the execution. Nor is it possible that the writer of such verses can have wanted an ear for melody, however capriciously he may have sometimes experimented upon language, in the effort, as we conceive, to bring a deeper, more expressive music out of it than it would readily yield. We add one of his elegies as a specimen of his more elaborate style:

Language, thou art too narrow and too weak

To ease us now; great sorrows cannot speak.
If we could sigh our accents, and weep words,
Grief wears, and lessens, that tears breath affords.
Sad hearts, the less they seem, the more they are;
So guiltiest men stand mutest at the bar;
Not that they know not, feel not their estate,
But extreme sense hath made them desperate.
Sorrow! to whom we owe all that we be,
Tyrant in the fifth and greatest monarchy,
Was 't that she did possess all hearts before
Thou hast killed her, to make thy empire more?
Knew'st thou some would, that knew her not, lament,
As in a deluge perish the innocent?

Was 't not enough to have that palace won,
But thou must raze it too, that was undone?
Had thou stay'd there, and looked out at her eyes,
All had adored thee, that now from thee flies;
For they let out more light than they took in;
They told not when, but did the day begin.
She was too sapphirine and clear for thee;
Clay, flirt, and jet now thy fit dwellings be.
Alas, she was too pure, but not too weak;
Whoe'er saw crystal ordnance but would break?
And, if we be thy conquest, by her fall
Thou hast lost thy end; in her we perish all :
Or, if we live, we live but to rebel,

That know her better now, who knew her well.
If we should vapour out, and pine and die,
Since she first went, that were not misery;

She changed our world with hers; now she is gone,
Mirth and prosperity is oppression.

For of all moral virtues she was all

That ethics speak of virtues cardinal:
Her soul was Paradise; the cherubin

Set to keep it was grace, that kept out sin:

She had no more than let in death, for we
All reap consumption from one fruitful tree.
God took her hence lest some of us should love
Her, like that plant, him and his laws above;
And, when we tears, he mercy shed in this,

To raise our minds to heaven, where now she is ;
Who, if her virtues would have let her stay,
We had had a saint, have now a holiday.

Her heart was that strange bush, where sacred fire,
Religion, did not consume, but inspire

Such piety, so chaste use of God's day,
That what we turn to feast she turned to pray,
And did prefigure here, in devout taste,
The rest of her high Sabbath, which shall last.
Angels did hand her up, who next God dwell,
For she was of that order whence most fell.
Her body 's left with us, lest some had said
She could not die, except they saw her dead;
For from less virtue, and less beauteousness,
The Gentiles framed them Gods and Goddesses.
The ravenous earth that now woos her to be
Earth too will be a Lemnia;1 and the tree
That wraps that crystal in a wooden round 2
Shall be took up spruce filled with diamond.
And we, her sad glad friends, all bear a part
Of grief, for all would break a Stoic's heart.

SHAKSPEARE'S MINOR POEMS.

IN the long list of the minor names of the Elizabethan poetry appears the bright name of William Shakspeare. Shakspeare published his Venus and Adonis in 1593, and his Tarquin and Lucrece in 1594; his Passionate Pilgrim did not appear till 1599; the Sonnets not till 1609. It is probable, however, that the firstmentioned of these pieces, which, in his dedication of it to the Earl 1 The earth of the isle of Lemnos was supposed by the ancients to be medicinal.

2 We have ventured to introduce this word instead of "Tomb," which is the reading in the edition before us (Poems, &c., 8vo. Lond. 1669), and which cannot possibly be right.

of Southampton, he calls the first heir of his invention, was written some years before its publication; and, although the Tarquin and Lucrece may have been published immediately after it was composed, it, too, may be accounted an early production. We have no positive evidence that any wholly original drama, such as would be considered a work of invention, had yet been produced by Shakspeare; and, notwithstanding the force of some of the reasons which have been lately urged for carrying back some of his original plays to a date preceding the year 1593, we are still inclined to think it probable that all the other poetry we have of Shakspeare's was composed at least before he had fairly given himself up to dramatic poetry, or had done anything in that line to which he could properly set his name, or by which he could hope that he would live and be remembered among the poets of his country. But, although this minor poetry of Shakspeare sounds throughout like the utterance of that spirit of highest invention and sweetest song before it had found its proper theme, much is here also, immature as it may be, that is still all Shakspearian, the vivid conception, the inexhaustible fertility and richness of thought and imagery, the glowing passion, the gentleness withal that is ever of the poetry as it was of the man, the enamored sense of beauty, the living words, the ear-delighting and heartenthralling music; nay, even the dramatic instinct itself, and the idea at least, if not always the realization, of that sentiment of all subordinating and consummating art of which his dramas are the most wonderful exemplification in literature.

Resuming now the history of that dramatic poetry which is the chief glory of the Elizabethan age of our literature, we begin with a notice of these productions, which constitute by much the most valuable part of it.

1 Both by Mr. Knight and by Mr. Collier. Mr. Knight conceives, also, that the Tarquin and Lucrece is a composition of seven or eight years' later date than the Venus and Adonis.

SHAKSPEARE'S DRAMATIC WORKS.

.

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE, born in 1564, is enumerated as one of the proprietors of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1589; is sneered at by Robert Greene in 1592, in terms which seem to imply that he had already acquired a considerable reputation as a dramatist and a writer in blank verse, though the satirist insinuates that he was enabled to make the show he did chiefly by the plunder of his predecessors;1 and in 1598 is spoken of by a critic of the day as indisputably the greatest of English dramatists, both for tragedy and comedy, and as having already produced his Two Gentlemen of Verona, Comedy of Errors, Love's Labours Lost, Love's Labours Won (generally supposed to be All's Well that Ends Well),2 Midsummer Night's Dream, Merchant of Venice, Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo and Juliet. There is no ground, however, for feeling assured, and, indeed, it is rather improbable, that we have here a complete catalogue of the plays written by Shakspeare up to this date; nor is the authority of so evidently loose a statement, embodying, it is to be supposed, the mere report of the town, sufficient even to establish absolutely the authenticity of every one of the plays enumerated. It is very possible, for example, that Meres may be mistaken in assigning Titus Andronicus to Shakspeare; and, on the other hand, he may be the author of Pericles, and may have already written that play and some others, although Meres does not mention them. The only other direct or positive information we possess on this subject is, that a History called Titus Andronicus, presumed to be the play afterwards published as Shakspeare's, was entered for publication at Stationers' Hall in 1593; that the

1 "There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in a country." - Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, 1592.

2 But the Rev. Joseph Hunter, in the Second Part of New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare, 8vo. Lond. 1844, and previously in a Disquisition on the Tempest, separately published, has contended that it must be the Tempest; and I have more recently stated some reasons for supposing that it may be the Taming of the Shrew (see The English of Shakespeare, 1857; Prolegomena, pp. 8, 9).

3 Palla lis Tamia; Wit's Treasury. Being the Second Part of Wit's Commonwealth. By Francis Meres. 1598, p. 282.

Second Part of Henry VI. (if it is by Shakspeare), in its original form of The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, was published in 1594; the Third Part of Henry VI. (if by Shakspeare), in its original form of The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, in 1595; his Richard II., Richard III., and Romeo and Juliet, in 1597; Love's Labours Lost and the First Part of Henry IV. in 1598 (the latter, however, having been entered at Stationers' Hall the preceding year); "a corrected and augmented" edition of Romeo and Juliet in 1599; Titus Andronicus (supposing it to be Shakspeare's), the Second Part of Henry IV., Henry V., in its original form, the Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, and the Merchant of Venice, in 1600 (the last having been entered at Stationers' Hall in 1598); the Merry Wives of Windsor, in its orig inal form, in 1602 (but entered at Stationers' Hall the year before 1); Hamlet in 1603 (entered likewise the year before); a second edition of Hamlet, "enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy," in 1604; Lear in 1608, and Troilus and Cressida, and Pericles, in 1609 (each being entered the preceding year); Othello not till 1622, six years after the author's death; and all the other plays, namely, the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Winter's Tale, the Comedy of Errors, King John, All's Well that Ends Well, As You Like It, King Henry VIII., Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, Macbeth, the Taming of the Shrew, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, the Tempest, Twelfth Night, the First Part of Henry VI. (if Shakspeare had anything to do with that play 2), and also the perfect editions of Henry V., the Merry Wives of Windsor, and the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI., not, so far as is known, till they appear, along with those formerly printed, in the first folio, in 1623.

Such, then, is the sum of the treasure that Shakspeare has left us; but the revolution which his genius wrought upon our national

1 This first sketch of the Merry Wives of Windsor has been reprinted for the Shakespeare Society, under the care of Mr. Halliwell, 1842.

2 See, upon this question, Mr. Knight's Essay upon the Three Parts of King Henry VI., and King Richard III., in the Seventh Volume of his Library Edition of Shakspere, pp. 1-119. And see also Mr. Halliwell's Introduction to the reprint of The First Sketches of the Second and Third Parts of King Henry the Sixth (the First Part of the Contention and the True Tragedy), edited by him for the Shakespeare Society, 1843.