present volume, "the nobler and richer the ideal portrait sketched by the dramatist, the greater ever is the task, not only of expression, but of completion, in a kindred spirit of art, imposed upon its histrionic representative. The more thoroughly any reader shall have possessed himself of the true spirit and meaning of any portion of Shakespeare's dramatic text, the more will he be in a condition to receive that additional and crowning illustration which no critic or commentator can give him—which can only come from the performer whom Nature and Shakespeare have themselves inspired, and which is indispensable to realize to us that living and breathing creation which each of these dramas primarily was in the mind of its author."

In short, until the love and the study of Shakespeare shall cease altogether amongst his countrymen, will the British stage remain invested with the high office, however unworthily discharging it, of giving effective interpretation to the profoundest oracles of the most inspired of poets. And until the once proud spirit of England shall be dead to all sense of her intellectual honour, must she feel that honour to be vitally interested in providing whatever means may be requisite, whether in the way of public encouragement or of legislative institution, to call forth, to cultivate, and to perpetuate that

school of histrionic art, inspired by poetic genius, which alone can ensure a permanent competence, in her metropolitan theatres, to save her from the deep disgrace in the eyes of her cultivated neighbours, which must ever attend her inability to make her boasted Shakespeare worthily seen and heard in his own peculiar temple.

Nor is this all. There is not only this negative dishonour to be avoided: there is a positively disgraceful perversion to be remedied, for doing which the agency of a regenerated stage is indispensable. The vitiation here alluded to, seems to have escaped even the penetration of Coleridge; nor, perhaps, could it be clearly discovered by anything short of the closely analytic process which has been applied to the several Shakespearian creations examined in the following pages. This mode of examination, however, has led their author to the clearest conviction that in one instance after another, the bestreputed expositors of Shakespeare have delivered interpretations of his principal meaning in a particular drama, and of his conception of its leading characters, which it is impossible that they should have drawn from an unprejudiced consideration of his own unmutilated text. The question which naturally and immediately presented itself to the writer's mind,

has been-From whence, then, can these misinterpretations have arisen? And on turning from the established criticism to the actual stage, he has found, in each instance, a ready solution of this problem, in the fact that these critics themselves have ever come to the consideration of Shakespeare's text, unconsciously prepossessed by the perverted stage impressions of their youth, or by interpretations of their critical predecessors, derived through the same distorting theatrical medium. To understand this distinctly, requires a glance over the larger features of our modern theatrical history.

At the opening of its second great era, after the puritanical interregnum, the taste of the restored court, at once foreign and depraved, threw the re-establishment and remoulding of the stage into the hands-not of that class of critics who studied, loved, and venerated Shakespeare in the spirit of a Milton--but of the Davenants and the Drydens the men who, in all the flippant presumption and boundless self-sufficiency which possessed them by virtue of that pseudo-classical code of taste which they had imported from France, proceeded (as in the signal case of 'Macbeth,' so fully treated in the following pages) to remodel the works of their divine. predecessor, condemning and rejecting from

them, as gross and barbarous, whatever they found it impracticable to squeeze into their Procrustes' bed of polite criticism.

This operation was peculiarly facilitated by the protracted interruption which had taken place, of histrionic tradition from the elder and better stage. So that, not only the moulding of the drama itself, but the formation of a school of acting, and the establishing a body of histrionic and theatrical precedent, were vested virtually in the hands of the same fashionable critics of the day. No wonder that they performed the latter task in strict accordance with the spirit in which they executed the former. No wonder that the actors, and the actresses, remained the very humble servants and pupils of them and their successors in the same school for the next half-century at least.

Since then, however, our national stage has too well avenged upon our criticism its long subjection to that misleading thraldom. When, in the days of Pope, and of Johnson, the written Shakespeare came once more to be recognized at least as a great British classic,—and his unmutilated page began consequently to grow more and more current,-it was not to be expected that the mind either of reader or of critic would find itself all at once in a state for considering, with judgment unwarped and dis

cernment unconfused, even the lucid but pregnant and subtle text now laid in full before them. Not only did the critics, following habitually in the track of their predecessors, continue to judge the great dramatist by canons to which he is not amenable,but, having their intellectual vision unconsciously blinded or confused by the vivid and repeated impression with which the gross perversions and often inversions of the poet's deeper meaning, on the stage, had operated on their early associations respecting him, they often mistook the originally most obvious import of his plot, his character, and even his dialogue, unwittingly haunted, while expounding the very letter of his work, by that erring spirit which their predecessors had but too wilfully infused into his theatrical interpreters.

In this vicious circle our stage and our criticism have ever since been more or less revolving. In the work of rectification, the stage itself may do much; but in producing a thorough Shakespearian reform, it is our literary criticism that must lead the way. The writer, if his views be sound, may bring them to bear upon the false prepossessions of his readers. again and again, with persevering, certain, and decisive effect. But the power of the most inspired actor-vivid and electric as it isthough occasionally darting conviction upon