ness there is in the use of that word "thrilling!" But I shrink alike from picking this marvellous conception to pieces and from thrusting myself between my readers and their spontaneous admiration of Shakespeare. Yet it should be said about the last two lines of this passage, if it never have been said,—and I believe it never has,-that they possess an awful beauty which it is hardly in the power of language to describe. The idea seems to be but vaguely hinted; and yet an undefined, peculiar dread goes with the words, that would vanish, or dwindle into certain fear, if we were told exactly what they mean. We feel that they have conveyed that to us which they themselves tell us is too horrible for utterance. What can be those monstrous thoughts which ever seem to be about to take on hideous shape, and ever again vanish into formlessness, leaving the tortured spirit howling with rage and horror at it knows not what, save that it is the dim phantasmagoria of the hell it ever bears within itself? What are those thoughts? We must first be damned eternally ere we can know. And yet Shakespeare in half a dozen words has made us feel what they must be.

I do not hesitate to say that there are not other ten such lines as these in the whole range of poetry, except in Eliphaz' relation of his vision, in the book of Job.

"In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men,

"Fear came upon me and trembling, which made all my bones to shake.

"Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh. stood up:

"It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof: an image before mine eyes: silence and I heard a voice,

"Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his Maker ?" Chap. IV.

Measure for Measure, though it delights not Mr. Hunter, or Mr. Knight, or yet Coleridge, can only lose by comparison with the greatest poem ever written; and Shakespeare can well afford to find an intellectual rival in a dramatic poet whose work had reached immortal age while yet the Pyramids were young.

ACT I. SCENE 1.

"Duke. Of government the properties to unfold,
Would seem in me to affect speech and discourse;
Since I am put to know, that your own science
Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice

My strength can give you: Then no more remains
But that to your sufficiency, as your worth is able,
And let them work."

The last two lines are universally allowed to be incomprehensible as they stand in the original; and none of the many attempts to alter or explain them have seemed to satisfy even those of whose ingenuity they were the fruit. In such extremity, it would be arrogant to claim to have done that which so many able critics and editors have failed to do; but I make the passage plain for my own reading by a change in only one point and one letter; thereby correcting two trifling errors, which seem to me to be such as might easily have been made. I put a colon after 'remains,' change B for P, as Rowe did, and read,

-"your own science

Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice

My strength can give you: then no more remains :

Put that to your sufficiency, as your worth is able,
And let them work."

"Sufficiency" is obviously the plenary power delegated to Escalus and Angelo; and, if a paraphrase of this reading be needed, it is this:-Your own knowledge of the proper

ties of government exceeds the extent of any information which I can give you then no more remains to be considered: put that [i. e., your knowledge of government] to the ample powers delegated to you, as your individual worth of character is all sufficient, and let them work.

But there is yet another method of making the passage plain and the line musical, which does the least possible violence to the original text, and which I do not remember to have seen suggested. The mistake of 'able' for added' is one which might easily be made by a careless compositor in setting indistinct manuscript; and 'able ' once in the compositor's mind, as,' the word which destroys the rhythm of the line, would naturally suggest itself, and be inserted in the text to make an approximation to sense. It is not improbable, at least, that the passage was written,

"Then no more remains,

But that to your sufficiency your worth is added,

And let them work.'

In this reading "sufficiency" refers, of course, to the capacity of Escalus, which is spoken of by the Duke in the immediately preceding sentence; and the emphatic word is "but," and not "that," which, a pronoun in the previous reading, becomes, in this, a conjunctive particle. This acceptation of "sufficiency," which is contended for by many commentators, whatever may be the reading, is made the more apposite, and this reading the more probable and plausible, by the phraseology of the Duke, who, after saying to Escalus, your knowledge of government exceeds my own,' adds, 'then [i. e., therefore] no more remains, but that to your sufficiency [i. e., your intellectual capacity and knowledge of the science of government to which I have just alluded] your worth [i. e., your moral fitness] is added, and let them work.'

Apropos to the subject,-tell it in Gath and publish it in Ascalon, that Malone, even Edmund Malone, in commenting upon this passage, has the following note:

"And let them work,'-a figurative expression, 'let them ferment"!!!

This is the cap-sheaf of annotation in the post-' Augustan age' of English literature. Words fail us, and we are driven to the use of mere dumb signs of astonishment, incredulity and ridicule.

SCENE 2.

"Lucio. If the duke, with the other dukes, come not to composition with the King of Hungary, why then all the dukes fall upon the King. "1 Gentleman. Heaven grant us its peace, but not the King of Hungary's."

The period of the action of this play has been regarded, as far as my knowledge of editions and commentaries goes, as altogether indeterminable. The editors seem to have abandoned the attempt to ascertain it in hopeless despair. The learned Mr. Collier says nothing about it, and Mr. Knight, in his note upon the costume of the play, in his Pictorial Edition, remarks:

"With the exception, perhaps, of the Winter's Tale, no play of Shakspere's is so utterly destitute of any 'loop or hinge to hang an' appropriate costume upon as Measure for Measure. The scene is laid in Vienna, of which city there never was a duke; and in the whole of the list of persons represented there is not one German name. Vincentio, Angelo, Escalus, Claudio, Lucio, Isabella, Juliet, Francisca, Mariana, all smack of Italy; and it has therefore been questioned by some whether or not we should read "Sienna" for "Vienna." There does not appear, however, to be any authority for supposing the scene of action to have been

altered either theatrically or typographically, and, consequently, we must leave the artist to the indulgence of his own fancy, with the suggestion merely that the Viennese costume of the time of Shakspere must be sought for amongst the national monuments of the reign of the Emperor Rudolph II., A. D. 1576--1612." Pictorial Shakspere, Vol. II. p. 273.

If we did not know whence Shakespeare took the plot of Measure for Measure, if the passage just quoted from the second scene of the play did not occur in it, and if there were no historical records of Hungary and the German Empire, I could understand this perplexity; but as the case stands, it seems that the question may be settled by investigation.

The plot of the play is taken from the Promos and Cassandra of George Whetstone, a tale published in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses, in 1582, and republished by Mr. Collier in his Shakespeare's Library. The argument or plot of this story, as given by Whetstone himself, which is printed in almost every critical edition of Shakespeare's Works, begins, "In the Cyttie of Julio (sometimes under the dominion of Corvinus King of Hungary and Bohemia) there was a law," &c. The tale itself commences thus:

"At what time Corvinus, the scourge of the Turkes, rayned as Kinge of Bohemia, for to well governe the free cities of his realme, he sent divers worthy majestrates," &c.

Shakespeare, with his usual tact in adapting his plays to the understanding of his audience, changed the unknown city, Julio, for Vienna, a place, the name and importance of which was almost or quite as well known to Englishmen of that day as of this; with the place, he also changed, of course, the prince whose delegated authority was abused. But he scrupulously retained the costume and all the traits,