father, in the rebellion of kindred blood in the bosom of the family; we find here also in Lear and Cymbeline the pure contrast of unshaken fidelity set before us in the child, the subject, the servant, and the wife. In Troilus the same theme is continued in the faithlessness of Cressida and the leaguebreaking of the Greeks. In Antony, the faithless rupture of old and newly formed political, friendly, and nuptial ties, in order to keep faith with an unworthy paramour, is represented as the catastrophe in the fate of the hero. Coriolanus' defection from his country, falls more remotely under the same category. On the other hand, the subjects of Timon and the Tempest, the disgraceful ingratitude and the faithless alienation of the false friends in the one, and the usurpation of brother against brother in the other, rank entirely under this head.

Whether the striking constant recurrence of the poet to such instances of injured confidence, broken obligations, evident ingratitude, and breach of natural ties, can be accounted for by any personal and sorrowful experiences which would at once explain why he dwelt more on these dark pictures, than on the opposite bright ones of fidelity, — this, unfortunately we do not know; nay, that which in Shakespeare's life might have perhaps corresponded with his inclination to the tragic, we should hardly be able to guess, if from outward facts, and from probable grounds and causes we were to trace his more serious, more gloomy frame of mind. We have heard from his sonnets, that at the zenith of his friendship with that favourite youth, some adverse fate befel him, which cast him into affliction and melancholy. This unhappiness which overtook him, we can refer to nothing unless it be to the death of his son Hamlet in the

year 1596. A heavy blow also to his heart was indisputably the rebellion of the Earl of Essex in the year 1601, in which Southampton was involved; as well as the conspiracy in 1603, which cost the lives of Watson and Clarke. Essex was beheaded in February 1601; Southampton remained in confinement during the reign of Elizabeth; in 1603, began the lengthy imprisonment of the famous Raleigh, who certainly stood high in Shakespeare's esteem, if not in closer relation to him. It is possible enough, that Julius Cæsar was written just about 1601 or 1602, not without reference to these conspirators and independent spirits. We have seen from the prologue to Henry V., what a sympathizing delight Shakespeare manifested in Essex, and still later in Macbeth; Steevens has conjectured, that in the account of the death of the Thane of Cawdor he had in view the behaviour of the Earl at his execution. Much importance cannot, however, be placed on these allusions; those misfortunes too do not appear sufficient to call forth such an important change in the tone of his life, as is to be found in Shakespeare's works after the year 1600. Much more essential to the explanation of this change must be those inner experiences of the poet, amid which he had even earlier confessed himself to his friend as refined and purified in a transformation of his nature. The hour seemed to have come to him also, as he had so often represented it in his humorous characters, in which he renounced the frivolous. practices of the world; age advanced upon him, he acquired an extended knowledge of history and an increasing experience of life, which dispose no men with any depth of character and cultivation to be more merry, frivolous, and shallow as years go on. If we take into account his aversion

to his profession, and the impression which the degeneracy of stage-poetry may have made upon him, the crudeness of the age so repugnant to him in many of its features, the capricious and not rarely bloody arbitrariness of the government, we have motives sufficient to incite the poet to descend still deeper into the recesses of human nature, to roll back the page of history further than he had hitherto done, to search after passions of still greater force in the traditions of the past, and to trace still deeper furrows on the brow from the more profound contemplation of the world and of humanity. It is however striking, that the very play, the hero of which bears the name of Shakespeare's deceased son, may be regarded as a vehicle for the elegiac humour of the poet. Hamlet is the only piece of this later period, in which one might conjecture a pathological interest on the part of the poet; we might perceive, that he had treated the hero as a counterpart to Prince Henry, and in both together we might feel that Shakespeare displayed the various points of his own nature in greater fulness, than had been possible in one alone. In one of the sonnets the melancholy feature in Hamlet's character is so prefigured, that one is tempted to believe that the plan of this poem was projected by Shakespeare since the period in which "the world was bent to cross his deeds". We may call to mind in Hamlet's famous soliloquy, the motives which led him to draw the idea of self-murder from the consideration of the course of this world, the weariness at the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the pangs of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns of merit, and we shall read a similar soliloquy in the 66th sonnet, which the poet addressed like all

the others to his friend. But if the reader takes for granted this correspondence between this personal poem and the drama alluded to, he must beware of inferring from this that a hypochondriacal state of mind attacked Shakespeare' in his later years, making him regard the world and its course with a darkened vision, and suggesting to him the gloomy and dismal pictures of his tragedies, as somewhat far removed from his former nature. We utter this warning, because even here, our Romanticists have sought to mislead us on a false track. William Schlegel called Hamlet a "tragedy of thought", suggested by constant and neversatisfied reflections on human destiny, on the sad complexity of the events of this world. This view was embraced by Frederic Schlegel in his history of literature, and he unfolded it further: he perceived in Shakespeare a nature deeply sensitive, and austerely tragic, a disposition isolated, reserved, and solitary, and this in the poet, whom these very Romanticists could not admire enough for his wit and mirth, in the man who, in the great market of life was the judge

Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry;

As, to behold desert, a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captive ill:
Tir'd with all these, from these would I begone,

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

and agent in all matters and in every kind of intercourse. These critics impute their own confusion and bluntness to the powerful nature, whose measure is so far beyond them. Even in Hamlet, Shakespeare has delineated with such objective acuteness this weary depression and unsatisfied frame of mind, this too-close search into the gloomy side of life, and he stands himself in such clear and distinct light above this mental disorder, that this very play must be regarded as a triumph, in which he must have overcome his vein of melancholy, if any such existed within him. If such a gloomy elegiac mood had lastingly governed him, he would not possibly have written the merriest of his comedies almost at the same time with Hamlet, nor have continually inserted in his serious tragedies the most comic scenes full of unclouded humour. And in his latest tragedies, in Macbeth and Lear, let no one imagine that what he depicted there of austerity and cruelty, was less known and experienced by the poet than we experience it; it was his intention to exhibit harsh and violent subjects, and his tenderness of feeling in the midst of these pieces ever lies close by the side of the severity which the subject required. If any one believes Shakespeare to have been sunk in melancholy during this latter period of his life, and sees him dwell with satisfaction upon the gloomy pictures of his tragedies, we will alone draw his attention to Cymbeline, where the poet has really taken for theme and subject the complexity of the affairs of this world, their apparent contradictions, discords, and injustice, and where he resolves them into a harmony which utterly excludes from his heart every idea of shallow discontent, of weak disgust of the world, and of a harassed spirit.