zons of ancient Greece, with the fictions of the middle age, blended by the poet in the same piece. It is yet more singular, perhaps, to see a celebrated poet of the eighteenth century imitate, learnedly and by design, this strange amalgamation, which was in Shakspeare only the effect of ignorance, or the sport of careless caprice. Let us praise a man of genius from the love of truth, and not of system, We shall then find that, if Shakspeare often violates local and historic truth; if he throws over almost all his productions the uniform hardness of the manners of his own times; he also expresses with admirable energy the ruling passions of the human heart, hatred, ambition, jealousy, the love of life, pity, and cruelty..

He does not less powerfully excite the superstitious feelings of the soul. Like the first poets of Greece, he has laid open the catalogue of physical evils, and has exposed on the stage the anguish of suffering, the very dregs of misery, the last and most frightful of human infirmities, insanity. What, in fact, can be more tragic than this apparent death of the soul, which degrades a noble being without destroying it? Shakspeare has often used these means of exciting terror, and, by a singular combination, he has represented feigned as often as real madness; finally, he has contrived to blend both in the extraordinary character of Hamlet, and to join together the light of reason, the cunning of intentional error, and the involuntary disorder of the soul.

If he has shown madness springing from despair; if he has united this image to the most poignant of all sorrows, the ingratitude of children; by a view not less profound, he has often connected crime with madness, as if the soul was alienated from itself in proportion as it became guilty. The terrible dreams of Richard III.; his sleep agitated with the convulsions of remorse; the still more frightful sleep of Lady Macbeth, or rather the phenomenon of her mysterious watching, as much out of nature as her crime;-all these inventions form the sublime of tragic horror, and surpass the Eumenides of Eschylus.

We may remark more than one other resemblance between the English and the old Greek poet, who knew not more of, or who respected as little, the severe law of the unities. Poetical daring is, besides, a character which strikes us not less in Shakspeare than in Eschylus: it exhibits, though under forms less polished, the same vivacity, the same intemperance of metaphor and figurative expression, the same dazzling and sublime fervor of imagination; but the incoherences of a society scarcely emerged from barbarism, constantly mingle in Shakspeare coarseness with grandeur, and we fall from the clouds into the mire. It is more particularly for his pieces of invention that the English poet has reserved that richness of colouring which seems to be natural to him. His historical pieces are more chaste, more simple, especially where the subjects are of modern

date; for when he places antiquity on the scene, he has not unfrequently overcharged both its national and individual character.

The reproach which Fenelon cast upon our theatre, of having given too much energy to the Romans, will apply yet more strongly to the Julius Cæsar of the English poet. Cæsar, so simple even from the elevation of his genius, scarcely ever speaks in this tragedy but in a pompous and declamatory style. But, as if to recompense us for this, what admirable truth and correctness in the part of Brutus! Does he not appear such as Plutarch represents him, the mildest of men in private life, and led by virtue alone to bold and bloody resolutions? Antony and Cassius are not represented with traits less profound and less distinct. I imagine that the genius of Plutarch had strongly possessed Shakspeare, and had placed before his eyes that reality which, for the purposes of modern times, Shakspeare took from all around him.

But a thing altogether new, altogether his own production, is the incomparable scene of Antony stirring up the Roman people to insurrection by the artifice of his language: there you behold the emotions of the populace at this harangue, those emotions always expressed in a manner so cold, so imperfect, so timid in our modern pieces, and which there are so lively and so true to nature, that they form an important part of the drama, and lead essentially towards the catastrophe.

The tragedy of Coriolanus is not less a faithful transcript from truth, nor less indebted to Plutarch. The haughty character of the hero, his pride as a patrician and a warrior, his disgust at the popular insolence, his hatred against Rome, his love for his mother, render him altogether the most dramatic personage in history.

There are some unworthy buffooneries in the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra; but the moroseness of tarnished glory, that delirium of debauchery and prosperity, that fatalism of vice which blindly precipitates itself on ruin,-these assume a sort of grandeur from the force of truth. Cleopatra is certainly not a princess of our theatres any more than of history; but she is truly the Cleopatra of Plutarch, that prostitute of the East running disguised in Alexandria by night, carried to her lover on the shoulders of a slave, the fool of voluptuousness and drunkenness, yet knowing how to die with so much ease and courage.

The historical plays of Shakspeare upon national subjects are yet more true to nature; for never writer, as we have already observed, was more completely identified with his country. It is probable, however, that some of these pieces are not entirely the composition of Shakspeare, and were only vivified, as it were, by his powerful hand; like those great works of painting, where the master has thrown the most brilliant and vigorous touches over the labour of inferior artists, reserving only for himself those strokes of genius which give life and animation to the design.

Thus, in the first part of Henry VI., shines forth the incomparable scene of Talbot and his son, refusing to quit each other, and determined to perish together; a scene as simple as it is sublime, where the grandeur of the sentiment, and the vigorous conciseness of the language, rival the purest and most beautiful passages of our Corneille. But to this scene, of which the grandeur altogether consists in the elevation of the sentiments, succeeds one of great activity, such as the licence of the English theatre alone permits; and the various fortunes of an engagement multiply under every form, the heroism of father and son, alternately rescued by each other, re-united, separated, and at length slain on the same field of battle. Nothing can surpass the vehemence and the patriotic beauty of this spectacle. The French reader alone suffers from seeing the character of Joan of Arc unworthily travestied by the gross prejudice of the poet. But this is one of those faults which form a part of the nationality of Shakspeare, and only rendered him more dear to his contemporaries."

In the second part of Henry VI., some traits of a kind not less elevated mix themselves with the tumultuous variety of the drama. Such is the terrible scene where the ambitious Cardinal Beau

The First Part of Henry VI., though not totally devoid of beautiful passages, is written throughout, both as to style and versification, in a manner so completely the reverse of what we find in the genuine plays of Shakspeare, as at once to strip it of all claim to be considered as his. These discrepances, it must be recollected, are not very perceptible to a foreigner..