he is known to have been the representative of Adam in As You Like It.' If the names of the actors prefixed to Every Man in his Humour,' were arranged in the same order as the persons of the drama, he must have performed the part of Old Knowell' in that comedy. Whatever Shakspeare may have been in the practical part of his art, the speech which he has put into Hamlet's mouth, in his directions to the players, affords sufficient evidence that he understood the theory of the histrionic art perfectly well.

It is now impossible to fix the date of Shakspeare's first appearance as a dramatic writer. When he appeared in this character he had many illustrious cotemporaries, but no rival; at one bound he placed himself foremost and alone in the race of fame. "The cotemporaries of Shakspeare were great and remarkable men. They had winged imaginations, and made lofty flights. They saw above, below, or around; but they had not the taste or discrimination which he possessed, nor the same extensive vision. They drew correctly and vividly for particular aspects, while he towered above his subject, and surveyed it on all sides, from top to toe.' If some saw farther than others, they were dazzled at the riches before them, and grasped hastily, and with little care. They were perplexed with that variety which he made subservient to the general effect. They painted a portrait, or two, or three only, as though afraid of confusion. He, on the other hand, managed and marshalled all. His characters lie, like strata of earth, one under another; or, to use his own expression, matched in mouth like bells, each under each.' We need only look at the plays of Falstaff, where there are wits, and rogues, and simpletons, of a dozen shades,-Falstaff, Hal, Poins, Bardolph, Nym, Pistol, Hostess, Shallow, Silence, Slender, to say nothing of those rich recruits, equal only to a civil war. Now, no one else has done this, and it must be presumed that none have been able to do it; Marlow, Marston, Webster, Decker, Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher,—a strong phalanx, yet none have proved themselves competent to so difficult a task."

Besides his thirty-six plays, commencing with the first part of Henry VI. and ending with the Tempest, all of which were certainly produced betwixt the years 1589 and 1613, Shakspeare wrote some poetical pieces which were published separately: viz. Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim, A Lover's Complaint, and a volume of Sonnets. These pieces have indeed been entirely eclipsed by the unrivalled splendour of dramas from the same pen, but they are noble compositions nevertheless, and worthy in all respects of the golden age of our literature. The Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, appeared in 1593-4, and were both dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton. That young nobleman proved a munificent patron. Rowe relates, that on one occasion he presented the poet with a thousand pounds, a sum equivalent to at least five thousand pounds in our own day. The earls of Pembroke and Montgomery also vied with each other, and with Southampton, in the patronage of the rising dramatist, who was also soon still more highly flattered by the special notice and favour of Queen Elizabeth, at whose desire he is said to have composed his Merry Wives of Windsor,' with the view of exhibiting Falstaff in the character of a lover. How well Shakspeare knew to compliment royal vanity, the following lines in the Midsummer Night's Dream,' testify:

"That very time I saw (but thou could'st not)
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all arm'd: a certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west;

And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts:
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quench'd in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon;
And the imperial vot'ress passed on,

In maiden meditation, fancy free."

With such patronage, and such skill to avail himself of it, it is not matter of surprise that our poet, unlike too many of his gifted contemporaries, should have quickly improved his finances and risen in the world. So early as the year 1596, he possessed a share in the Blackfriar's theatre, and the next year he purchased one of the best houses in his native town, to which, in 1602, he added a small estate of one hundred and seven acres of land in the neighbourhood. Nor did this flow of worldly prosperity interrupt his friendly connexions with his less fortunate and probably less prudent brethren, although one at least of the gifted circle had been exalted by the public voice into the place of a rival. Much has been written about the secret enmity which is supposed to have existed between Jonson and Shakspeare, but the story has been amply disproved by Mr Gifford, who expresses his fixed persuasion that the two great dramatists were friends and associates till one of them finally retired from public notice; that no feud, no jealousy, ever disturbed their connexion; that Shakspeare was pleased with Jonson, and that Jonson loved and admired Shakspeare.

The profession of a player was certainly not congenial to our poet's inclinations. That he regarded himself as dishonoured by it appears from his CX. and CXI. sonnets, in which he expresses regret that he had

"Made himself a motley to the view;"

and bids his friend upbraid Fortune

"That did not better for his life provide

Than public means, which public manners breed."

He seems to have finally quitted the metropolis and retired to his beloved Stratford about the year 1613. Henceforward even tradition is silent regarding him. We only know that he died on the 23d of April 1616, the anniversary of his birth, and the same day on which expired, in Spain, his great contemporary Cervantes. On the 25th of April, his body was interred on the north side of the chancel of the parish church, where a monument was subsequently erected to his memory. In the year 1741, a very noble and beautiful monument was raised to him in Westminster abbey. His wife survived him eight years. He left two daughters who were both married, and from one of whom sprung Lady Barnard, our poet's last lineal descendant, who died in 1670.

The powers of language have been exhausted in dissertations upon the genius, and criticisms on the dramas of Shakspeare. The following masterly and eloquent encomium on our great dramatist, as coming

from the pen of a foreign critic, ought to be impartial at least: "The distinguishing property," says Schlegel, "of the dramatic poet is the capability of transporting himself so completely into every situation, even the most unusual, that he is enabled, as plenipotentiary of the whole human race, without particular instructions for each separate case, to act and speak in the name of every individual. It is the power of endowing the creatures of his imagination with such self-existent energy, that they afterwards act in each conjuncture according to general laws of nature: the poet institutes, as it were, experiments, which are received with as much authority as if they had been made on real objects. Never, perhaps, was there so comprehensive a talent for the delineation of character as Shakspeare's. It not only grasps the diversities of rank, sex, and age, down to the dawnings of infancy; not only do the king and the beggar, the hero and the pickpocket, the sage and the idiot, speak and act with equal truth; not only does he transport himself to distant ages and foreign nations, and portray in the most accurate manner, with only a few apparent violations of costume, the spirit of the ancient Romans, of the French in their wars with the English, of the English themselves during a great part of their history, of the Southern Europeans (in the serious part of many comedies), the cultivated society of that time, and the former rude and barbarous state of the North; his human characters have not only such depth and precision that they cannot be arranged under classes, and are inexhaustible, even in conception :-no-this Prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical world of spirits; calls up the midnight ghost; exhibits before us his witches amidst their unhallowed mysteries; peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs :—and, these beings existing only in imagination, possess such truth and consistency, that, even when deformed monsters like Caliban, he extorts the conviction, that if there should be such beings, they would so conduct themselves. In a word, as he carried with him the most fruitful and daring fancy into the kingdom of nature, on the other hand, he carries nature into the regions of fancy, lying beyond the confines of reality. We are lost in astonishment at seeing the extraordinary, the wonderful, and the unheard of, in such intimate nearness.

"If Shakspeare deserves our admiration for his characters, he is equally deserving it for his exhibition of passion, taking this word in its widest signification, as including every mental condition, every tone from indifference or familiar mirth to the wildest rage and despair. He gives us the history of minds; he lays open to us, in a single word, a whole series of preceding conditions. His passions do not at first stand displayed to us in all their height, as is the case with so many tragic poets, who, in the language of Lessing, are thorough masters of the legal style of love. He paints in a most inimitable manner, the gradual pro.. gress from the first origin. He gives,' as Lessing says, a living picture of all the most minute and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls; of all the imperceptible advantages which it there gains; of all the stratagems by which every other passion is made subservient to it, till it becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions.' Of all poets, perhaps, he alone has portrayed the mental diseases, melancholy, delirium, lunacy, with such inexpressible, and, in every respect, definite truth, that the physician may enrich his observations from them in the same manner as from real cases.

"And yet Johnson has objected to Shakspeare, that his pathos is not always natural and free from affectation. There are, it is true, passages, though, comparatively speaking, very few, where his poetry exceeds the bounds of true dialogue, where a too soaring imagination, a too luxuriant wit, rendered the complete dramatic forgetfulness of himself impossible. With this exception, the censure originates only in a fanciless way of thinking, to which every thing appears unnatural that does not suit its own tame insipidity. Hence, an idea has been formed of simple and natural pathos, which consists in exclamations destitute of imagery, and nowise elevated above every-day life. But energetica! passions electrify the whole of the mental powers, and will, consequently, in highly favoured natures, express themselves in an ingenious and figurative manner. It has been often remarked, that indignation gives wit; and, as despair occasionally breaks out into laughter, it may sometimes also give vent to itself in antithetical comparisons.

"Besides, the rights of the poetical form have not been duly weighed. Shakspeare, who was always sure of his object, to move in a sufficiently powerful manner when he wished to do so, has occasionally, by indulging in a freer play, purposely moderated the impressions when too painful, and immediately introduced a musical alleviation of our sympathy. He had not those rude ideas of his art which many moderns seem to have, as if the poet, like the clown in the proverb, must strike twice on the same place. An ancient rhetorician delivered a caution against dwelling too long on the excitation of pity; for nothing, he said, dries so soon as tears; and Shakspeare acted conformably to this ingenious maxim, without knowing it.

"The objection, that Shakspeare wounds our feelings by the open display of the most disgusting moral odiousness, harrows up the mind unmercifully, and tortures even our minds by the exhibition of the most insupportable and hateful spectacles, is one of much greater importance He has never, in fact, varnished over wild and blood-thirsty passions with a pleasing exterior,—never clothed crime and want of principle with a false show of greatness of soul; and in that respect he is every way deserving of praise. Twice he has portrayed downright villains; and the masterly way in which he has contrived to elude impressions of too painful a nature, may be seen in Iago and Richard the Third. The constant reference to a petty and puny race must cripple the boldness of the poet. Fortunately for his art, Shakspeare lived in an age extremely susceptible of noble and tender impressions, but which had still enough of the firmness inherited from a vigorous olden time, not to shrink back with dismay from every strong and violent picture. We have lived to see tragedies of which the catastrophe consists in the swoon of an enamoured princess. If Shakspeare falls occasionally into the opposite extreme, it is a noble error, originating in the fulness of a gigantic strength and yet this tragical Titan, who storms the heavens, and threatens to tear the world from off its hinges; who, more fruitful than Eschylus, makes our hair stand on end, and congeals our blood with horror, possessed, at the same time, the insinuating loveliness of the sweetest poetry. He plays with love like a child; and his songs are breathed out like melting sighs. He unites in his genius the utmost elevation and the utmost depth; and the most foreign, and even apparently irreconcileable properties, subsist in him peaceably together. The world of spirits and nature have laid all their treasures at his feet.

In strength a demi-god, in profundity of view a prophet, in all-seeing wisdom a protecting spirit of a higher order, he lowers himself to mortals, as if unconscious of his superiority; and is as open and unassuming as a child."

John Bull.

BORN CIRC. A. v. 1563.-DIED A. D. 1622.

THIS celebrated composer of music was born in Somersetshire, about the year 1563. Hawkins affirms that he was allied to the noble family of Somerset. He was educated under Blytheman, an organist highly celebrated in his day, but of whose compositions none are known to be now extant. In 1591, on the death of Blytheman, Bull was appointed organist and composer to the Queen's chapel; and, in 1592, he was created Doctor of Music by the university of Cambridge. On the foundation of the Gresham professorship of music, Dr Bull was first appointed to that chair, at the request of his royal mistress; but it appears that his scholarship, at least, was inadequate to the duties of this office, and that he required a special dispensation in his favour from the fundamental law of the institution, which directed the lectures to be read in Latin as well as in English. In the year 1601, Dr Bull went abroad for the benefit of his health, and travelled for some time incognito through France and Germany. On this occasion he is said to have astonished certain foreign musicians by his skill and facility in musical composition; and to have received various flattering invitations from foreign princes to fix himself at their courts. On Queen Elizabeth's death, he was appointed first organist to James I.; and, on the 16th of July, 1607, he had the honour to entertain his majesty and Prince Henry, who that day dined with the company at Merchant Tailors' Hall," with excellent melodie upon a small payre of organs placed there for that purpose onlie." It would appear, from the investigations of Mr Clarke, that it was on this occasion that our national anthem of God save the King'-now ascertained to be the undoubted composition of Bull-was first performed in public, in celebration of the king's happy escape from the machinations of Guy Fawkes and his band of conspirators. In 1613, Dr Bull threw up all his situations in his native country, and went to reside in the Netherlands, where he was admitted into the service of the Archduke. He is supposed to have died abroad, about the year 1622; Wood says that he died at Hamburg, but some of his contemporaries have mentioned Lubeck as the place of his death. Of Dr Bull's compositions, a long list is given by Ward in his lives of the Gresham professors. The only works of his in print, are lessons for the organ and virginals, in the collection called Parthenia,'-the anthem above-mentioned,--and one entitled 'Deliver me, O God!' in Barnard's collection of church-music. Dr Pepusch placed his lessons in a very high rank, not only for the harmony and contrivance, but for the air and modulation; from some of them we are led to form a high idea of the composer's powers of execution.

Lectures on the Drama, vol. II.