and tiresome; the mind sinks into a state of aching torpidity; and we feel as if we should never get to the end of our eternal journey. What a contrast to a journey among mountains and valleys, spotted with herds of various kinds of cattle, interspersed with villages, opening ever and anon to a view of the distant ocean, and refreshed with rivulets and streams; where if the eye is ever fatigued, it is with the boundless flood of beauty which is incessantly pouring upon it! Such is the tragedy of Shakespeare.

"The great beauty of this play, as of all the genuine writings of Shakespeare, beyond all didactic morality, beyond all mere flights of fancy, and beyond all sublime,a beauty entirely his own, and in which no writer ancient or modern can enter into competition with him,—is that his men are men; his sentiments are living, and his characters marked with those delicate, evanescent, undefinable touches, which identify them with the great delineation of nature. The speech of Ulysses in Act III, sc. iii, when taken by itself is purely an exquisite specimen of didactic morality; but when combined with the explanation given by Ulysses, before the entrance of Achilles, of the nature of his design, it becomes an attribute of a real man, and starts into life.

"When we compare the plausible and seemingly affectionate manner in which Ulysses addresses himself to Achilles, with the key which he here furnishes to his meaning, and especially with the epithet 'derision,' we have a perfect elucidation of his character, and must allow that it is impossible to exhibit the crafty and smooth-tongued politician in a more exact or animated style. The advice given by Ulysses is in its nature sound and excellent, and in its form inoffensive and kind; the name therefore of 'derision,' which he gives to it, marks to a wonderful degree the cold and self-centered subtlety of his character.

"The whole catalogue of the Dramatis Persona in the play of Troilus and Cressida, so far as they depend upon a rich and original vein of humor in the author, are drawn with a felicity which never was surpassed. The genius of

Homer has been a topic of admiration to almost every generation of men since the period in which he wrote. But his characters will not bear the slightest comparison with the delineation of the same characters as they stand in Shakespeare. This is a species of honor which ought by no means to be forgotten when we are making the eulogium of our immortal bard, a sort of illustration of his greatness which cannot fail to place it in a very conspicuous light. The dispositions of men perhaps had not been sufficiently unfolded in the very early period of intellectual refinement when Homer wrote; the rays of humor had not been dissected by the glass, or rendered perdurable by the rays of the Poet. Homer's chracters are drawn with a laudable portion of variety and consistency; but his Achilles, his Ajax, and his Nestor are, each of them, rather a species than an individual, and can boast more of the propriety of abstraction, than of th vivacity of the moving scene of absolute life. The Achilles, the Ajax, and the various Grecian heroes of Shakespeare, on the other hand, are absolute men, deficient in n thing which can. tend to individualize them, and already touched with the Promethean fire that might infuse a soul into what, without it, were lifeless form. From the rest perhaps the character of Thersites deserves to be selected, (how cold and school boy a sketch in Homer!) as exhibiting an appropriate vein of sarcastic humor amidst his cowardice, and a profoundness of truth in his mode of laying open the foibles of those about him, impossible to be excelled.

"One of the most formidable adversaries of true poetry, is an attribute which is generally miscalled dignity. Shakespeare possessed, no man in higher perfection, the true dignity and loftiness of the poetical afflatus, which he has displayed in many of the finest passages of his works with miraculous success. But he knew that no man ever was, or ever can be, always dignified. He knew that those subtler traits of character, which identify a man, are familiar and relaxed, pervaded with passion, and not played off with an eye to external decorum. In this re

spect the peculiarities of Shakespeare's genius are nowhere more forcibly illustrated, than in the play we are here considering. The champions of Greece and Troy, from the hour in which their names were first recorded, had always worn a certain formality of attire, and marched with a slow and measured step. No poet, till this time, had ever ventured to force them out of the manner which their epic creator had given them. Shakespeare first supplied their limbs, took from the the classic stiffness of their gait, and enriched them with an entire set of those attributes which might render them completely beings of the same species with ourselves."

ADDRESS

PREFIXED TO THE QUARTO EDITION, 1609

A NEVER WRITER, TO AN EVER READER: NEWS

Eternal reader, you have here a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar, and yet passing full of the palm comical; for it is a birth of your brain, that never undertook any thing comical vainly and were but the vain names of comedies changed for the titles of commodities, or of plays for pleas, you should see all those grand censors, that now style them such vanities, flock to them for the main grace of their gravities; especially this author's comedies, that are so framed to the life, that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives, showing such a dexterity and power of wit, that the most displeased with plays are pleased with his comedies. And all such dull and heavy-witted worldlings as were never capable of the wit of a comedy, coming by report of them to his representations, have found that wit there that they never found in themselves, and have parted better-witted than they came; feeling an edge of wit set upon them, more than ever they dreamed they had brain to grind it on. So much and such savored salt of wit is in his comedies, that they seem, for their height of pleasure, to be born in that sea that brought forth Venus. Amongst all there is none more witty than this; and had I time I would comment upon it, though I know it needs not, for so much as will make you think your testern well bestowed, but for so much worth as even poor I know to be stuffed in it. It deserves such a labor as well as the best comedy in Terence or

Plautus. And believe this, that when he is gone, and his comedies out of sale, you will scramble for them, and set up a new English inquisition.1 Take this for a warning, and at the peril of your pleasure's loss, and judgment's, refuse not, nor like this the less, for not being sullied with the smoky breath of the multitude; but thank fortune for the scape it hath made amongst you; since by the grand possessors' wills I believe you should have prayed for them, rather than been prayed.2 And so I leave all such to be prayed for (for the states of their wits' healths) that will not praise it.

Vale.

1 This Address, with all its conceit and affectation, has some very just and intelligent praise, and in a higher strain than any other we have that was written during the Poet's life; unless we should except a passage in Spenser's Tears of the Muses. The writer, whoever he might be, gives out in this place a pretty shrewd anticipation. Many things occurring in our time might be aptly quoted as answering to his forecast of "a new English inquisition"; as, for example, £130 was given a few years since for a copy of The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, which was the original form of The Third Part of King Henry VI.-H. N. H.

2 There is some obscurity here. The "grand possessors," we have no doubt, were the proprietors of the Globe Theatre, and the passage refers to the means they used to keep Shakespeare's plays out of print. Probably we should understand them as referring not to possessors, but to the comedies for which “a new English inquisition" was to be "set up"; the sense thus being, "you should have prayed to get them, rather than have been prayed to to buy them." -H. N. H.