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'twilled' as ridged, or made up in ridges-a sense it yet bears with reference to some kinds of linen. These ridges are produced by intermingling the threads; and hence, perhaps, the origin of the word in the French, (touiller.) The 'pioned and twilled brims' are, therefore, the brims which are dug and ridged."-COLLIER.

It may be added, in reply to an objection to the more modern reading, that the Poet does not say that the banks were in full bloom of peonies and lilies in April, but that it was that month which then so bestrewed the banks with such a growth as would yield "chaste crowns for nymphs," etc.

"with thy saffron wings"-Mr. Douce remarks that this is an elegant expansion of the following lines in Phaer's "Virgil's Eneid:"

Dame rainbow down therefore with safron wings of dropping

showres,

Whose face a thousand sundry hues against the sun devoures, From heaven descending came.

"this SHORT-GRASS'D green"-Many editors, since Rowe, have "short-graz'd green," or grazed down so as to be short; which is neither the genuine old reading, nor the sense. Ceres, as if finding herself out of place on the scanty wild-grass of an uncultivated island, naturally asks why she is summoned to this "shortgrass'd green."

"Enter JUNO"-She appears in the air during the first speech of Iris; and there the stage-direction, in the folio, (1623,) is "Juno descends." Collier, who is very learned in the details of the ancient English stage, supposes that she was probably let down slowly by some machine, and did not reach the stage until Iris and Ceres were concluding their speeches.

"to MEET WITH Caliban"-i. e. To counteract, to play stratagem against stratagem. "The parson knows the temper of every one in his house, and accordingly either meets with their vices, or advances their virtues."-HERBERT's Country Parson.

"-lifted up their noses"-This passage is a most accurate description of the effect produced upon colts by music. On first hearing even a trumpet, instead of being terrified, they will often advance and thrust their nose up to the very mouth of the instrument, while it is blown, provided this be done with some consideration.

"-king Stephano"-This is an allusion to the old ballad, "King Stephen was a worthy peer," of which Iago sings a verse in OTHELLO.

"a FRIPPERY"-i. e. A shop where old clothes were sold.

"Now is the jerkin under the LINE: now, jerkin, you are like to lose your HAIR"-Malone says, that goat's-hair jerkins, both plain and ornamented, formed part of the theatrical wardrobes of this period; and he suggests that in the present instance they were hung upon a hair line. Stevens thinks there is some gross allusion in the passage. Edwards says it refers to the loss of hair by fever on passing the equinoctial line! Did the sailors shave folks with an iron hoop in those days? Stephano, was, however, drunk; half with wine, and half with his ideas of royalty.

"CAL. I will have none on't: we shall lose our time"It is an acute remark of Hazlitt's, that these drunken sailors (who are as like drunken sailors as they can be) serve as an indirect foil to Caliban, "whose figure acquires a classical dignity in the contrast." This passage depicts a truth which, in that age, the Poet must have rather inferred from his general acquaintance of human nature than gathered from immediate knowledge, but which the intercourse of civilized man with savages has, in later years, too often and too unhappily confirmedthat, degraded and brutal as the savage may be, he is still, mentally and morally, above the level to which a more wilful depravity can degrade his civilized visitor or neighbour.

Hazlitt has presented the leading idea which pervades and individualizes Caliban's character with great taste and discrimination, as well as with sagacious insight into the principle on which manners are felt to be gross or refined:

"Caliban is generally thought (and justly so) to be one of the author's master-pieces. It is not, indeed, pleasant to see this character on the stage, any more than it is to see the god Pan represented there. But, in itself, it is one of the wildest and most abstracted of all Shakespeare's characters, where deformity, whether of body or mind, is redeemed by the power and truth of the imagination displayed in it. It is the essence of grossness, but there is not a particle of vulgarity in it. Shakespeare has displayed the brutal mind of Caliban the character grows out of the soil where it is rooted, in contrast with the pure and original forms of nature; uncontrolled, uncouth, and wild, uncramped by any of the meannesses of custom. It is of the earth, earthy.' It seems almost to have been dug out of the ground, with a soul instinctively superadded to it, answering to its wants and origin. Vulgarity is not natural coarseness, but conventional coarseness, learned from others, contrary to or without entire conformity of natural power and disposition; as fashion is the common-place affectation of what is elegant and refined, without any seeking of the essence of it."

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"the LINE-GROVE"-This is usually printed limegrove; but the old name of the tree is "line," and not lime, and so it stands in the old copies. This error is pointed out by the Rev. Mr. Hunter, in his "Disquisition on the Tempest." He, however, insists, with less reason, that the line on which the "glistering apparel" is hung means a lime-tree. All the coarse jokes of the dialogue contradict this supposition.

"Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes"-This speech is evidently suggested by Medea's, in Ovid: the expressions are (many of them) in the old translation by Golding, which is by no means literal, showing that the Poet had that in his mind, and not the original. But the exquisite fairy imagery is Shakespeare's own.

("Weak MASTERS though ye be")-i. e. "Ye are powerful auxiliaries, but weak if left to yourselvesyour employment is then to make green ringlets, and midnight mushrooms, and to play the idle pranks, mentioned by Ariel in his next song; yet, by your aid, I have been enabled to invert the course of nature. say, proverbially, 'Fire is a good servant, but a bad master.'"-BLACKSTONE.

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"There I couch when owls do ery"-There is some variation in the modes adopted by the several editors in printing and pointing this song, and in their understand ing of it. In the first edition the text of the folios has been followed, and I see little difficulty in it. "When owls do cry" (i. e. at night) Ariel "couches in a cow slip's bell;" and he uses the "bat's back" as his pleasant vehicle, to pursue the summer in its progress round the globe, and thus live merrily under continual blossoms. But some of the commentators have rejected this, which is admitted to be the most obvious sense, because bats no not migrate in search of summer, but become torpid in winter. Possibly the Poet did not advert to this, or more probably he did, but still saw no reason why Ariel might not make the bat serve as his locomotive, and obey his direction, without depending upon the bat's mere instinct to guide him. In reference to this zoological fact of the non-migration of bats, divers variations of the punctuation have been made. Theobald proposes sunset for summer. Capell and Collier place a period after "couch:"

There I couch. When owls do cry,

On the bat's back I do fly,
After summer, merrily.

This reading is founded on the notion that owls do not cry in summer, which is neither true in fact, nor according to Shakespeare's idea of them; for he introduces "the clamorous owl that nightly hoots," in the month of May, in the MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM. Knight, retaining the folio arrangement in his text, in his notes offers this punctuation:

In a cowslip's bell I lie:

There I couch when owls do cry

On the bat's back-I do fly
After summer merrily.

After summer" he understands as after summer is past. But in this punctuation there seems to have no meaning, nor can it refer at once to the cowslip's bell and to the bat's back. I think we may be well content with the old text, and consider it not very material (in fairy nature) that Ariel should thus make the bat, instead of the wind, his post-horse, and pursue the circling series of blossoms and leaves in its progress around the world.

ARIEL AS A SEA-NYMPH.

"It is observed of the TEMPEST, that its plan is regular: this the author of the Revisal' thinks, what I think too, an accidental effect of the story, not intended, or regarded, by our author. But, whatever might be Shakespeare's intention in forming or adopting the plot, he has made it instrumental to the production of many

characters, diversi preserved with p knowledge of opin In a single drama, and sailors, all spe is the agency of a The operations of ventures of a des taught affection, th happiness of the p are equally interest

"The TEMPEST movement: the fixed at their first apparent obstacles go leisurely about and Antonio on the Caliban and his dr

are nothing but a f completely frustrat Nothing remains, t guilty, by dreadful sciences, the disco this want is so adm display of the fasci of mirth-the det tractive, that it re perceive that the already contained i love of Ferdinand short scenes, is er union of chivalrous on the other, of th brought up far from has never learned The wisdom of th magical and myster falsehood of the tw gossiping of the old Stephano, two good associate in Caliban whole, as the perso "Caliban has be creation of a poet gnome and the sava behaviour we perce disposition, and the The latter could on in the slightest de it is as if the use of communicated to s cowardly, false, and is essentially differe ized world, as the Shakespeare. He falls into the low fa for he is a poetical up every thing diss of which he has co whole variety of nat tily deformed have nation. The magic of Prospero has ass a faint reflection int falls into a dark cav either heat or illumi tion the poisonous v this monster is inco and notwithstanding ful to our feelings, a untouched.

"In the zephyr-li be mistaken; his r On the other hand, of earth. Yet they sonifications, but be general we find, in

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in the TEMPEST, in the magical part of MACBETH, and wherever Shakespeare avails himself of the popular belief in the invisible presence of spirits, and the possibility of coming in contact with them, a profound view of the inward life of Nature and her mysterious springs; which, it is true, ought never to be altogether unknown to the genuine poet, as poetry is altogether incompatible with mechanical physics, but which few have possessed in an equal degree with Dante and himself."-SCHLEGEL.

"The TEMPEST is a specimen of the purely romantic drama, in which the interest is not historical, or dependent upon fidelity of portraiture, or the natural connection of events; but is a birth of the imagination, and rests only on the coaptation and union of the elements granted to, or assumed by, the Poet. It is a species of drama which owes no allegiance to time or space, and in which, therefore, errors of chronology and geography-no mortal sins in any species-are venial faults, and count for nothing. It addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty; and although the illusion may be assisted by the effect on the senses of the complicated scenery and decorations of modern times, yet this sort of assistance is dangerous. For the principal and only genuine excitement ought to come from within-from the moved and sympathetic imagination; whereas, where so much is addressed to the mere external senses of seeing and hearing, the spiritual vision is apt to languish, and the attraction from without will withdraw the mind from the proper and only legitimate interest which is intended to spring from within.

"The romance opens with a busy scene admirably appropriate to the kind of drama, and giving, as it were, the key-note to the whole harmony. It prepares and initiates the excitement required for the entire piece, and yet does not demand any thing from the spectators which their previous habits had not fitted them to understand. It is the bustle of a tempest, from which the real horrors are abstracted; therefore it is poetical, though not in strictness natural, (the distinction to which I have so often alluded,) and is purposely restrained from concentering the interest on itself, but used merely as an induction or tuning for what is to follow.

"In the second scene, Prospero's speeches, till the entrance of Ariel, contain the finest example, I remember, of retrospective narration, for the purpose of exciting immediate interest, and putting the audience in possession of all the information necessary for the understanding of the plot. Observe, too, the perfect probability of the moment chosen by Prospero (the very Shakespeare himself, as it were, of the tempest) to open out the truth to his daughter, his own romantic bearing, and how completely any thing that might have been disagreeable to us in the magician, is reconciled and shaded in the humanity and natural feeling of the father. In the very first speech of Miranda, the simplicity and tenderness of her character are at once laid open; it would have been lost in direct contact with the agitation of the first scene. The opinion once prevailed, but, happily, is now abandoned, that Fletcher alone wrote for women. The truth is, that with very few, and those partial, exceptions, the female characters in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are, when of the light kind, not decent; when heroic, complete viragos. But in Shakespeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that continuates society, as sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not in the analytic processes, but in that same equipoise of the faculties, during which the feelings are representative of all past experience-not of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has been educated, and their predecessors even up to the first mother that lived. Shakespeare saw that the want of prominence, which Pope notices for sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of the woman's character, and knew that it arose not from any deficiency, but from the more exquisite harmony of all the parts of the moral being constituting one living total

of head and heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude-shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty-sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone. In all the Shakespearian women there is essentially the same foundation and principle; the distinct individuality and variety are merely the result of the modification of circumstances, whether in Miranda the maiden, in Imogen the wife, or in Katharine the queen.

"But to return. The appearance and characters of the super or ultra-natural servants are finely contrasted. Ariel has in every thing the airy tint which gives the name; and it is worthy of remark that Miranda is never directly brought into comparison with Ariel, lest the natural and human of the one and the supernatural of the other should tend to neutralize each other. Caliban, on the other hand, is all earth-all condensed and gross in feelings and images; he has the dawnings of understanding without reason or the moral sense, and in him, as in some brute animals, this advance to the intellectual faculties, without the moral sense, is marked

by the appearance of vice. For it is in the primacy of the moral being only that man is truly human; in his intellectual powers he is certainly approached by the brutes, and, man's whole system duly considered, those powers cannot be considered other than means to an end, that is, to morality.

"In this scene, as it proceeds, is displayed the impression made by Ferdinand and Miranda on each other; it is love at first sightat the first sight They have chang'd eyes.

And it appears to me that, in all cases of real love, it is at one moment that it takes place. That moment may have been prepared by previous esteem, admiration, or even affection; yet love seems to require a momentary act of volition, by which a tacit bond of devotion is imposed-a bond not to be thereafter broken without violating what should be sacred in our nature. How finely is the true Shakespearian scene contrasted with Dryden's vulgar alteration of it, in which a mere ludicrous psychological experiment, as it were, is tried-displaying nothing but indelicacy without passion. Prospero's interruption of the courtship has often seemed to me to have no sufficient motive; still his alleged reasonlest too light winning Make the prize light

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is enough for the ethereal connections of the romantic imagination, although it would not be so for the historical. The whole courting scene, indeed, in the beginning of the third act, between the lovers is a masterpiece; and the first dawn of disobedience in the mind of Miranda to the command of her father is very finely drawn, so as to seem the working of the scriptural command, Thou shalt leave father and mother,' etc. O! with what exquisite purity this scene is conceived and executed! Shakespeare may sometimes be gross, but I boldly say that he is always moral and modest. Alas! in this our day decency of manners is preserved at the expense of morality of heart, and delicacies for vice are allowed, while grossness against it is hypocritically, or at least morbidly, condemned.

In this play are admirably sketched the vices generally accompanying a low degree of civilization; and in the first scene of the second act Shakespeare has, as in many other places, shown the tendency in bad men to indulge in scorn and contemptuous expressions, as a mode of getting rid of their own uneasy feelings of inferiority to the good, and also, by making the good ridiculous, of rendering the transition of others to wickedness easy. Shakespeare never puts habitual scorn into the mouths of other than bad men, as here in the instances of Antonio and Sebastian. The scene of the intended assassination of Alonzo and Gonzalo is an exact counterpart of the scene between Macbeth and his lady,

only pitched in a lower key throughout, as designed to be frustrated and concealed, and exhibiting the same profound management in the manner of familiarizing a mind, not immediately recipient, to the suggestion of guilt, by associating the proposed crime with something ludicrous or out of place-something not habitually matter of reverence. By this kind of sophistry the imagination and fancy are first bribed to contemplate the suggested act, and at length to become acquainted with it. Observe how the effect of this scene is heightened by contrast with another counterpart of it in low life-that between the conspirators Stephano, Caliban, and Trinculo, in the second scene of the third act, in which there are the same essential characteristics.

"In this play and in this scene of it are also shown the springs of the vulgar in politics-of that kind of politics which is inwoven with human nature. In his treatment of the subject, wherever it occurs, Shakespeare is quite peculiar. In other writers we find the particular opinions of the individual-in Massinger it is rank republicanism-in Beaumont and Fletcher even jure divino principles are carried to excess; but Shakespeare never promulgates any party tenets. He is always the philosopher and the moralist, but at the same time with a profound veneration for all the established institutions of society, and for those classes which form the permanent elements of the state-especially never introducing a professional character, as such, otherwise than as respectable. If he must have any name, he should be styled a philosophical aristocrat, delighting in those hereditary institutions which have a tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks

of which, althou the advantages. good nature with with the passion tional animal. content with hol sometimes you n superiority, some of the rogueries way in which he most licentious Trinculo and C characters are al results of medita drapery and the with each other great component had seen that the nations were in showed how the disproportions of in which these tr any set fashion, b moral being, and

[Coleridge has his own opinions tocrat," etc.; b presented elsewh tions or opinions of it in this place cursive ingenuity

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