be the fourth. King James 1, spoke in the tragedy style when be informed his parliament, that he was the husband, and Great Britain his lawful wife;-that he was the head, and she the body;-and that England and Scotland, being two kingdoms in one and the same island, he, a Christian Prince, could not be accused of committing the crime of bigamy.

The fine style, which prevailed about the middle of the sixteenth century, was merely a flimsy, pedantic canvas, embroidered with high-flown sentences, plays upon words, and Italian concetti. Elizabeth was capable of giving her poet college lessons; she spoke Latin, composed Greek epigrams, translated the tragedies of Sophocles and the orations of Demosthenes. At her gallant, formal, quintessential, and reforming court, it was the fashion to interlard English conversation with French words, and to articulate so as to leave the sound doubtful, for the purpose of producing an equivoque in the sense.

In France, the same affectation prevailed. Ronsard was in his way a sort of Shakspeare, not by his genius, not by his Greek neologism, but by the forced turn of his phraseology. The Memoirs of the learned Marguerite, or Margot, de Valois, though in other respects so charming are written in a metaphysical, sentimental

jargon, which but ill conceals very physical sensations. Half a century earlier, the sister of Francis I. had written tales, which have at least as much natural simplicity as those of Boccaccio.

The Guisiade of Pierre Mathieu, a classic tragedy with choruses, on a national subject, reproduces the phraseology of Shakspeare: for example d'Epernon exclaims :

Venez mes compagnons, monstres abominables,
Jetez sur Blois l'horreur de vos traits effroyables.
Prenez pour mains des crocs, pour yeux des dards de feu,
Pour voix un gros canon, des serpents pour cheveux ;
Changez Blois en enfer, apportez-y vos gênes,
Vos roues, vos gibets, vos feux, vos fouets, vos peines.

Coligni, in the tragedy which bears his name, is made to utter the following:

O mânes noircissants ès enfers impiteux !
O mes chers compagnons, hé que je suis honteux
Qu'un enfant ait bridé mon effroyable audace;
Que me reste-t-il, chétif, pour ondoyer ma race,
Sinon que me cacher et du vilain licol,

De mes bourrelles mains hault estraindre mon col.

I may here offer a few remarks on two writers, who have often, and very improperly, been confounded together by critics of our own time, at once vague and systematic, who jumble

together indiscriminately ages, situations, talents, and recollections.

Shakspeare and Dante wrote under very dissimilar circumstances. The English dramatist found a language, not perfect it is true, but at least three-fourths formed, and which had already been employed by distinguished writers both in poetry and prose. This language had become a sort of barbarous and mannered dialect, grotesquely adorned and overcharged with foreign fashions. It may easily be imagined how much Shakspeare must have been annoyed when, in the midst of a vivid conception, he found himself obliged to introduce into his inspired language some affected foreign word. Conceive the colossus, thus obliged to force his feet into little Chinese slippers, struggling against impediments which he burst through like a lion breaking his chains.

Dante, who lived two centuries and a half before Shakspeare, entered upon a world in which he found nothing. The last remnants of the Roman society had expired, and had left behind a language, beautiful it is true, but ofa dying beauty -a language unavailable for the purposes of common life, because it no longer expressed the character, the ideas, the manners, and the wants of the society which had newly sprung up. The

necessity of intelligible communication had given birth to a vulgar idiom, which was employed on both sides of the southern Alps, and on two declivities of the eastern Pyrenees. Dante adopted this bastard of Rome, whom the learned and the noble disdained to recognize. He found it wandering in the streets of Florence, fostered at hazard by a republican people, in plebeian and democratic rudeness. He communicated to the child of his choice his own manliness, his simplicity, his independence, his dignity, his melancholy, his holy sublimity, and his wild grace. Dante drew from nothing the interpreter of his talent; he gave being to the language of his genius; he himself constructed the lyre from which he drew forth his melodious strains, like those astronomers who invent instruments with which they measure the heavens. Italian and the Divina Commedia sprang at once from his brain. The illustrious exile simultaneously conferred on the human race a durable language and an immortal poem.

MECHANISM OF THE ENGLISH STAGE IN THE SIXTEENTH

CENTURY.

In the dramatic performances of Shakspeare's time, the female characters were represented by young men ; and the actors were not distinguished from the spectators except by the plumes of feathers which adorned their hats, and the bows of ribbon which they wore in their shoes. There was no music between the acts. The place of performance was frequently the court-yard of an inn, and the windows which looked into this court-yard served for the boxes. On the representation of a tragedy in London, the place in which it was performed was hung with black, like the nave of a church at a funeral.

As to the means of illusion, some idea may be formed of them from the burlesque picture drawn by Shakspeare in the "Midsummer Night's Dream." A man, having his face smeared with plaster, is the wall which intervenes between Pyramus and Thisbe, and he spreads out