mentioned it as an honour to Shakspeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, adds he, Would he had blotted out a thousand! which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candour, for I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any: he was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasie, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped; Suflaminandus erat, as Augustus said of Haterius: his wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too!' I think there can be no doubt but this kind of indignant negligence with which Shakspeare wrote, was greatly owing to the slight consideration he had for his audience. Jonson treated them with the dictatorial haughtiness of a pedant: Shakspeare with the carelessness of a gentleman who wrote at his ease, and gave them the first flowings of his fancy without any dread of their correction. These were times in which the poet indulged his genius without restraint; he stood alone and supereminent, and wanted no artificial scaffold to raise him above the heads of his contemporaries; he was natural, lofty, careless, and daringly incorrect. Place the same man in other times, amongst a people polished almost into general equality, and he shall begin to hesitate and retract his sallies; for in this respect poetical are like military excursions, and it makes a wide difference in the movements of a skilful general, whether he is to sally into a country defended by well-disciplined troops, or only by an irregular mob of unarmed barbarians. Shakspeare might vault his Pegasus without a rein; mountains might rise and seas roll in vain before him; Nature herself could neither stop nor circumscribe his career. The modern man of verse mounts with the precaution of a riding-master, and prances round his little circle full-bitted and caparisoned in all the formality of a review. Whilst he is thus pacing and piaffering with every body's eyes upon him, his friends are calling out every now and then- Seat yourself firm in the saddle! Hold your body straight! Keep your spurs from his sides for fear he sets a kicking! Have a care he does not stumble: there lies a stone, here runs a ditch; keep your whip still, and depend upon your bit, if you have not a mind to break your neck!' -On the other quarter his enemies are bawling out-' How like a tailor that fellow sits on horseback! Look at his feet, look at his arms! Set the curs upon him; tie a cracker to his horse's tail, and make sport for the spectator!'-All this while perhaps the poor devil could have performed passably well, if it were not for the mobbing and hallooing about him: whereas Shakspeare mounts without fear, and starting in the jockey phrase at score, cries out, 'Stand clear, ye sons of earth! or by the beams of my father Apollo, I'll ride over you and trample you into dust!' NUMBER LXIX. Nil intentatum nostri liquere poetæ : Ausi deserere, et celebrare domestica facta.-HORAT. THERE are two very striking characters delineated by our great dramatic poet, which I am desirous of bringing together under one review, and these are Macbeth and Richard the Third. The parts which these two persons sustain in their respective dramas, have a remarkable coincidence: both are actuated by the same guilty ambition in the opening of the story: both murder their lawful sovereign in the course of it: and both are defeated and slain in battle at the conclusion of it: yet these two characters under circumstances so similar, are as strongly distinguished in every passage of their dramatic life by the art of the poet, as any two men ever were by the hand of nature. Let us contemplate them in the three following periods; viz. The premeditation of their crime; the perpetration of it; and the catastrophe of their death. Duncan, the reigning king of Scotland, has two sons: Edward the Fourth of England has also two sons; but these kings and their respective heirs do not affect the usurpers Macbeth and Richard in the same degree, for the latter is a prince of the blood royal, brother to the king, and next in consanguinity to the throne after the death of his elder brother the Duke of Clarence: Macbeth, on the contrary, is not in the succession And to be king Stands not within the prospect of belief. His views therefore being farther removed and more out of hope, a greater weight of circumstances should be thrown together to tempt and encourage him to an undertaking so much beyond the prospect of his belief. The art of the poet furnishes these circumstances, and the engine which his invention employs, is of a preternatural and prodigious sort. He introduces in the very opening of his scene a troop of sibyls or witches, who salute Macbeth with their divinations, and in three solemn prophetic gratula tions hail him Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and King hereafter! By Sinel's death I know I'm Thane of Glamis; But how of Cawdor? One part of the prophecy therefore is true; the remaining promises become more deserving of belief. This is one step in the ladder of his ambition, and mark how artfully the poet has laid it in his way: no time is lost; the wonderful machinery is not suffered to stand still, for behold a verification of the second prediction, and a courtier thus addresses him from the king And for an earnest of a greater honour, He bade me from him call thee Thane of Cawdor. The magic now works to his heart, and he cannot wait the departure of the royal messenger before his admiration vents itself aside Glamis, and Thane of Cawdor! The greatest is behind. A second time he turns aside, and unable to repress the emotions, which this second confirmation of the predictions has excited, repeats the same secret observation Two truths are told As happy prologues to the swelling act A soliloquy then ensues, in which the poet judiciously opens enough of his character to shew the spectator that these preternatural agents are not superfluously set to work upon a disposition prone to evil, but one that will have to combat many compunctious struggles, before it can be brought to yield even to oracular influence. This alone would demonstrate (if we needed demonstration) that Shakspeare, without resorting to the ancients, had the judgment of ages as it were instinctively. From this instant we are apprized that Macbeth meditates an attack upon our pity as well as upon our horror, when he puts the following question to his conscienceWhy do I yield to that suggestion, Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair, And make my seated heart knock at my ribs Now let us turn to Richard, in whose cruel heart no such remorse finds place: he needs no tempter: there is here no dignus vindice nodus, nor indeed any knot at all, for he is already practised in murder; ambition is his ruling passion, and a crown is in view, and he tells you at his very first entrance on the scene I am determined to be a villain. We are now presented with a character full formed and complete for all the savage purposes of the drama. Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer. The barriers of conscience are broken down, and the soul, hardened against shame, avows its own depravity Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, He observes no gradations in guilt, expresses no hesitation, practises no refinements, but plunges into blood with the familiarity of long custom, and gives orders to his assassins to dispatch his brother Clarence with all the unfeeling tranquillity of a Nero or Caligula. Richard, having no longer any scruples to manage with his own conscience, is exactly in the predicament, which the dramatic poet Diphilus has described with such beautiful simplicity of expression- |