reconcile to our judgments the suggestions of

self-love.

The management of Beatrice is equally happy. She loved, because she thought that another loved her, - a beautiful illustration of a general truth: she was a generous feeling woman, and needed no cold sophistry to satisfy the pride of intellect, before she yielded up her heart.

Shakspeare has been deservedly praised for his skill in overcoming the difficulties that still interposed between the union of Benedick and Beatrice. Delay was impossible; the story of Benedick's love being a fable, great care was necessary to prevent Beatrice from discovering the deception practised on her; a discovery which would have altogether defeated the design of bringing her and Benedick together, for Beatrice never could have condescended to own a passion she had been tricked into. Shakspeare, therefore, combines in her mind, a desire of revenge on Claudio with her new feelings for Benedick. In the most natural way possible, she engages her lover to call Claudio to account for the injury done her cousin; and she is thus at once compelled to drop her capricious humour, and treat Benedick with the confidence and candour his service merited.

Benedick and Beatrice are the pure and beautiful productions of Shakspeare's imagination. He first conceived and gave a faint sketch of their characters in Love's Labour's Lost. In Much Ado About Nothing, they are expanded into finished portraits, and launched into a new scene of action of which he himself was the entire inventor. It is not often that Shakspeare appears as the constructor of his dramatic incidents. The plot on the two marriage haters is ingeniously conceived and executed; and the characters of the parties being as similar as is consistent with the difference of sex, the practice of the same mode of deception on each of them is highly natural and humorous.

NOTES.

NOTE A.

MR. Luder, in his Essay on the Character of Henry, is eminently successful in exposing the exaggeration with which successive historians have adorned their portraits of the prince. But, in truth, after stripping the tale of all its meretricious colouring, enough remains in the report of Elmham, Henry's original biographer, to justify the idea of his having been a Corinthian of the highest order" He was much given to lasciviousness, and very fond of musical instruments. Passing the bounds of modesty, and burning with the fire of youth, he was eager in the pursuit of Venus as of Mars. When not engaged in military exercises, he also indulged in other excesses which unrestrained youth is apt to fall into." The truth of this picture cannot be shaken by the omission of some circumstances in Henry's life which Elmham ought to have recorded, or by the misrepresentation of others on which he should have been informed more correctly. Such failings are common to all historians; but Elmham, the contemporary of Henry and his father, and who survived both, could

not erroneously have made an allegation against the prince of excessive and habitual indulgence in the vices of youth. At the same time, I perfectly agree with Mr. Luder, that if, in the spring of life," the feathers of the prince's crest played wantonly over his brow, we are not obliged to add ungracefully." But I cannot acquiesce in the opinion, that the historians borrowed from the theatre the idea that the prince's associates were low and degrading. Shakspeare's influence over the historians is entirely out of the question, for he wrote his play after Holinshed and Stowe's works were published. In the supposition that the mischief was produced by "The Famous Victories," the fact is assumed that it was in existence previous to 1573, when Holinshed's Chronicle was printed. Of this there is no proof, and the probabilities appear to me against it. The old play is proved to have existed in 1588; because Tarlton the actor, who was much admired in the clown's part, died in that year. But its date must be carried at least fifteen years higher, before it will yield any support to the hypothesis of Mr. Luder. Internal evidence there is none; conjecture is as available on one side as the other; and the same objection may, perhaps, be urged against the opinion that the probability is greater of the dramatists having copied from the historians, than the historians from the dramatists.

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