These have been introduced accordingly. Then follows Troilus and Cressida, with the prologue, the volume concluding with Cymbeline.

It was the poet's object to paint life, not in the beau ideal, but as he found it appear before him. This has been shown over and over again; it was too obvious for concealment. He startled those critics who judged by the line and rule, that time rather than reason had shaped, and his adherence to the humanities was passed by to censure his dereliction from certain ordinances and customs which would have shackled his genius, because it exhibited men and manners close to what they really were. In his mixture of tragic and comic scenes he has committed another fault, according to some whose judgment is of value, but who have been accustomed to run into a certain current of popular opinion, joining in its judgments, because they will not boldly judge for themselves. Nature's truth was ever the poet's guide. Thus, according to the schools, it is impossible for comedy and tragedy to be mingled as Shakspeare has mingled them. Suppose a murder or suicide takes place in a particular house, the scene must on no account in any act shift over the way to some inmate of the same house where the murder or suicide occurred, who may be jesting at the moment. While, for example, an individual cuts his own or his wife's throat in the upper room of a five-story building, let out in flats, the people on the lower floor, who have no knowledge of the tragedy at the top of the house, must not jest and joke in a different scene before the audience, because the murder was taking place above. Tragedy above and comedy below stairs, in the same dramatic representation, shocked the critics, for though perfectly natural it was against rule. There is no reason why scenes that might and do occur in this way should not be embodied for stage action. In all connected with the arts nature may be followed. If the scene shifts from the drawing-room in grief to the servants in merriment in the kitchen, it is nature. The scenes of life are a mingled web in almost everything, and, therefore, to represent them as they are is only to paint with fidelity. The critics who support the unities can adhere to their own side of the question; their opponents may certainly do the same. Johnson thought it a fault that Shakspeare too often sacrificed virtue to convenience; but while the stage might be made one of the most striking means for instruction, the promotion of virtue, and the diffusion of wisdom, it never was so made use of, in time past or present. It can only be said that the attendance there is a voluntary act. The multitude go to be pleased, and the noblest examples of heroic virtue are not, at least in the present day, as acceptable as the exhibitions of daring spoliation or the pictures of atrocious vices that excite the mind, or as the cant slang is, "produce a sensation." With too many it is to be feared the sympathies that attach themselves to the coarser and more unscrupulous in vulgar life have the preference. Here Jerry Abershaw on the highway shall outshine a thousand Kosciuskos. The more beautiful, amiable, and charming characters drawn by the poet, banished from his native boards, would not at all interest the audiences that support the present theatres.

We must, therefore, enjoy Shakspeare in the closet. The susceptibilities and tastes of the hour are not with the pure, or reflective, or instructed. The poet will be more honoured than ever in the closet by those whose minds are elevated and refined. In the closet the bungling of some scenes

in the representation, and the want of equal excellence in those who support the different characters, are unobserved, and a just exercise of the student's own imagination, and due attention, will supply amusement and instruction from the pages of the great bard, in the same way we glean them from the great writers of antiquity. In aid of this the country is deeply indebted to Mr. Booth for the care and steadiness he has exhibited in perfecting his valuable and adventurous undertaking, and yet we do not know why we should call it "adventurous," after what we have stated in regard to the true enjoyment of the poet in the closet, since those who enjoy the poet that way rapidly multiply. What interest can the beautiful creation Ariel, in the Tempest, create, or the insanity and sweetness of Ophelia, the sanguinary ambition of Lady Macbeth, and similar heroines of Shakspeare? How can such creations be relished by those who rejoice in the exhibitions of the female characters that accompany the favourite heroes of the present stage? The scum of the gaol, the miscreant over whom is poured, for example, the affected sensibility of the author of "The Miserables," with his flashes of infidelity by way of seasoning.

The sympathies aroused by the varnish daubed over notorious vices, all which, to frame an excuse for them, are affected to be the fruits of social neglect, but which, in reality, are only the excuse for introducing exaggerations of vices, to gratify the polluted tastes that revel in and batten on them, it is these which render the beautiful, the virtuous, and the truly unfortunate so uninteresting. Suffering virtue is too tame; a miscreant of the deepest crime is the glory of the tastes to which we allude. The great, or good, or even vicious characters of history, the latter not being low and mean enough, will not do now. What is an historical novel worth now, even if Scott drew the characters to the life? The bound of time and space in infamy must be passed: the villain must be a superlative. Villany is not "exciting" until it is made as low, black, and degraded as possible, to make the saintship more effective. The crime of Macbeth, for example, was too exalted; that of Köhl, who murdered his friend the other day, and cut him up, butcher as he was, for a sovereign or two, may be made something of to attract popular applause. "His neglected youth and early misery no doubt led him into crime, his stars being in fault." We must still have the dregs of vice, the acme, the finished iniquity, to move us and kindle our sympathies. There must be no exalted feeling, no ambition in our favourite scenes; all must be qualified by a sympathetic pity for the hero miscreant of the stage or novel. Virtuous character is become a tasteless thing with the multitude. The truth of nature, and the adherence to humanity, are of no moment. There is no accounting for tastes, it is true, but there is a mode of accounting for the prevalence of vice so largely by the constant creation of new familiarities with its heroes, and the principles which make and support them, and engender sympathy in their behalf.

These, then, are reasons enough why Shakspeare must in future be enjoyed in private by those who have a regard for what is great and beautiful, for what is imaginative yet true to our common nature. We may deplore the existing state of things, and imagine there must be something out of the way in that which the spread of education does not seem to rectify, but it must be recollected that, after all, taste is not the pro

perty of the many, but of the few, and the elevation of a degree or two in the intellectual scale above the past, with the mass, is not enough. A little time ago, men of taste led society in literature and the arts, but now the multitude judges on its own behalf, characteristically giving us its own ideas of the "sublime and beautiful!" The consequences are plain. The mistake is that the mere mechanical part of education has been taken as the all in all. High thought and elevated ideas cannot be engendered against nature. The current, therefore, has run in its troubled course, and the deposit partakes of the nature of the stream.

There is the advantage, too, that Shakspeare can be read in the present edition as he was, not as he has been acted and often altered by managers or commentators. These changes should not be passed over, but should be considered after mastering the original text, and thus all the light that can be thrown upon his few obscurities, good or bad, will be noted as well as his higher embodyings. Some comments are very superfluous, as they explain that with which everybody is already acquainted, and here we are happily rid of them. It is wonderful how far the language of Shakspeare had advanced towards excellence. With a little alteration in the spelling, it is equal to that of the best poets of the eighteenth century— an era when both the prose and verse of the English tongue, as far as a present judgment can be formed, reached its highest point as a language. Upon this account the language and spelling in the present edition are peculiarly interesting in the way of comparison.

The emendations and changes in the text of the poet by editors and commentators are numerous, and we too often find fanciful, because it became at one time the vogue to notice and comment upon Shakspeare, as it becomes a new fashion with meaner subjects of the hour. Some seem to imagine that the wonderful painting of the poet, his insight into character, and his fidelity to nature, were the result of research and severe deliberation. We do not think so. They were the happy dictation of the heavenly gift of genius, "poeta nascitur non fit." The reasonings of Macbeth with himself, for example, while as yet his intended murder "is but fantastic." The poet looks into the secret things in the heart of the intended assassin as if he were privy to them, and records Macbeth's own wonder that he should yield to the criminal suggestion. "Why do I yield to that suggestion?" Then comes ambition's prize:

Your children shall be kings!

from another quarter feeding his criminal hopes. These are touches beyond the schools. But we must close, expressing high satisfaction at the fidelity and exactness of a work that has fully borne out its original promise.

A SUMMER-DAY late in the year in the wild moorland of the old

Border.

An amber light was on the lochs, a soft mist on field and fell; the salmon-waters were leaping down from rock to rock, or boiling in the deep black pools beneath the birches; the deer were herding in the glens and wooded "dips" that sheltered under the Cheviot range, here, in the debatable land between the northern country and the Southrons, where Bothwell had swept with his mad Moss Troopers, ere the Warden of the Marches let passion run riot for his fair White Queen, and where Belted Will's Tower still rose above its oaks, as when the bugle blast of the Howard sounded from its turrets, and the archers were marshalled against a night-raid of the Scots. On the distant seas, which once were dark with the galleys of Norse pirates, nothing now was in sight but a fisher-boat in the offing; on the heather-moors, which had once echoed with the beat of horses' hoofs, as Douglas or Percy had scoured through the gorse for a dashing Border fray, or a Hotspur piece of " derring-do, there was only now to be heard the flap of a wild-duck's wing as the flocks rose among the sedges, and the sole monarch of earth or sky was a solitary golden eagle soaring upward to the sun.

With a single swoop the bird had swept down from his eyrie among the rocks, as though he were about to drop earthward; then, lifting his grand head, he spread his pinions in the wind that was blowing strong and fresh from Scotland through the heat of the August day, and sailed upward gloriously with slow majestic motion through the light. Far below him lay the white-crested waves of the sea, gleaming afar off; the purple stretch of the dark moors and marshes; the black still tarns; the rounded masses of the woods; higher and higher, leaving earth beneath him, he rose in his royal grandeur, fronting the sun, and soaring

onward, and upward, against the blue skies and the snowy piles of clouds, rejoicing in his solitude, and kingly in his strength.

With his broad wings spread in the sun-gleam, he swept through the silent air in his calm, grand, sovereign passage, with his eyes looking at the luminance which blinds the eyes of men, and his empire taken in the vastness of the space that monarchs cannot gauge, and his pinions stretched in all the glory of his god-like freedom, his unchained liberty of life. Far beneath him, deep down among the tangled mass of heather and brown moor grasses, glistened the lean cruel steel of a barrel, like the shine of a snake's back, pointing upward, while the eagle winged his way aloft; there, in his proud kingship with the sun, how could he note or know the steel tube-scarce larger, from his altitude, than a needle's Lilliputian length of his foe, hidden deep among the gorse and reeds? The sovereign bird rose higher and higher still, his wide wings spread in stately flight. One sharp sullen report rang through the silence; a single grey puff of smoke curled up from the heather; a death-cry echoed on the air, quivering with a human agony; the eagle wheeled once round, a dizzy circle in the summer light, then dropped down through the sunny air-stricken and dead.

Was it more murder when Cæsar fell?

His assassin rose from where he had knelt on one knee among the gorse, while his retriever started the wild-fowl up from the sedges of a broad black pool, and he strode through the bracken and heath to the spot where his shot had brought down the eagle, at a distance, and with an aim, which marked him as one of the first shots in Europe. A hundred yards brought him to the place where his quarry had fallen, and he thrust the heather aside with impatient movement; he was keen in sport as a Shikari, and he had looked for no rarer game to-day than the blackcocks or the snipes, or at very best a heron from the marshes.

On the moor the King-bird lay, the broad wings broken and powerless, the breast-feathers wet and bathed in blood; the piercing eyes, which loved the sun, blind and glazed with the death-film; the life, a moment before strong, fearless, and rejoicing in the light, was gone. A feeling new and strange came on his slayer, as he stood there in the stillness of the solitary moor, alone with the dead eagle lying at his feet. He paused, and leaned on his rifle, looking downward:

"God forgive me. I have taken a life better than my own!"

The words were involuntary, and unlike enough to one whose superb shot had become noted from the jungles of Northern India to the iceplains of Norway; from the bear-haunts of the Danube to the tropic forests of the Amazons. But he stood looking down on the mighty bird, while the red blood welled through the heather, with something that was almost remorse. It looked strangely like slaughter, in the still, golden gleam of the summer day.

If you wonder at it, wait until you see an eagle die on a solitary moorland that was his kingdom by right divine, with all the glorious liberty of life.

The superb shot which you would have challenged the first marksmen in Europe to have beaten, will look, for a second at least, oddly base, and treacherous, and cowardly, when the Lord of the Air lies, like carrion, at your feet.