urally calculated to depress them, should be suffered to continue; but it should be constantly borne in mind by them, no less than by all the friends of our institutions, that without moral and intellectual cultivation, little permanent good can be effected. There is as much of the spirit of aristocracy among the laboring classes, as among any other order of society. The difference is only in the degree of ability to exercise it; and it shows itself just in proportion as this ability is increased. And after all, it may be found that improper competition of laborer with laborer, and the jealousies existing between them, have far more tendency to depress these classes, than any aristocratic or other influences. which are so much talked of.

But all this does not alter the fact, that in this as well as in other countries, though not to the same extent, their condition calls for extensive amelioration and that the other classes are so exclusively engaged in their own affairs, that the laborer is not only greatly neglected, but constantly liable to have his rights trampled upon, and to be injured by the competition of foreigners, whose increase ought to be checked by prudent legislation.

Leaving the faults of the laboring class, therefore, to be exhibited in detail by their enemies, if they have any, it is the object of these brief remarks, to enforce the strong necessity of the more elevated of our community taking a deeper interest in their condition, with special reference to its bearing on the institutions of the country. And, in conclusion, we will only ask, if the present state of things does not call loudly upon every friend of equal rights and just laws, seriously to reflect? Is there no duty to be discharged? Is there nothing to be apprehended from the great mass of uneducated mind, whose restless heavings are felt in every part of the land? Is there no danger that this chaos of intellect may ere long break forth, like the rushing storm, and cover the country with desolation, far and wide?

TO R. H. D.

If I could, in my humble way, awaken some young man, of however inferior powers to our delightful poet, to a sensation in any poor degree like this, I should bless God for it the remainder of my days.'-[The author of the Idle Man.]

435

MISCONCEPTIONS OF SHAKSPEARE UPON THE STAGE.

My admiration of Shakspeare, as a profound delineator of human nature and a sublime poet, is but little short of idolatry. I think he is often misunderstood, as performed on the stage.

The character of Juliet, for example, is travestied almost into burlesque, by the alteration of the text in the Scene where the nurse, with so much precision, fixes her age: (Act 1, Scene 3.) The nurse declares she knows it to an hour, and that next Lammas eve, (which Lady Capulet says will be in a fortnight and odd days) she will be fourteen. Upon this precise age, the character of Juliet, her discourse, her passion, and the deep pathos of the interest that we take in her fate, very largely repose. Born under Italian skies, she is at the very moment of transition from the child to the woman. Her love is the pure impulse of intelligent sensitive nature-first love-unconscious and undissembled nature, childhood expanding into maturity, physical and intellectual-all innocence, all ardor, all ecstasy. How irresistibly are our sympathies moved at seeing the blossom blasted at the very moment while it is opening to the sun! As the play is performed on the stage, the nurse, instead of saying that Juliet, at the next Lammas eve, will be fourteen, says she will be nineteen. Nineteen! In what country of the world was a young lady of nineteen ever constantly attended by a nurse? Between the ages of thirteen and fourteen, a nurse, in a noble Italian family of the middle ages, was not yet an unnatural companion. On the verge of nineteen, the nurse is not only supernumerary, but very much out of place. Take away the age of Juliet, and you take away from her all her individuality, all the consistency of her character, all that childish simplicity, which, blended with the fervor of her passion, constitutes her greatest charm. In what but in that, and in everything which she does and says, congenial to that age, does she differ from Viola, from Miranda, from Ophelia, and indeed from all the lovely daughters of Shakspeare's muse? They are all in love, but you can never mistake one of them for another. The peculiarities of Juliet all have reference to her age; and that which in her mouth is enchanting, would seem but frothy nonsense from a woman five years older. Juliet says

And when Romeo dies,

Take him and cut him up in little stars,

And he shall make the face of Heaven so fine,
That all the world shall grow in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.'

In the incomparable beauty of this passage, as spoken by a girl under fourteen, there is something too childish for a woman of

nineteen, however desperately in love. One, who has been accustomed to personate Juliet as a young woman of nineteen, may see no incongruity with that age in her character; yet that one, who has herself passed through both those stages of life, should not understand the difference of maturity between the ages of fourteen and of nineteen in the female sex, is scarcely conceivable. That Shakspeare should have confounded them, is impossible. That he intended to make the age of Juliet an exposition of her character, is evident from the special care he has taken to make the nurse announce it. If the meanest of dramatists were to undertake to write a tragedy, and to draw the character and to repeat the discourse of a girl of fourteen, attended throughout the play by a nurse, can we imagine that he would change the age to nineteen and yet retain the nurse, and give to the full-formed woman the same character and the same tone of dialogue which he would to the ripening child of fourteen? Such a writer would. prove himself as poor a proficient in the school of human nature as in that of Shakspeare.

In that ever memorable delineation of the Life of man, and its division into seven ages,' by Jaques, in the comedy of 'As you like it,' the meditative moralist says that each man in his turn plays many parts. He says, too, that all the men and women are merely players. In coming to the details, he exhibits only the seven ages of the man; but there was certainly in the mind of the poet a corresponding division in the ages of the woman; and Juliet, at any age short of fourteen, and yet under the care of a nurse, partakes at once, in the relation of her sex, of the schoolboy with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school, and of the lover sighing like a furnace, with a woful ballad made to his mistress's eyebrow. Shakspeare was not the observer and painter of nature, to confound them together. If he had exhibited in action a school-boy of between thirteen and fourteen, think you that he would have given him the features, or inspired him with the language and ideas of a lover at nineteen? Our youth at fourteen are yet under the age of passing from the school to the university; at nineteen, many of them have already closed their career at the university and passed into the busy scenes of active life. The female mind and person hastens also to maturity in advance of the male; and a woman at nineteen is generally more completely formed than a man at twenty-one.

Shakspeare, with his intuitive sagacity, has also marked the characteristics of the change between these two of his 'seven ages. In the Merchant of Venice,' when Portia proposes to Nerissa that they should assume male attire and go to Venice, she

says

'I'll hold thee any wager,

When we are both apparell'd like young men,

I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two,
And wear my dagger with the braver grace,
And speak between the change of man and boy
With a reed voice; and turn two mincing steps
Into a manly stride; and speak of frays
Like a fine bragging youth; and tell quaint lyes
How honorable ladies sought my love,
Which I denying, they fell sick and died.

I could not do withal: then I'll repent,

And wish, for all that, that I had not kill'd them-
And twenty of these puny lyes I'll tell,

That men shall swear I've discontinued school
Above a twelvemonth.'*

Tragedy, according to the admirable definition of Aristotle, is a poem imitative of human life, and the object of which is to purify the soul of the spectator by the agency of terror and pity. The terror is excited by the incidents of the story and the sufferings of the person represented; the pity, by the interest of sympathy with their characters. Terror and pity are moved by the mere aspect of human sufferings; but the sympathy is strong or weak, in proportion to the interest that we take in the character of the sufferer. With this definition of tragedy, 'Romeo and Juliet' is a drama of the highest order. The incidents of terror and the sufferings of the principal persons of the drama arouse every sympathy of the soul, and the interest of sympathy with Juliet. She unites all the interest of ecstatic love, of unexampled calamity, and of the peculiar tenderness which the heart feels for innocence in childhood. Most truly, then, says the prince of Verona, at the conclusion of the play

'For never was a story of more wo

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.'

The age of Juliet seems to be the key to her character throughout the play, an essential ingredient in the intense sympathy which she inspires; and Shakspeare has marked it, not only in her discourse, but even in her name, the diminutive of tender affections applied only to childhood. If Shakspeare had exhibited upon the stage a woman of nineteen, he would have dismissed her nurse and called her Julia. She might still have been a very interesting character, but the whole color and complexion of the play must have been changed. An intelligent, virtuous woman, in love with a youth of assorted age and congenial character, is always a person of deep interest in the drama. But that interest is heightened and redoubled when, to the sympathy with the lover you add all the kind affections with which you share in the joys and sorrows of the child. There is childishness in the discourse of Juliet, and the poet has shown us why; because she had scarcely ceased

*Act 3, Scene 5.