the statue must have been painted. Sir Henry rally designated as a strange absurdity." We Wotton calls this practice an English barbarism; have touched upon this in the ' Costume' but it is well known that the ancients had painted below. statues. The mention of Julio Romano is gene

THIS Comedy is so thoroughly taken out of the where the Emperor of Russia" represents region of the literal, that it would be worse than some dim conception of a mighty monarch of idle to talk of its costume. When the stageWhen the stage- far-off lands; and "that rare Italian master, manager shall be able to reconcile the contra- Julio Romano," stands as the abstract personifidictions, chronological and geographical, with cation of excellence in art. It is quite imwhich it abounds, he may decide whether the possible to imagine that he who, when it was characters should wear the dress of the ancient necessary to be precise, as in the Roman plays, or the modern world, and whether the archi- has painted manners with a truth and exactness tectural scenes should partake most of the Gre- which have left at an immeasurable distance cian style of the times of the Delphic oracle, or such imitations of ancient manners as the of the Italian in the more familiar days of Julio learned Ben Jonson has produced, that he Romano. We cannot assist him in this diffi- should have perplexed this play with such anoculty. It may be sufficient for the reader of malies through ignorance or even carelessness. this delicious play to know that he is purposely There can be no doubt that the most accomtaken out of the empire of the real;—to wander plished scholars amongst our early dramatists, in some poetical sphere where Bohemia is but a when dealing with the legendary and the roname for a wild country upon the sea, and the mantic, purposely committed these anachronoracular voices of the pagan world are heard isms. Greene, as we have shown, of whose amidst the merriment of "Whitsun pastorals scholarship his friends boasted, makes a ship and the solemnities of "Christian burial;" sail from Bohemia in the way that Shakspere

makes a ship wrecked upon a Bohemian coast. | talking of Shakspere wanting "sense," as we When Jonson, therefore, in his celebrated conversation with Drummond of Hawthornden, said " Shakspere wanted art, and sometimes sense, for in one of his plays he brought in a number of men saying they had suffered ship. wreck in Bohemia, where is no sea near by a hundred miles," he committed the unfairness of imputing to Shakspere the fault, if fault it be, which he knew to be the common property of the romantic drama. Gifford, in a note upon this passage in his 'Life of Jonson,' says, "No one ever read the play without noticing the 'absurdity,' as Dr. Johnson calls it; yet for this simple truism, for this casual remark in the freedom of conversation, Jonson is held up to the indignation of the world, as if the blunder was invisible to all but himself." We take no part in the stupid attempt of Shakspere's commentators to show that Jonson treated his great contemporary with a paltry jealousy; but we object to Jonson, in the instance before us,

object to Gifford speaking of the anachronism as a "blunder." It is absurd to imagine that Shakspere did not know better. Mr. Collier has quoted a passage from Taylor, the waterpoet, who published his journey to Prague, in which the honest waterman laughs at an alderman who "catches me by the goll, demanding if Bohemia be a great town, whether there be any meat in it, and whether the last fleet of ships be arrived there." Mr. Collier infers that Taylor " ridicules a vulgar error of the kind" committed by Shakspere. We rather think that he meant to ridicule very gross ignorance generally; and we leave our readers to take their choice of placing Greene and Shakspere in the same class with Taylor's "Gregory Gandergoose, an Alderman of Gotham," or of believing that a confusion of time and place was considered (whether justly is not here the question) a proper characteristic of the legendary drama-such as 'A Winter's Tale'