Arden, as we ramble with its accidental inmates, our spirits are soothed into cheerfulness, and are, occasionally, elevated into gaiety. In the tavern at Eastcheap, with the witty and debauched knight, we meet with "Laughter holding both his sides;" and we surrender ourselves, willingly and delighted, to the inebriation of his influence. We could dwell for a long summer's day amid the fertility of these charming topics; if we were not called from them to a higher region of poetic enjoyment, possessed by the genius of Shakspeare alone; where he reigns sole lord; and where his subjects are the wondrous progeny of his own creative imagination. From whatever quarter of the world, eastern or northern, England may have originally derived her elves and her fairies, Shakspeare undoubtedly formed these little beings, as they flutter in his scenes, from an idea of his own; and they came from his hand, beneficent and friendly to man; immortal and invulnerable; of such corporeal minuteness as to lie in the bell of a cowslip; and yet of such power as to disorder the seasons; as

." to bedim

The noontide sun; call forth the mutinous winds:

And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault,

Set roaring war."

To this little etherial people our Poet has assigned manners and occupations in perfect consistency with their nature; and has sent them forth, in the richest array of fancy, to gambol before us, to astonish and delight us. They resemble nothing upon earth: but if they could exist with man, they would act and speak as they act and speak, with the inspiration of our Poet, in "The Tempest," and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." In contrast with his Ariel, "a spirit too delicate," as the servant of a witch, " to act her earthy and abhorr'd commands:" but ready, under the controll of his philosophic master,

"To answer his best pleasure, be it to fly,
To swim; to dive into the fire; to ride
On the curl'd clouds"

in contrast with this aërial being, the imagination of Shakspeare has formed a monster, the offspring of a hag and a demon; and has introduced him into the scene with a mind and a character appropriately and strictly his own. As the drama, into which are introduced these two beings, beyond the action of Nature, as it is discoverable on this earth, one of them rising above, and one sinking beneath the level of humanity, may be received as the proudest evidence, which has hitherto been produced, of the extent and vigour of man's imagination; so it bids fair to stand unrivalled amid all the loftiest aspirations of the human mind in the ages which are yet to come. The great Milton's imagination alone can be placed in competition with that of Shakspeare; and even Milton's must yield the palm to that which is displayed in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and in the almost divine" Tempest."

or

But having sported a while with the fairies,

as on the sands with printless feet.

They chase the ebbing Neptune,"

"in the spiced Indian air, They dance their ringlets to the whistling wind,"

the mighty Poet turns from their bowers, "overcanopied with luscious woodbine," and plants us on " the blasted heath," trodden by the weird sisters, the Fates of the north; or leads us to the dreadful cave, where they are preparing their infernal caldron, and singing round it the incantations of hell. What a change, from all that is fascinating, to all that is the most appalling to the fancy; and yet each of these scenes is the product of the same astonishing intellect, delighting at one time to lull us on beds of roses, with the spirit of Orpheus, and at another to curdle our blood by throwing at us the viper lock of Alecto. But to show his supreme command of the superhuman world, our royal Poet touches the sepulchre with his magic rod, and the sepulchre opens "its pond'rous and marble jaws," and gives its

dead to "revisit the glimpses of the moon.". The belief that the dead, on some awful occasions, were permitted to assume the semblance of those bodies, in which they had walked upon earth; or that the world of spirits was sometimes disclosed to the eye of mortality, has prevailed in every age of mankind, in the most enlightened as well as in the most dark. When philosophy had attained its widest extent of power, and had enlarged and refined the intellect, not only of its parent Greece, but of its pupil Rome, a spectre is recorded to have shaken the firmness of Dion, the scholar and the friend of Plato; and another to have assayed the constancy of the philosophic and the virtuous Brutus. In the superstitious age of our Elizabeth and of her Scottish successor, the belief in the existence of ghosts and apparitions was nearly universal; and when Shakspeare produced upon his stage the shade of the Danish sovereign, there was not, perhaps, a heart, amid the crowded audience, which did not palpitate with fear. But in any age, however little tainted it might be with superstitious credulity, would the ghost of royal Denmark excite an agitating interest, with such awful solemnity is be introduced, so sublimely terrible is his tale of woe, and such are the effects of his appearance on the persons of the drama, who are its immediate witnesses. We catch, indeed, the terrors of Horatio and the young prince; and if the illusion be not so strong as to seise in the first instance on our own minds, it acts on them in its result from theirs. The melancholy, which previously preyed on the spirits of the youthful Hamlet, was certainly heightened into insanity by this ghostly conference; and from this dreadful moment his madness is partly assumed, and partly unaffected. It is certain that no spectre, ever brought upon the stage, can be compared with this phantom, created by the power of Shakspeare. The apparition of the host, in "The Lover's Progress," by Fletcher, is too contemptible to be mentioned on this occasion: the spirit of Almanzor's mother, in "The Conquest of Granada," by Dryden, is not of a higher class; and even the ghost of Darius, in "The Persians,"

of the mighty and sublime Eschylus, shrinks into insignificance before this of the murdered Majesty of Denmark. For his success, indeed, in this instance, Shakspeare is greatly indebted to the superior awfulness of his religion; and the use which he has made of the Romish purgatory must be regarded as supremely felicitous. When the imagination of Shakspeare sported without controll amid these creations of its own, it unquestionably lifted him high above any competition. As he plays with the fairies in their bowers of eglantine and woodbine; or directs the operations in the magic cave; or calls the dead from the "cold obstruction" of the tomb," to make night hideous," he may challenge the poets of every age, from that of Homer to the present, and be fearless of the event. But either from his ignorance of them, which is not easily credible, or from his disregard to them, or rather perhaps from his desire to escape from their yoke, he violates without remorse the dramatic unities of time and place, contenting himself to preserve the unity of action or design, without which, indeed, nothing worthy of the name of composition can exist. And who steps forward, in this instance of his licentious liberty, as the champion of Shakspeare, but that very critic who brings such charges against him as a poet and a dramatist, that, if they were capable of being substantiated, would overturn him from his lofty pedestal; and would prove the object of our homage, during two centuries, to be a little deformed image, which we had with the most silly idolatry mistaken for a god? But Johnson's defense of Shakspeare seems to be as weak as his attack; though in either case the want of power in the warrior is concealed under the glare of his ostentatious arms. It is unquestionable that, since the days of the patrician of Argos, recorded by Horace *, who would sit for hours in the vacant theatre, and give his applause to actors who were not there, no. man, unattended by a keeper, ever mistook the wooden and narrow platform of a stage for the fields of Philippi or Agincourt; or the painted canvas, shifting under his -Fuit haud ignobilis Argis, &c. Epis. lib. ii. Ep. ii. l. 128.

**

eye, for the palace of the Ptolemies or the Cæsars; or the walk, which had brought him from his own house to the theatre, for a voyage across the Mediterranean to Alexandria; or the men and women, with whom he had probably conversed in the common intercourse of life, for old Romans and Grecians. Such a power of illusion, quite incompatible with any degree of sanity of mind, has never been challenged by any critic, as attached to poetry and the stage; and it is adduced, in his accustomed style of argument, by Johnson, only for the purpose of confounding his adversaries with absurdity, or of baffling them with ridicule. But there is a power of illusion, belonging to genuine poetry, which, without overthrowing the reason, can seise upon the imagination, and make it subservient to its purposes. This is asserted by Horace in that often cited passage: "Ille per extentum funem mihi posse videtur

Ire poëta, meum qui pectus inaniter angit,
Irritat, mulcet falsis terroribus implet

Ut magus; et modo me Thebis modo ponit Athenis." Assisted by the scenery, the dresses of the actors, and their fine adaptation of the voice and countenance to the design of the poet, this illusion becomes so strong as intimately to blend us with the fictitious personages whom we see before us. We know, indeed, that we are seated upon benches, and are spectators only of a poetic fiction: but the power, which mingles us with the agents upon the stage, is of such a nature that we feel, as it were, one interest with them: we resent the injuries which they suffer, we rejoice at the good fortune which betides them: the pulses of our hearts beat in harmony with theirs; and as the tear gushes from their eyes, it swells and overflows in ours. To account for this influence of poetic imitation; for this contagion of represented passion belongs to the metaphysician : the sole business of the critic is to remark and to reason from the fact. It is unquestionable that our imaginations are, to a certain extent, under the controll of authentic poetry, and especially of that poetry which employs the scenic imitation for its instrument. The stream of passion, like a stream of electricity, rushes