6

In both these passages there is undoubtedly an allusion to certain ancient representations of Death and the Fool. It has been clearly shown that Warburton was mistaken in asserting that these characters occurred in the old Moralities. The idea was probably suggested to Shakspere by some of the celebrated engravings of the Dance of Death,' with which he must have been familiar. In Stowe's 'Survey of London,' 1618, there is an initial letter exhibiting a contest between Death and the Fool, which Mr. Douce says is copied from one of a set of initials used by the Basil printers in the sixteenth century. Of this the cut above is a fac-simile.

5 SCENE I.-"For all thy blessed youth," &c. Warburton proposed a singular emendation of this passage:

"For pall'd, thy blazed youth
Becomes assuaged."

Probably the original idea, or the critic's refinement on it, suggested Byron's exquisite "Stanzas for Music: "

"There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes

away,

When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay:

'T is not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so fast,

But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past.

"Then the few, whose spirits float above the wreek of happiness,

Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt or ocean of excess: The magnet of their course is gone, or only points in

vain

The shore to which their shiver'd sail shall never stretch again.

"Then the mortal coldness of the soul like death itself comes down;

It cannot feel for others' woes, it dare not dream its own;

That heavy chill has frozen o'er the fountain of our tears,

And though the eye may sparkle still, 't is where the ice appears.

"Though wit may flash from fluent lips, and mirth distract the breast,

Through midnight hours that yield no more their former hope of rest;

'T is but as ivy-leaves around the ruin'd turret wreath, All green and wildly fresh without, but worn and gray beneath.

"Oh! could I feel as I have felt,-or be what I have been,

Or weep, as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanish'd

scene;

As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,

So, 'midst the wither'd waste of life, those tears would flow to me."

The poor

• SCENE I.

beetle that we tread upon,

In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.”

These lines, taken apart from the context, would indicate that the bodily pain, such as is attended with death, is felt with equal severity by a giant and a beetle. The physiologists tell us that this is not true; and that the nervous system of a beetle does not allow it to feel pain so acutely as that of a man. We hope this is correct; but we are not sure that Shakspere meant to refine quite so much as the entomologists are desirous to believe. "It is somewhat amusing," says a writer in the 'Entomological Magazine,' "that his words should, in this case, be entirely wrested from their original purpose. His purpose was to show how little a man feels in dying; that the sense of death is most in apprehension, not in the act; and that even a beetle, which feels so little, feels as much as a giant does. The less, therefore, the beetle is supposed to feel, the more force we give to the sentiment of Shakspere."

* SCENE I.-" At the moated grange resides this dejected Mariana.”

We have before alluded to Mr. Tennyson's poem, in which the idea of loneliness and desolation, suggested by these simple words of Shakspere, is worked out with the most striking effect. We have now great pleasure in extracting these beautiful verses, which have been described as exhibiting "the power of creating scenery in keeping with some state of human feeling, so fitted to it as to be the embodied symbol of it, and to summon up the state of feeling itself with a force not to be surpassed by anything but reality."

"With blackest moss the flower-pots

Were thickly crusted, one and all;
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the peach to the garden-wall.
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange,
Unlifted was the clinking latch,
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.

She only said, 'My life is dreary-
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, I am aweary, aweary;
I would that I were dead!'
"Her tears fell with the dews at even,
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide.

London Review,' July, 1835.

After the flitting of the bats,

When thickest dark did trance the sky, She drew her casement-curtain by, And glane'd athwart the glooming flats. She only said, 'The night is drearyHe cometh not,' she said; She said, I am aweary, aweary; I would that 1 were dead!'

"Upon the middle of the night,

Waking she heard the night-fowl crow;
The cock sung out an hour ere light:
From the dark fen the oxen's low
Came to her without hope of change,
In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.

She only said, 'The day is dreary-
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary;
I would that I were dead!'

"About a stone-cast from the wall,

A sluice with blacken'd waters slept, And o'er it many, round and small, The cluster'd marish mosses crept. Hard by a poplar shook alway, All silver-green with gnarled bark: For leagues no other tree did dark The level waste, the rounding gray. She only said, My life is drearyHe cometh not,' she said; She said, 'I am aweary, aweary; I would that I were dead!'

"And ever when the moon was low, And the shrill winds were up an' away, In the white curtain, to and fro,

She saw the gusty shadow sway. But when the moon was very low,

And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the poplar fell
Upon her bed, across her brow.

She only said, The night is dreary-
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, I am aweary, aweary;
I would that I were dead!'

"All day within the dreamy house

The doors upon their hinges creak'd; The blue-fly sung i' the pane; the mouse Behind the mould'ring wainscot shriek'd, Or from the crevice peer'd about. Old faces glimmer'd through the doors, Old footsteps trod the upper floors, Old voices call'd her from without.

She only said, My life is dreary-
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary;
I would that I were dead!'

"The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof

The poplar made, did all confound Her sense; but most she loath'd the hour When the thick-moted sunbeam lay Athwart the chambers, and the day Down-slop'd was westering in his bower. Then said she, 'I am very drearyHe will not come,' she said; She wept, I am aweary, aweary; O God! that I were dead!'"

SCENE I.-"Take, oh, take those lips away." THIS charming lyric, as sung to Mariana, would appear perfect in itself, but from two circumstances; first, Mariana says, "Break off thy song," which would lead one to infer that, as we find it in the text, it is not complete : secondly, we have the song, apparently complete, in the tragedy of 'Rollo Duke of Normandy,' ascribed to Fletcher, and printed in Beaumont and Fletcher's works. We give the song as it stands in that play:

"Take, oh, take those lips away,

That so sweetly were forsworn,
And those eyes, like break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn;
But my kisses bring again,
Seals of love, tho' seal'd in vain.

"Hide, oh, hide those hills of snow,

Which thy frozen bosom bears,
On whose tops the pinks that grow
Are yet of those that April wears;
But first set my poor heart free,
Bound in those icy chains by thee."

The question then arises, is the song to be attributed to Shakspere or to Fletcher? Malone justly observes that all the songs introduced in our author's plays appear to have been his own composition. The idea in the line

"Seals of love, but seal'd in vain,"

is found in the 142nd Sonnet :

"not from those lips of thine, That have profan'd their scarlet ornaments, And seal'd false bonds of love, as oft as mine."

The image is also repeated in the Venus and Adonis.' Weber, the editor of Beaumont and

Fletcher, is of opinion that the first stanza was Shakspere's, and that Fletcher added the second. There is no evidence, we apprehend, external or internal, by which the question can be settled.

• SCENE III.—"He's in for a commodity of brown paper," &c.

The old comedies are full of allusions to the

practice of the usurer-so notorious as to acquire him the name of the brown-paper merchant—of stipulating to make his advance partly in money and partly in goods, which goods were some times little more than packages of brown paper. The most minute description of these practices is given in a pamphlet by Nashe, published in 1594"He (a usurer) falls acquainted with gentlemen, frequents ordinaries and dining. houses daily, where, when some of them at play have lost all their money, he is very diligent at hand, on their chains and bracelets, or jewels, to lend them half the value. Now this is the nature of young gentlemen, that where they have broke the ice, and borrowed once, they will come again the second time; and that these young foxes know as well as the beg gar knows his dish. But at the second time of their coming it is doubtful to say whether they shall have money or no. The world grows hard, and we are all mortal; let him make any assurance before a judge, and they shall have some hundred pounds per consequence, in silks and velvets. The third time if they come, they shall have baser commodities: the fourth time, lute-strings and gray paper."