LOST, like that of Egeon in the first scene of the CoмEDY OF ERRORS, and of the Soldier in the second scene of MACBETH, seems imitated with its defects and its beauties from Sir Philip Sidney; whose Arcadia,' though not then published, was already well known in manuscript copies, and could hardly have escaped the notice and admiration of Shakespeare, as the friend and client of the Earl of Southampton. The chief defect consists in the parentheses and parenthetic thoughts and descriptions, suited neither to the passion of the speaker, nor the purpose of the person to whom the information is to be given, but manifestly betraying the author himself-not by way of continuous undersong, but palpably, and so as to show themselves addressed to the general reader. However, it is not unimportant to notice how strong a presumption the diction and allusions of this play afford, that, though Shakespeare's acquirements in the dead languages might not be such as we suppose in a learned education, his habits had, nevertheless, been scholastic, and those of a student. For a young author's

first work almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits, and his first observations of life are either drawn from the immediate employments of his youth, and from the characters and images most deeply impressed on his mind in the situations in which those employments had placed him; or else they are fixed on such objects and occurrences in the world, as are easily connected with, and seem to bear upon, his studies and the hitherto exclusive subjects of his meditation. Just as Ben Jonson. who applied himself to the drama after having served in Flanders, fills his earliest plays with true or pretended soldiers, the wrongs and neglects of the former, and the absurd boasts and knavery of their counterfeits. So Lessing's first comedies are placed in the universities, and consist of events and characters conceivable in an academic life.

"I will only further remark the sweet and tempered gravity with which Shakespeare, in the end, draws the only fitting moral which such a drama afforded. Here Rosaline rises up to the full height of Beatrice."