we behold in the first part the powerful king, who by his harsh grandeur and reckless iron energy of will, brings to mind the characterization of King John, Henry VI., or Richard III., sinking into weakness and insignificance before the virtue of a high-minded woman, and suddenly enslaved by an unworthy passion, neglecting his great designs to carry on an intrigue, or to spin out love-ditties. All human grandeur, power, and sovereignty, have no stability if they be not planted on the soil of genuine morality, without which the highest energy of man is too feeble to resist the assaults of temptations when directed against his weak side. This is the truthful idea which forms the living centre of the first part. But the fall of true nobleness and energy is not irremediable; they may rise again, and derive strength from that very virtue against which they were tempted to offend, but which by the good disposition of Providence was too strong for them. With this consolatory lesson, and the masterly, deeply affecting, and sublimely noble picture of a wife, who, to guard her own virtue, and to save her sovereign from crime, is ready to sacrifice her own life, the second act closes, and forms a natural transition to the second part, which sets forth in the brightest light the native beauty of true heroism. And not the king alone, but his famous son also, serves to illustrate this truth. For the Black Prince has likewise been trained in the same school; at the close of the second act, by his prompt but silent submission to his father's commands in direct opposition to his own wishes, he displays the same self-control to which the king has roused himself. Such lofty moral strength, when it comes to the aid of right, nothing can withstand. The haughty John of France, who, conscious of the injustice of his claim, nevertheless seeks to maintain it, and from a blind desire of revenge would not scruple to violate the faith which his son has pledged, is defeated, notwithstanding the superiority of his force, and carried prisoner to England. As in "Henry the Fifth," so here, also, greatness of heart and mind gains with small outward means a complete victory over outward power and influence. At the close of the third act, Edward proves the ascendancy which he has now acquired over himself by the pardon which he grants to the captive townsmen of Calais, and the Black Prince preserves

throughout the same humble and modest spirit, uncorrupted by the great and glorious victories he had won. Thus forcibly does the whole play set forth the noble lesson, that true heroism, and the conquest and empire of the world, go hand in hand with a man's mastery over himself. Life and history are thus depicted from the intrinsic law of their development, and form the true notion of the intellectual power; for mind is not truly such except by the exercise of a positive and negative power over itself. Thus understood, this drama easily connects itself with the great cycle of historical tragedies which commences with "Richard the Second." The Black Prince was the father, and Edward the Third the grandfather, of Richard. The reign of the latter and that of Edward are direct organical contraries, both having the same subject; which, however, is pourtrayed negatively in the former, and in its positive sense in the latter. The royal dignity is sketched from two opposite aspects; here indirectly, and as it ought not to be; there directly, and in its true essence. Richard was no true king: he forfeited his hereditary kingdom simply because he could not rule himself. The play of "Edward the Third" forms the introduction-the hanging-sign as it were to the lofty edifice which the poet has constructed out of the materials of English history, from Richard the Second down to Richard the Third. For in it we have written, in large characters, what ought to be done by a king to save his people from the times of misery which flowed, uninterruptedly from the abuse which Richard made of his royal rights, and from the injustice of Henry the Fourth; while on the other hand it was the prelude and prototype of the heroic deeds of Henry the Fifth, which formed the only bright spot in this long æra of dark suffering. In short, the manner in which this piece adjusts itself to the other dramatic histories is so perfectly Shakspearean, that on this account alone I am disposed to regard it as genuine. But the characters and language also speak loudly in its favour. The former we have already stated to be harsh and rugged sketches, in the manner of "Henry the Sixth" and "Richard the Second," and evidently drawn with an unsteady hand; but this rough sketching possesses poetic vigour, and is a proof, so far, that the Edward the Third" must have been written about the same

time with the two others-probably in 1591, and soon after the "Henry the Sixth," with which monarch's weak and timid policy the reign of Edward furnishes a happy and encouraging contrast. This early origin may at the same time serve to account for the slowness with which the representation at the beginning of the third act drags somewhat heavily, and from the fact of some of the characters-those of the Queen and Louis, for instance-being without depth or colour, and for the way in which others are treated too much in the light of subordinates. The fulness and vividness with which, in spite of the slight employment of the means of art, the characters of Edward the Black Prince, the Countess and her father, of Villiers, Copland, King John and his sons, and of Salisbury, are thrown out, must be recognized at once by every intelligent reader. The description of the King's first consciousness of his rising passion for the Countess, his attempt to fly from her society, and yet involuntarily hesitates, and remains as it were enchained, and the passionate ardour with which, in vain seeking for poetic images to express its intensity, he depicts to the astonished Louis her beauty and his love; and lastly, the concluding scene of the second act, where the King, reminded by his heroic and warlike son of the great designs he has in hand, and of his faithful consort, is on the point of listening to the dictates of his better conscience, when a smile from the Countess again seduces him from the right path; or those incomparable scenes of the third and fourth acts, where the father with magnanimous severity forbids any succours to be carried to his son, in order to give him opportunity to approve his valour and generalship, and to allow him free scope for glory,—or where the Prince, hemmed in by a free six times as great as his own, in the very spirit of mediæval chivalry devotes himself to death, and yet by God's help, who by predictions and ominous signs scatters fear and panic among his foes, gains an unequalled and glorious victory. Who, except Shakspeare, was capable of writing these scenes? They breathe his spirit throughout; all the most vocal chords of his soul seem to be sensibly touched therein; they are worked up with such perfect truth out of the very flesh and blood of human nature, and out of the inmost marrow of life and history, that I do not hesitate to assert, that although, in his later works, Shakspear

may have written more profoundly, more thoughtfully, and more pregnantly, yet none of his poems are more sublime or more touching. Add to this the language, which is throughout Shakspeare's it is replete with his peculiar turns and figures, and although it is as yet irregular, awkward, and pretending, it is nevertheless, in its gushing fulness, its poetic force, and transporting flights, the energetic language of history. If the play is not Shakspeare's, as the English critics maintain, then truly it is a disgrace to them not to have done anything to rescue from forgetfulness this second Shakspeare-this twin brother of their great poet. In closing the few remarks I have felt called on to make upon this noble poem, I cannot do better than request the reader to peruse it again and again, in order to judge for himself of its merits. An excellent translation of it is given by Tieck in his "Vier Schauspielen Shakspeare's."

Of the last piece which bears the name of Shakspeare with a disputed right, I have less to say. It bears the title of "A Yorkshire Tragedy." It is entered at Stationers' Hall, 2d May, 1608, for the bookseller Pavier, with a note, "Written by Wm. Se." It was printed the same year, and again in 1619 with Shakspeare's name at full length on the title-page. It is also known to have been acted at the Globe. The name of the publisher, it is true, awakens an unfavourable prejudice. It is the same that presented our poet with the authorship of "Sir John Oldcastle." However, this is removed, when, on the one hand, we reflect that he was the publisher of an unquestioned drama, the "Henry the Fifth," and of the two last parts of "Henry the Sixth," and on the other hand, that the note on the registry at Stationers' Hall, could, if false, have had no object or utility, since they were never made known. Still more completely does doubt vanish, when we proceed to a close examination of the piece itself. Collier at least (iii. 51) has no hesitation to pronounce it a work of Shakspeare's. It details, in a brief, simple, and straightforward way, a crime committed in Yorkshire in 1604, and which at the time excited general attention. A father ruined both in mind and fortune by a passion for gambling, murders his two children, and attempts the life of his wife. Such is the simple plot. When we apply to it the standard supplied by Shakspeare's

greatest tragedies, "Lear," "Macbeth," &c. we must, no doubt, pronounce it trifling and insignificant, and far beneath the dignity of tragedy. It neither sounds the inmost depths of human character, nor elucidates life under any special aspect of the tragic view of things; it possesses neither complication of action nor skill in composition; no great and pregnant characters fully and completely worked out. The whole keeps itself within the ordinary range of every-day life. But, on the other hand, the piece sets up no pretension to the name of an historical picture; it is simply a dramatic portrait, and nothing more—a genre-painting, designed to exhibit an ordinary occurrence of life with true poetic truth and fidelity. As the portrait is entitled to rank as a work of art only so far as it does not confine itself strictly to copying nature, but attempts to give something more than nature; i. e. so far as it exposes to view not merely the outward form, but also the inward man fully and entirely in his organic unity,-although this inward character is in truth a succession of single moments, and thereby exhibits itself as a living impression of the universal stamp of humanity, so the "Yorkshire Tragedy" represents not merely a particular actual event, but also the whole series of causes which lead to its intrinsic truths, and the totality of its ideal influences, which in the reality lie wide apart from each other, or else are not immediately apparent. It is thus that the present piece attains to a general interest, and rises to the dignity of a true dramatic work of art, which, compared with the great tragedies already named, takes lower rank only because the universal and the ideal is immediately elucidated in them, whereas it is set forth mediately and partially in the former, in the exact degree that the represented matter is calculated to illustrate it. Every unprejudiced reader of the "Yorkshire Tragedy" will, I think, recognize the hand of Shakspeare, not only in the composition, in spite of its great simplicity, but also in the characters and the language. Single speeches-as, for instance, that of the unhappy wife and mother, which occurs almost at the opening,

"What will become of us? All will away!

My husband never ceases in expense,

Both to consume his credit and his house," &c.