition which the philosophic spirit can never release itself from. And thus it happens that, let the tragedy

be what it may which Shakspeare has presented to us, one result is sure to follow he leaves us in the reflective mood; if not wiser, in the mood for wisdom. Of all the creations of Shakspeare, one of the most thoroughly dramatic, as it is also one of his very grandest, is King Lear. What mournful sagacity, what serious and pensive satire, gleam through the free and wild discourses of the discrowned and half-bewildered monarch! Oh, do not tell us that Shakspeare is not seen in his dramas! He is not seen intrusively; his men and women speak; but there is the same inspiration felt throughout.

This reflective mood, like everything earthly, may have its darker side, and evil as well as good may be traced to it. We have heard some complaints in print, as well as in conversation mutterings, on what has been called the sceptical spirit of the dramas of Shakspeare. Very susceptible of scepticism those minds, we think, must be who have found it there. But say that you encounter a spirit of meditation, revolving much and concluding little, where the problems of human life are stated, and not resolved, consider this-that it is always a serious spirit. Doubt is sadness; there is no levity in it; inquiry is never thrown aside; a great problem is never forgotten, never trifled with. And the doubt is but transitory-an obscuration, not a departure of faith. It is but the cloud upon Mount Sinai; the sacred mountain itself is not removed. If a certain distrust and despondency may be said to characterise the people and the literature of England, and if this be in some measure traceable to the author of "Hamlet," let it be also remembered that no Gallic levity enters into this dubious and distrustful disposition. At one time, when all earnest thought was out of fashion, and Shakspeare himself was forgotten, there appeared this spirit of lighthearted scepticism amongst us. But even then it was a foreign importation. It is a Rasselas, and not a Candide, that takes root in the English mind. Sadness enough it may betray, and arising partly from incertitude in its quest for truth; but a gay recognition that no truth is to be found, and a

"let us live happy without it!"this is not in our national mind, nor in our national poet.

Shakspeare lived at a time when a great religious revolution was taking place in this country. At such times there is brought before the observant mind one of the most mournful spectacles which human affairs present. Virtue and piety are arrayed-against virtue and piety. Men substantially of the same faith, and the same morality, are condemning each other with a bitterness of language they do not use towards the worst of criminals. Each, in the estimation of his opponent, is the enemy of God and of man. In such scenes of controversy, they are not to be most blamed who find it impossible to side heartily with either party-whose first wish is for peace, and who stand aloof that they may not further embroil the fray. It is said of Shakspeare that he was neither good Protestant nor good Catholic, and that he had probably received just so much of the new doctrine as to disturb his faith in the old. To us it seems that there was a great similarity in this respect between Bacon and Shakspeare. Both were Protestants, so far as this was a national or patriotic question; both were ready to declare

"That no Italian priest Shall toll and tithe in our dominions ;"

and we need not add that both were men accustomed to the independent exercise of their own judgment. So far, they were Protestants. But they had neither of them irrevocably pledged themselves to the doctrinal system of that party. Bacon was a political Protestant; the poet Shakspeare had evidently never revoked or called in his sympathies from the old forms of Christian piety. Both were occasionally driven, by the influence of the times, to speculate on first principles. Bacon found his consolation, and a great purpose, in recalling men to the study of material nature, and Shakspeare his occupation in the study of human nature. One hardly sees how he could have pursued his theme, and been the staunch Protestant of the times: he could hardly have been both dramatist and Puritan.

But he might have been the poet.

Milton, it may be suggested, was a Puritan. Have many of those who would thus characterise Milton reflected on the various elements that entered into the composition of the mind of that poet? He was a Puritan imbued with the spirit of Homer and of Eschylus. Classical learning had done for him what a speculative spirit had done for Shakspeare; it imparted a certain freedom, produced a certain impartiality of thought and vision, without which we might have had hymns, many and beautiful, but no epic.

Speaking on national poets, it is hardly a digression to bestow a passing word on Milton. What is it we see in the mind of this great poet? It is nothing less than the confluence of two streams of poetic literature-the Hebrew and the Greek. Homer and Isaiah meet together. In prose, he was a Puritan arguing against Prelacy, as if this were the turning-point of the world's history. But in poetry, his imagination haunts the past, and the old gods restored to him large portions of our common humanity. In vain did he convert the heathen gods into disguised and treacherous devils; they had reared a temple for themselves in his imagination which he never could desecrate.

Examine the mind of Milton-we feel our knee bend reverently as we approach the theme, with just that slight genuflexion the priest makes as he nears the altar-examine his mode of thinking and reasoning. You find that in his controversial works he shows little tendency to build on first principles, or on abstract truths, but argues much, (according to the prevailing manner of the times,) from his authorities, his texts, his citations, his "Kings" and "Chronicles," his priests and prophets. His learning and his reasoning go hand in hand. But Milton happily had two learnings, and the balance and interchange between them produced some of the liberalising effect of enlarged abstract reasoning. In his poetry this becomes very conspicuous. The Hebrew literature lent him all its grandeur of conception, and its moral purity; but he escaped from its spirit of exclusiveness; for the Greek literature also claimed an allegiance from him.

These two sources of thought, these two golden urns, were on his right band and on his left, and he drew from both: or rather let us say, that these two literatures were the two mighty wings on which he soared and balanced himself in that loftiest empyrean in which none other has sailed with safety.

Our national mind and character are permanently, and in every department, marked by compromise. In our political constitution, in our church, in our system of education, in our great habits of thinking, we make some curious, undefinable, but most useful compromise between irreconcilable antagonists. We talk like republicans, and we feel an enthusiastic loyalty; we have a personal independence that amounts to churlishness, and the throne is scarcely more honoured than the aristocracy; we are the most practical and businesslike, and the most sad and reflective of men; and in our speculative opinions we claim ever the greatest freedom, and are most averse to any use of it-are very bold, and full of selfdistrust;-and lo! amongst our poets, our great epic is a compromise between Christian and classical learning; and in our Shakspearian drama we have been taught to look for nothing but a faithful reflection of all manner of men, of all sentiments, and all passions.

We have been carried on by our own train of thought, to the forgetfulness of our critical duty, and have not yet ushered in the two works of M. Guizot which led to these reflections on the national influences of the French and the English dramatist. Two such announcements as Corneille and his Times, and Shakspeare and his Times, by an author who is almost naturalised amongst us, and who, at all events, is as highly appreciated in this country as in his own, must have proved very attractive. Those who did not give themselves the leisure to reflect whether it was very likely that the ex-minister, or the fallen statesman, would so soon have withdrawn his attention from political events to fix it upon purely literary themes, will have expected, under these titles, to receive two new works, the result of the last researches and reflections of

M. Guizot. They will have been disappointed when, on opening the volumes, they found them composed of essays and fragments written many years ago-one of the longest not even by the pen of M. Guizot. The volumes, however, will be found worthy of perusal; although they will hardly add to the mature reputation of the philosophical historian.

In the Shakspeare and his Times, the conspicuous defect lies where one would have least anticipated-in the historical and biographical notice of Shakspeare. The author has not revised his early work; he has not taken advantage of the researches or suggestions of later authors; neither, when he wrote his essay, does he appear to have bestowed much attention on this part of his subject. The consequence is that he repeats some old stories, which we believe we may say are now generally exploded.

Historical investigation has added very few facts to the biography of Shakspeare, but it has disproved several idle traditions that have been currently attached to his name. All we seem really to know is this, that about the age of nineteen or twenty he left Stratford, and came up to London to push his fortune there, as actor and playwright. A youth, in our days, bent on the like search of fame and fortune, travels up to London with a manuscript in his pocket, and hies forthwith to the publisher. There was no Murray or Longman in those times of Shakspeare-not even a Lintot; even Grub Street as yet was unknown-and our literary aspirant betakes himself, of necessity, to the Globe theatre. This is all we really know. When the adventurous youth had become the renowned dramatist, the gossips bestirred themselves, and found, or invented, divers anecdotes which, we apprehend, are now generally discredited, or likely to become so.

Shakspeare's father is now a glover, now a butcher; he is a wool-stapler, he is a grazier, a man in distressed circumstances, and a respectable burgess. Shakspeare himself has been articled to a lawyer, has been a schoolmaster; has been bred a butcher, and seen killing a calf, and making speeches over it; he had no education, he has been educated at a most excellent

grammar school: there is no end to the conflicting gossip. Then comes the famous story of the deer-stealing, told hitherto in all the biographiesbut told with gradually diminishing confidence, till at length his last biographer, Mr Knight, boldly refuses to it any historical value whatever. M. Guizot, after a very hasty examination, concludes that this story must be true, but regards it in the light of a jocular event, such as Shakspeare himself might have alluded to in after life with the same frankness that men relate the feats of their schoolboy days with. This is the most rational representation to give, if the story is to be retained. But M. Guizot still relates it as the turning-point in our poet's career. It is hard to conceive that he should have been driven from his native place by an occurrence which admits of being represented as a mere youthful exploit, in which there was more frolic than crime. And if he really had to fly from Stratford as a disgraced culprit, it is quite as hard to understand why he should have clung with tenacity to his native place, continually revisiting it, and returning to end his days there. But what is still more to the purpose than any general reasoning of this kind-it has been shown that the facts by which the tradition has been upheld are without authorityare not facts, but fictions.

We cannot do better than give, in the first place, the narrative as told by M. Guizot.

"The occurrence which forced Shakspeare to leave Stratford, and gave to his position as the father of a family (he England her greatest poet, proves that had very early married Anne Hathaway) had not effected any great alteration in the irregularity of his habits as a young

man.

"Jealous preservers of their game, like all gentlemen who are not engaged in war, the possessors of parks were continually under the necessity of defending them against invasions which, in places. so open and unprotected, were as frequent as they were easy. Danger does not always diminish temptation, but frequently even makes it appear less illegitimate. A band of poachers carried on their depredations in the neighbourhood of Stratford, and Shakspeare, who was eminently sociable, never refused to engage in any

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