sual; and society, having just thrown off the trammels of the old faith, had not yet come fully under the moral restraints of Protestantism. It was awakened, by the stiring spirit of the time, to a longing after happiness and a boundless capacity for enjoyment, like a youth when he first finds himself a man. An audience so constituted was prepared for whatever fare the dramatist provided; they were not shocked at scenes of blood, nor offended by the coarsest humor; they were not above the silliest buffoonery; but they were also susceptible to gentler sentiments and higher emotions. unison with it," and so it was with Lord Bacon. He was a philosopher, not by the force of genius, but because mankind had ceased to believe in the decline of the human race, and the approaching end of the world. "To be developed, an idea must be in harmony with the civilization that surrounds it;" and yet, as if to contradict this very theory, he remarks that "the last representatives of ancient science, like the first representatives of modern science, were exiled, imprisoned, assassinated, or burned;"* or, in other words, thought and discovered in defiance of the opinions and voices of their contemporaries. No one will be disposed to ignore the influence of sur-ized society; but it seems that there rounding circumstances upon the minds of men; but we can not allow it a creative power. It communicates an impulse and direction to the general current of thought, at particular periods; but above and beyond it, will soar the genius and virtue of lofty souls; and these are the special gifts of God. After this brief sketch of the prose writer of this period, M. Taine enters upon the subject dearest to French taste the theatre. Here he revels and luxuriates far into his second volume. He indulges a twofold pleasure; as a critic, he is full of relish for his work; as a historian, he is able to expose the coarseness of the English stage and the rude manners of the people. The stage is the very mirror of the times; and he holds it before us with an air of exulting mockery. And first we are introduced to the pit of the Globe Theatre. It is open to the watry sky of London, and is made no better than a pig's sty by the brutal crowd who throng it. With such spectators what need of high dramatic art, of scenery, of the proprieties of time or place? They are willing to see Africa on one side of the stage, Asia on the other, and many secondary states in the middle; the imagination of the public was the only stage machinist. They were ready to feel all, as the poet was to dare all and this was due to the free and complete expansion of nature at this period. The people were uncivilized beings-full of animal life and spirits; the nobles were coarse, violent, and sen * Vol. 1, pp. 410-414. All this was natural to any half-civil were also passions, peculiarly English, which the dramatists sought to gratify. The English, we are reminded, were a fierce race, accustomed to war, and familiar with public executions, living in an execrable climate, grossly fed on beef and beer, and consequently savage, gloomy, and desponding. "A dark and threatening mist covers their spirit like their sky;" and hence the stage was filled with massacres, punishments, and crimes. The temperament of Latin races, living under brighter skies, led to representations. of beauty and happiness; but here the character of the people encouraged scenes of fierce energy, agony, and death.† This flattering portrait of Englishmen favors a theory, but is it true? We would ask M. Taine to point out in English history any examples of blood-thirstiness to be compared with the foul murders perpetrated by princes of Southern race,-the D'Estes, Borgias, and Medicis. He has drawn a frightful picture of English history and English society in the reigns of the Tudors, and he infers that the passions of the English drama were but the echo of the fierce and sanguinary contentions out of doors. But M. Taine entirely confounds the spirit of the country with the spirit of the age. No doubt blood was shed like water by the Tudors; but was the House of Valois, was the gay and brilliant Court of Touraine, less superstitious and less cruel? Was the House of Guise a model of the gaiety and simplicity of the Latin races? Did not every enormity culminate under Vol. i. pp. 436-445. the influence of Catharine de Medicis and Charles IX. It is nonsense to attribute to influence of climate and race effects which took their origin in the manners and passions of the age; and if a comparison were drawn between England and France by the light of their history, the heaviest burden of acts of ferocity and violence would not lie at our door. Has M. Taine forgotten that barely seventy years have elapsed since the massacre of the Abbaye and the holocausts of the Reign of Terror? What tragedy ever reached the intensity of the French Revolution? And as to coarseness, there is nothing in the whole range of the Elizabethan literature to be compared with the obscenity of Voltaire in several of his most popular writings. But to proceed with the drama: M. Taine has described the audience-and who were the dramatists? Unable to earn their bread as writers, they were forced to become managers and actors, and led the life of comedians and artists -reckless and dissolute, spent with abandoned women and wild young men, and closing in exhaustion, indigence, and death. Such being the instructors of the play-going public, what could be expected but a depraved drama? We can not follow M. Taine through his survey of the ninor dramatistsPeele, Greene, Marlow, Ford, Massinger, Beaumount and Fletcher-from whose plays he culls examples of coarseness, and illustrations of the boule-dogue character of the English, while he has overlooked many beauties which English editors and critics have heartily commended. But, after all his contemptuous reflections upon the character of these authors, and the taste of their audience, he has scarcely proved his case against them. It is true that there was little unity, proportion, or fitness of things in their plots, and that they were not overnice in their language; we should not hold them up as examples worthy of imitation or study; but there is a poetic fire and grandeur in their conception of character and expression of passion, of which M. Taine has formed a very imperfect notion. We must now hasten on to the greater dramatists-Ben Jonson and Shakspeare. Ben Jonson was, according to M. Taine, the true type of an Englishman, having a heavy ungracious gait and "mountain belly," and being proud, combative, morose, and subject to fits of spleen. Such was he by nature; but, being a scholar well versed in classical literature, he learned to arrange his thoughts as well as if he had been of Latin race. It is consolatory to find that an Englishman may sometimes hope to become logical, by constant study of Latin or French models; but alas! poor Jonson sacrificed his dramatic genius to his uncongenial logic. He observed unity of time and place, indeed; but he was too methodical, and kept too constantly in view the design and moral of his plot,-representing abstract virtues and vices rather than actual men and women. The moralist and logician prevailed over the dramatist. But for those too accomplished Latins, he would have written better plays. And after all this sacrifice to method and symmetry, it appears that he was not a philosopher like Molière, who pursued similar principles of dramatic composition. Nothing, however, could obscure the natural force of his imagination, his humor, his vigorous satire, his erudition, or the power of his racy English speech. He was a great poet and dramatist, and second to Shakspeare alone.* We are naturally curious to learn M. Taine's view of the greatest of English poets; and his manner of dealing with Shakspeare is characteristic. The poet so so great that he can only be understood by the aid of science-which, with our author, signifies a theory. Now what theories will help us to understand Shakspeare? If they can be found, we shall be only too ready to embrace them. They are at hand. "Wisdom and knowledge are in man nothing but effects and accidents;" "man being foolish, as his body is sick, by nature.” "Without any distinct and free of his own, he is a creature of a series of impulsions and imaginations." Nothing of the kind! Man is born with every capacity of mind and body-undeveloped, indeed, but ripe for natural development. Some are born idiots, and some weakly and infirm; but the great mass of mankind are happily born with fair natural powers of mind and power * Vol. ii. pp. 1-63. Some, body-mens sana in corpore sano. But even admitting M. Taine's propositions-which he maintains with a train of reasoning more tedious than is his wont-how do they afford any key to Shakspeare? So far as we can understand him, it is because Shakspeare understood human nature in the same fashion as M. Taine himself, knew how weak and foolish a being was man, and saw under the semblance of good sense his lower brute instincts. Yet, after all his philosophizing, he tells us that Shakspeare had an extraordinary instinct, by which he read the very souls of men, and a "complete imagination." And this is precisely what all mankind have long since acknowledged, without any theory at all. Shakspeare knew men as he found them, a mixture of good and evil, wisdom and folly; and M. Taine's false and mischievous theory throws no further light upon the matter. Nay, the example proves the worthlessness of his doctrine; for after a long parade of secondary causes to account for Shakspeare's intuitive genius, he is obliged to fall back upon the innate imagination of the poet-a point whence less theoretical intellects had already started-and tells us that with him "all came from within, from his soul and genius; outward circumstances contributed but slightly to modify them."* *Vol. ii. pp. 63-72. Shakspeare owed little to education. He was not spoiled like Ben Jonson by too much learning. Removed from school at fourteen, when he knew "little Latin and no Greek," he married before he was nineteen, led a wild life, and commenced life as one of the lowest myrmidons of the stage. Hence he rose to the rank of actor; but acting was not his forte, as his best part is said to have been the Ghost in his own play of " Hamlet." But he was, at the same time, poet, dramatist, stage manager, and part proprietor of the Blackfriars and Globe theatres. Such were the labors and associations in the midst of which Shakspeare wrote. If not conducive to a high range of poetic thought, they may, at least, have improved his dramatic skill, and enlarged his knowledge of character. He had a systematic genius, and could transform himself into every character he conceived; he had no occasion to learn, but had an intuitive insight into nature, and a divination of all motives, sentiments, and emotions. In his general estimate of Shakspeare M. Taine agrees with other critics. We can not follow him through his review of the great poet's works; but must pause over some of his remarks. He notices that Shakspeare's imagination is excessive; "he spreads metaphors with profusion over all he writes, until he obscures his meaning by imagery. This, however, is not the ca price of his will, but the form of his thought." So far the justice of the criticism may not be disputed; but he proceeds to say, "The style of Shakspeare is a compound of forced expressions. No man has submitted words to a like torture, 3 it seems as if he never wrote a word without a scream.† . Hence a style composed of whims, of rash figures interrupted every instant by figures still more rash, ideas scarcely indicated, finished by others remote by a hundred leagues, no connection visible, an air of incoherence." But to make amends for these strictures upon the poet's style, he adds, "Shakspeare sets "Contrastes henrtés, exagérations furieuses, apostrophes, exclamations, tout le délire de l'ode, renversement, d'idées, accumulation d'images, l'horrible et le divin assemblés dans la même ligne, il semble qu'il n écrive jamais une parole sans crier." (Vol. ii. p. 96). aside propriety and clearness, and attains life." English readers, while accepting an acute French critic's praises of Shakspeare's imagination, will not subscribe to his censures upon the peculiar language in which it is clothed, which, if without rule or method, is at least unique-part of the very soul of the poet, and instinct with his genius. But we are convinced M. Taine does not understand the force of the Shaksperian diction. It is even more remarkable that he is entirely incapable of appreciating the wonderful variety and depth of Shakspeare's women. He describes them in a few sentences: "They are charming children, who feel to excess, and love with folly. They have frank and easy manners, little fits of anger, pretty words of friendship, coquettish rogueries, a playful volubility which remind us of the warbling and gracefulness of birds." What an entire want of insight and reflection in the critic! How little can such a writer have formed any conception of the characters of Rosalind and Juliet? of Portia and Desdemonia? M.Taine has made one discovery which we believe to be an entire misconception. He maintains that in several of his dramatic characters Shakspeare portrays himself, and is at once, for example, Hamlet and the melancholy Jaques! Indeed he goes so far as to say (vol. ii. p. 116), "His characters are all of the same family. Good or bad, coarse or refined, clever or stupid, Shakspeare gives them all the same class of mind, which is his own." Can anything be less true to the multiform genius of Shakspeare than this preposterous assertion? As well might we suggest that the poet's character is to be read in the coarse humor of Falstaff, which savors of too familiar taverns. The very reverse is the fact. He has left us a mirror which reflects every face, but that of him who holds it to our gaze. Nowhere can we see Shakspeare himself, for he portrayed all mankind. Nor was he an egotist. Smaller poets may often paint themselves under the disguise of heroes, but his comprehensive genius borrowed nothing from himself. With him "all the world" was "a stage, and all the men and women merely players;", "Le babil et la gentillesse des oiseaux." (Vol. ii. p. 193). and as they played before him, he drew them to the life. M. Taine has naturally devoted peculiar care to the study of Shakspeare; but the chapters he has filled with his remarks on this subject are the feeblest and most perverse portion of his work. His own countryman, M. A. Mézières in his "Predecessors" and "Successors " of Shakspeare, has given a far more accurate picture of English dramatic literature; and the pages of Frederick Schlegel on the genius of Shakspeare, in his "History of Literature" (vol. ii. p. 163), immeasurably surpass, in truth and depth, M. Taine's efforts to describe what he appears not to have understood. (Concluded in our next number.) was, a century after Justin Martyr, the "The Holy Land," by W. Hepworth Dixon. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall. that country's atmosphere and seeming to savor of it; and yet, with strong sympathies for home, while Mr. Dixon sits within his tent or his khan and writes of his wayfaring, or discusses the many momentous questions connected with the past, the present, and the future of the Holy Land. Thoughts of home, and memories of home, and comparisons of men and things and places here, with men and things and places at home, seem to come upon all wayfarers through the havoc and the beauty of this ancient land. When Dr. Richardson was riding from Ramla to Jerusalem, the features of the country, he says, brought strongly to his recollection, the ride from Sanquhar to Lead Hills, in Scotland. The Scottish doctor, of course, thinks that the hills of Judea have rather the worse side of this comparison! In some view, with a certain difference, it is the same with Mr. Dixon. It is natural enough that a sudden sight of the "dear domestic sea" should bring to him "delicious dream of home." A traveler from the Rhine, coming in sight of Kûlonich, would at least find in it an echo of his own Köln, another Roman built "Colonia," on the distant river. When Mr. Dixon was on the same road as Dr. Richardson, his comparison of the scenery was not made with Scotland. "The tropical vegetation of the plain," he says, as he ascends, "near Ramla and Modin, has given place to a flora more homely and familiar in our eyes; a flora in which the holm-oak, arbutus, thorn and holly, sweep you back, in fancy, to the mountains of Killarney and South Wales." Even when speaking of the marauding tribes of the Syrian Desert, the author compares them with old tribes in the old native home. "Every year," he writes, "the harvests of Sharon, Shefelah, Esdraelon, tempt these marauders from beyond Jordan, just as the harvests of Kent and Mercia used to bait the Saxon vikings and the Danish jarls." Above white-walled and towered Acre, stands the bold headland of Cape Blanco, in which Mr. Dixon sees a "Syrian imitation of Dover Cliff." Elsewhere, he rides over a soil which reminds him of that of a Suffolk field. If not of England, it is of European scenes through which he has traveled that he is reminded. In the province of Galilee, he sees repeated the woods of |