21st, 1832, he had paid upward of £100,000 of his debts; and soon after by the sale of his copyright interest in the Waverley novels, the claims of all his creditors were fully satisfied-a result perhaps never achieved before or since within so brief a space of time by the literary efforts of a single person. His character is most happily sketched by Prescott, p. 370. SH III. 121. SHAKSPEARE. HAKSPEARE is, above all writers,-at least above all modern writers, -the poët of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpracticed by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions; they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those genpassions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual: in those of Shaks'peare it is commonly a species. eral 2. It is from this wide extension of design that so much instruction is derived. It is this which fills the plays of Shakspeare with practical axioms and domestic wisdom. It was said of Euripides,' that every verse was a precept; and it may be said of Shakspeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and economical prudence. Yet his real power is not shown in the splendor of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenor of his dialogue: and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hier'ocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen. 2 'Eu rip'i dēs, one of the three great Greek tragedians, was born in Salamis, whither his parents retired during the occupation of Attica by Xerxes, on the day of the glorious victory near that island, B. C. 480. He was highly learned and accomplished, and on terms of intimacy with Socrates. According to some authorities, Euripides wrote ninetytwo tragedies, according to others, seventy-five. Of these nineteen are extant. He died B. C 406. "Hi ĕr o cles, a Platonic philosopher of Alexandria, who wrote many facetious stories. 3. It will not easily be imagined how much Shakspeare excels in accommodating his sentiments to real life, but by comparing him with other authors. It was observed of the ancient schools of declamation, that the more diligently they were frequented, the more was the student disqualified for the world, because he found nothing there which he should ever meet in any other place. The same remark may be applied to every stage but that of Shakspeare. The theater, when it is under any other direction, is peopled by such characters as were never seen, conversing in a language which was never heard, upon topics which will never arise in the commerce of mankind. But the dialogue of this author is often so evidently determined by the incident which produces it, and is pursued with so much ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selection out of common conversation and common occurrences. 4. Upon every other stage the universal agent is love, by whose power all good and evil is distributed, and every action quickened or retarded. To bring a lover, a lady, and a rival into the fable; to entangle them in contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppositions of interest, and harass them with viölence of desires inconsistent with each other; to make them meet in rapture, and part in agony; to fill their mouths with hyperbolical' joy and outrageous sorrow; to distress them as nothing human ever was distressed; to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered; is the business of a modern drămatist. For this, probability is violated, life is misrepresented, and language is depraved. 5. But love is only one of many passions; and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him. He knew that any other passion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity. This, therefore, is the praise of Shakspeare, that his drāma is the mirror of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious ecstasies, by reading human sentiments in human language, by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the trans1 Hý`per bŏl' ic al, exaggerating or diminishing greatly. 1 actions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions. 6. Shakspeare's plays are not, in the rigorous and critical sense, either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion, and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveler is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolic of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design. 7. Shakspeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind, but in one composition. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and ludicrous characters, and, in the successive evolutions of the design, sometimes produce seriousness and sorrow, and sometimes levity and laughter. That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is alway an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poëtry is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy can not be denied, because it includes both in its alternations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by showing how great machinations' and slender designs may promote or obviäte one another, and the high and the low cooperate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation." 8. The force of his comic scenes has suffered little diminution from the changes made by a century and a half, in manners or in words. As his personages act upon principles arising from genuine passion, věry little modified by particular forms, their pleasures and vexations are communicable to all times and to all places; they are natural, and therefore durable.' The adventitious peculiarities of personal habits are only superficial dyes, bright and pleasing for a little while, yet soon fading to a dim 1 Machination, (måk`i nå' shun), the act of planning or contriving a scheme for executing some purpose, usually an evil one. 2 Con căt`e nã' tion, connection by links; a series of links united, or of things depending on each other. Dū' ra ble, lasting. 3 tinct,' without any remains of former luster; but the discriminations of true passion are the colors of nature; they pervade the whole mass, and can only perish with the body that exhibits them. The accidental compositions of heterogeneous modes are dissolved by the chance which combined them; but the uniform simplicity of primitive qualities neither admits increase, nor suffers decay. The sand heaped by one flood is scattered by another; but the rock alway continues in its place. The stream of time, which is continually washing the dis'soluble fabrics of the poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakspeare. DR. JOHNSON, B IV. 122. SCENE FROM KING RICHARD III. RAKENBURY. Why looks your grace so heavily to-day? So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams, That, as I am a Christain faithful man, I would not spend another such a night, Though 'twere to buy a world of happy days, So full of dismal terror was the time! Brak. What was your dream, my lord? I pray you tell me. Clar. Methought that I had broken from the tower, And was embarked to cross to Bur'gundy, And in my company my brother Gloster, Who from my cabin tempted me to walk Upon the hatches. Thence we looked toward England, During the wars of York and Lanc'aster, That had befallen us. As we passed along Upon the giddy footing of the hatches, O heaven! Methought what pain it was to drown! Tinct, (ing), stain; color; tinge. A thousand men, that fishes gnawed upon : All scattered in the bottom of the sea. Some lay in dead men's skulls and in those holes Clar. Methought I had; and often did I strive Brak. Awaked you not with this sore agony? I passed, methought, the melancholy flood, The first that there did greet my stranger soul SEIZE on him, furies! take him to your torments!" 1 Charon, (karon), who, according to ancient mythology, conveyed in his boat the shades of the dead across the rivers of the lower world. For this service he was paid with an obolus, a small silver coin of about three cents in value, which was |