Massinger to that of Shakespeare. It is more uniformly smooth, correct, and regular. But it has nothing of the freedom, the variety and expression that characterize the voice of

"Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,

Warbling his native wood-notes wild."

I wish not to underrate the real merit of Massinger's versification. The march of his verse is noble and majestic, and his diction is singularly pure and perspicuous. The latter has quite a modern air, though written two hundred years ago. Perhaps both his metre and his diction are preferable to those of Jonson; but in neither respect does he equal Shakespeare. For though Massinger's language and metre have fewer faults, they have also incomparably fewer beauties, and the beauties very rarely indeed compete with those of the Prince of Dramatic Poets. They have not the same irresistible enchantment. The anticipated tones of Massinger always satisfy, but never surprize or ravish us. But the wild music of Shakespeare is like that of the Æolian harp touched by the wandering breeze. It reminds us of the music of the genius, who, in the habit of a shepherd, appeared before Mirza on the hills of Bagdad. He had a little musical instrument in his hand. As Mirza looked towards him, the genius applied it to

his lips, and began to play upon it. "The sound of it," says

'Mirza, "was exceeding sweet, and wrought into a variety of tunes that were inexpressibly melodious, and altogether different from any thing I had ever heard." We may describe the enchanting melody ́of Shakespeare's softer passages in his own delightful words.

"O it comes o'er the ear, like the sweet South
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour."

Coleridge once remarked, that he thought he might possibly catch the tone and diction of Milton, but that Shakespeare was absolutely inimitable. This was a very just and discriminating observation. We need be under no apprehension that the music

of Shakespeare will ever pall upon the ear in consequence of its frequent repetition by a servile flock of mocking birds. It will never be said of him, as it was said of Pope, that he

"Made poetry a mere mechanic art,

And every warbler had his tune by heart."

The only superiority to Shakespeare that can be discovered in Massinger, is in the greater general clearness and more sustained dignity of his language, and in the judicious abstinence from those puns and quibbles which so unhappily deform the pages of a writer who would otherwise be almost too perfect for humanity.

"Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see,

Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be."

The texture of Shakespeare's composition is often most vexatiously involved, and many of his passages are riddles still unsolved by the most patient and clear-headed of his commentators. These are his weightiest sins, and every school-boy can point them out for reprobation; but, as it is hardly necessary to observe, they are redeemed by a galaxy of beauties that may be sought in vain in any other region of the world of literature.

Massinger has comparatively few of those fine and unaffected strokes of nature, for which Shakespeare is so remarkable. The "What man! ne'er pull your hat upon your brows," addressed to Macduff when he receives the afflicting intelligence of the destruction of his family, and endeavours to suppress and conceal his agony; the single exclamation, "Ah!" in Othello, when a lightning-flash of jealousy first breaks upon the Moor's tempestuous soul;-his “Not a jot, not a jot," when Iago observes that he is moved;-the "Pray you undo this button," of Lear when his heart swells almost to bursting ;-and a thousand other simple but most expressive touches of a similar kind, are amongst the truly characteristic excellencies of Shakespeare and are never to be found in the stately lines of Massinger. But yet, if we

compare Massinger with the Dramatic writers of the present day, in whom shall we find his equal? The golden age of the Drama has passed away. Our present poets can paint the moods of their own minds and can write dramatic poems, but not plays. Their mirrors reflect themselves alone. They do not hold them up to nature and give the very age and body of the time, its form and pressure.

In reviewing the characters in this play, one cannot help wondering that Gifford, notwithstanding his narrow views in criticism, should not have seen the immeasurable inferiority of Massinger to Shakespeare in all the higher attributes of genius. But the critic appears to have been so taken up with the regularity of Massinger's plots, the accuracy of his metre and the purity of his diction, that he overlooked every consideration of a weightier and nobler nature, If in Shakespeare there are greater faults of style, there are far fewer errors of delineation, and in the highest sense of the word, he was a more correct writer than either Massinger himself, or the learned and laborious Jonson. The faults of Shakespeare are errors of taste, and not defects of genius. Where the heart is to be touched or the imagination kindled, he rarely fails. Massinger had an intellect of great force; but, like Dryden, he had no power over the pathetic. Even his great eloquence, his most characteristic merit, is the eloquence of the mind, and not the heart.

It was more than once urged against Shakespeare by his competitors as a weighty objection, that "nature was all his art." It would have served these writers justly if he had retorted that art was all their nature. And, if rightly qualified, there would have been considerable truth in the criticism on both sides.

AN ADDRESS TO SLEEP.

OH! gentle Sleep!

Bring thy most soothing dream

To calm my spirit now;

And thy soft tresses steep

In Lethe's silent stream

To lave my burning brow!

Oh! faithless maid!

To fly when grief appears,

And the fevered form is laid

On a bed bedew'd with tears!

Alas! in happier hours,

When Peace, thy bridal-maid,

Hath led thee to the secret shade,
Where verdant boughs were twined

O'er gorgeous summer flowers,
Thou wert not so unkind!

Farewell! a brief farewell!

Relenting Fate is nigh,

For swiftly speeds the welcome night, When Death, with unresisted might, Shall make thee haunt the silent cell

Where this worn frame shall lie!

ON THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE OF INDIA THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

SOME of the admirers of Orientalism have battled with more ability than success in favor of the vernacular, in preference to the English language, as a means of communicating the literature and science of the West to the people of India. They venture to compare it with the Latin and the English, and even roundly assert that the Bengali is quite as rich and expressive as either of those languages. It is added that all the subtle distinctions of metaphysics may be taught in Bengali quite as well as in English. How a language which has scarcely any literature at all can be compared for copiousness, flexibility and precision, to a language that has been cultivated for ages by the greatest poets, orators, and philosophers which the world has known, is a riddle that it would be difficult to solve. Bengali compared to English is as lax and meagre, as are almost all other ancient languages compared with Greek. "The obstacles," says Sir James Mackintosh, (in the introduction to his View of the Progress of Ethical Philosophy,) "which stood in the way of Lucretius and Cicero, when they began to translate the subtle philosophy of Greece into their narrow and barren tongue, are always felt by the philosopher, when he struggles to express, with the necessary discrimination, his abstruse reasoning in words which, though those of his own language, he must take from the mouths of persons to whom his distinctions would be without a meaning." If the Latin compared with the Greek is a narrow and barren