inform him of the conditions on which Angelo will spare his life.

"CLAUDIO.
ISABELLA.

Let me know the point.

O, I do fear thee, Claudio: and I quake,
Lest thou a feverous life should'st entertain,
And six or seven winters more respect
Than a perpetual honor. Dar'st thou die?
The sense of death is most in apprehension;
And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.

CLAUDIO. Why give you me this shame ?
Think you I can a resolution fetch

From flowery tenderness; if I must die,

I will encounter darkness as a bride,

And hug it in mine arms.

ISABELLA. There spake my brother! there my father's grave Did utter forth a voice! Yes, thou must die:

Thou art too noble to conserve a life

In base appliances. This outward-sainted deputy

Whose settled visage and deliberate word

Nips youth i' the head, and follies doth emmew,
As falcon doth the fowl-is yet a devil.

CLAUDIO. The princely Angelo ?

ISABELLA. Oh, 'tis the cunning livery of hell,

The damned'st body to invest and cover
In princely guards! Dost thou think, Claudio,
If I would yield him iny virginity,

Thou might'st be freed?

CLAUDIO. Oh heavens! it cannot be.

ISABELLA. Yes, he would give it thee, for this rank offence,

So to offend him still: this night's the time

That I should do what I abhor to name,

Or else thou dy'st to morrow.

CLAUDIO. Thou shalt not do 't.

ISABELLA. Oh, were it but my life,

I'd throw it down for your deliverance
As frankly as a pin.

CLAUDIO. Thanks, dear Isabel.

ISABELLA Be ready, Claudio, for your death to-morrow

CLAUDIO. Yes. Has he affections in him,

That thus can make him bite the law by the nose?

When he would force it, sure it is no sin;

Or of the deadly seven it is the least.

ISABELLA. Which is the least?

CLAUDIO. If it were damnable, he, being so wise,
Why would he for the momentary trick

Be perdurably fin'd? Oh, Isabel !

ISABELLA. What says my brother?

CLAUDIO. Death is a fearful thing.

ISABELLA. And shamed life a hateful.

CLAUDIO. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling!-'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life,
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear of death.

ISABELLA. Alas! alas!

CLAUDIO. Sweet sister, let me live.
What sin you do to save a brother's life,
Nature dispenses with the deed so far,

That it becomes a virtue."

What adds to the dramatic beauty of this scene and the effect of Claudio's passionate attachment to life is, that it immediately follows the Duke's lecture to him, in the character of the Friar, recommending an absolute indifference to it.

"Reason thus with life,

If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing

That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences

That do this habitation, where thou keep'st,

Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool;

For him thou labor'st by thy flight to shun,

And yet run'st toward him still; thou art not noble;

For all the accommodations, that thou bear'st,

Are nurs'd by baseness: thou art by no means valiant;

For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork

Of a poor worm: thy best of rest is sleep,

And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st

Thou art not thyself:

Thy death, which is no more.
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains

That issue out of dust: happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get;
And what thou hast, forget'st; thou art not certain;
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,
After the moon; if thou art rich, thou art poor;
For, like an ass, whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee: friend thou hast none;
For thy own bowels which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,

Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,

For ending thee no sooner: thou hast nor youth, nor age;
But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,

Dreaming on both for all thy blessed youth,
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms

Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this,
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even."

THE

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR is no doubt a very amusing play, with a great deal of humor, character, and nature in it; but we should have liked it much better, if any one else had been the hero of it, instead of Falstaff. We could have been contented if Shakspeare had not been "commanded to show the knight in love." Wits and philosophers, for the most part, do not shine in that character; and Sir John himself, by no means, comes off with flying colors. Many people complain of the degradation and insults to which Don Quixote is so frequently exposed in his various adventures. But what are the unconscious indignities which he suffers, compared with the sensible mortifications which Falstaff is made to bring upon himself? What are the blows and buffetings which the Don receives from the staves of Yanguesian carriers, or from Sancho Panza's more hard-hearted hands, compared with the contamination of the buck-basket, the disguise of the fat woman of Brentford, and the horns of Herne the hunter, which are discovered on Sir John's head? In reading the play, we indeed wish him well through all these discomfitures, but it would have been as well if he had not got into them. Falstaff, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, is not the man he was in the two parts of Henry IV. His wit and eloquence have left him. Instead of making a butt of others, he is made a butt of by them. Neither is there a single particle of love in him to excuse his follies; he is merely a designing, bare-faced knave, and an unsuccessful one. The scene with Ford as Master Brook, and that with Simple, Slender's man,

who comes to ask after the Wise Woman, are almost the only ones in which his old intellectual ascendency appears. He is like a person recalled to the stage to perform an unaccustomed and ungracious part; and in which we perceive only “some faint sparks of those flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the hearers in a roar." But the single scene with Doll Tearsheet, or Mrs. Quickly's account of his desiring "to eat some of housewife Keach's prawns," and telling her "to be no more so familiarity with such people," is worth the whole of THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR put together. Ford's jealousy, which is the mainspring of the comic incidents, is certainly very well managed. Page, on the contrary, appears to be somewhat uxorious in his disposition; and we have pretty plain indication of the effect of the characters of the husbands on the different degrees of fidelity in their wives. Mrs. Quickly makes a very lively go-between, both between Falstaff and his Dulcineas, and Anne Page and her lovers, and seems in the latter case so intent on her own interest as totally to overlook the intentions of her employers. Her master, Doctor Caius, the Frenchman, and her fellow-servant, Jack Rugby, are very completely described. This last-mentioned person is rather quaintly commended by Mrs. Quickly, as "an honest, willing, kind fellow, as ever servant shall come in house withal, and I warrant you, no telltale, nor no breed-bate; his worst fault is that he is given to prayer; he is something peevish that way; but nobody but has his fault." The Welsh Parson, Sir Hugh Evans (a title which in those days was given to the clergy), is an excellent character in all respects. He is as respectable as he is laughable. He has " very good discretions and very odd humors." The duelscene with Caius gives him an opportunity to show his "cholers and his tremblings of mind," his valor and his melancholy, in an irresistible manner. In the dialogue, which at his mother's request he holds with his pupil, William Page, to show his progress in learning, it is hard to say whether the simplicity of the master or the scholar is the greatest. Nym, Bardolph, and Pistol, are but the shadows of what they were; and Justice Shallow himself has little of his consequence left. But his cousin, Slender, makes up for the deficiency. He is a very potent piece