as a whole but what is bad or worthless in an age generally dies with the age: so that only the great and good of the past touches us; while of the present we are most touched by that which is little and mean. The shriekings and jabberings of an age's folly almost always drown, for the time being, the eloquence of its wisdom: but the eloquence lives and speaks after the jabberings have gone silent, God's air refusing to propagate them. So let our youth now and then breathe and listen an hour or two in the old intellectual fatherland, where all the foul noises have long since died away, leaving the pure music to sound up full and clear.

INTRODUCTION.

Date of the Composition.

MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM was registered - at the Stationers' October 8, 1600, and two quarto ediof it were published in the course of that year. The is not known to have been printed again till it reaped in the folio of 1623, where the repetition of certain rints shows it to have been printed from one of the to copies. In all three of these copies, however, the cing is remarkably clear and correct for the time, insoh that modern editors have little difficulty about the Probably none of the Poet's dramas has reached us more satisfactory state.

he play is first heard of in the list given by Francis es in his Palladis Tamia, 1598. But it was undoubtwritten several years before that time; and I am not re that any editor places the writing at a later date than 4. This brings it into the same period with King John, g Richard the Second, and the finished Romeo and Juand the internal marks of style naturally sort it into company. Verplanck, however, thinks there are some sages which relish strongly of an earlier time; while

from the press.

mingled occasionally with the deeper tonings of " years that bring the philosophic mind," as to argue that they were wrought into the structure of the play not long before it came The part of the Athenian lovers certainly has a good deal that, viewed by itself, would scarce do credit even to such a boyhood as Shakespeare's must have been. On the other hand, there is a large philosophy in Theseus's discourse of "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet,". a manly judgment in his reasons for preferring the "tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe," and a bracing freshness in the short dialogue of the chase, all in the best style of the author's second period. Perhaps, however, what seem the defects of the former, the fanciful quirks and far-fetched conceits, were wisely designed, in order to invest the part with such an air of dreaminess and unreality as would better sort with the scope and spirit of the piece, and preclude a disproportionate resentment of some naughty acts into which those love-bewildered frailties are betrayed.

There is at least a rather curious coincidence, which used to be regarded as proving that the play was not written till after the Summer of 1594. I refer to Titania's superb description, in ii. 1, of the strange misbehaviour of the weather, which she ascribes to the fairy bickerings. I can quote but a part of it:

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts

Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose;
And on old Heims' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the Spring, the Summer,
The childing Autumn, angry Winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazèd world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which:
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension.

For the other part of the coincidence, Strype in his Annals gives the following passage from a discourse by the Rev. Dr. King: "And see whether the Lord doth not threaten us much more, by sending such unseasonable weather and storms of rain among us; which if we will observe, and compare it with what is past, we may say that the course of Nature is very much inverted. Our years are turned upside down our Summers are no Summers; our harvests are no harvests; our seed-times are no seed-times. For a great space of time scant any day hath been seen that it hath not rained." Dyce indeed scouts the supposal that Shakespeare had any allusion to this eccentric conduct of the elements in the Summer of 1594, pronouncing it “ridiculous"; but I do not quite see it so; albeit I am apt enough to believe that most of the play was written before that date. And surely, the truth of the allusion being granted, all must admit that passing events have seldom been turned to better account in the service of poetry.

Hardly suited to the Stage.

I can hardly imagine this play ever to have been very successful on the stage; and I am sure it could not be made to succeed there now. Still we are not without contemporary evidence that it had at least a fair amount of fame. And we have authentic information that it was performed at the house of Dr. John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, on Sunday, the 27th of September, 1631. The actor of Bottom's part was on that occasion sentenced by a Puritan tribunal to sit twelve hours in the porter's room of the Bishop's palace, wearing the ass's head. This Dr. Williams was the very able but far from faultless man who was treated so harshly by Laud, and gave the King such crooked counsel

in the case of Strafford, and spent his last years in mute sorrow at the death of his royal master, and had his life written by the wise, witty, good Bishop Hacket.

Sources of the Plot.

The Poet has been commonly supposed to have taken the ground-work of this play from The Knight's Tale of Chaucer. But the play has hardly any notes of connection with the Tale except the mere names of Theseus, Hippolyta, and Philostrate, the latter of which is the name assumed by Arcite in the Tale. The Life of Theseus, in North's translation of Plutarch doubtless furnished something towards the parts of the hero and his " bouncing Amazon "; while Golding's translation of Ovid's story of Pyramus and Thisbe probably supplied hints towards the interlude. So much as relates to Bottom and his fellows evidently came fresh from Nature as she had passed under the Poet's eye. The linking of these clowns with the ancient tragic tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, so as to draw the latter within the region of modern farce, is not less original than droll. How far it may have expressed the Poet's judgment touching the theatrical doings of the time, were perhaps a question more curious than profitable. The names of Oberon, Titania, and Robin Goodfellow were made familiar by the surviving relics of Gothic and Druidical mythology; as were also many particulars in their habits, mode of life, and influence in human affairs. Hints and allusions scattered through many preceding writers might be produced, showing that the old superstition had been grafted into the body of Christianity, where it had shaped itself into a regular system, so as to mingle in the lore of the nursery, and hold an influential