again. Nothing short of an exalted estimate of his capacity, founded on his former services, can account for his reappointment to be Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief in India in 1797, and again, after he had been tried on a different arena, in 1805. But there was nothing showy or flashy about him, and brilliant reputation is seldom acquired by moderate and prudent counsels, by the unassuming performance of duty, by undeviating rectitude of purpose, or by the quiet exercise of that most valuable of intellectual acquirements or gifts, good sense.

It has been plausibly contended that a man's success in life is not unfrequently retarded by his virtues and accelerated by his defects. This is equally true of fame. Lord Cornwallis would have been more (if not better) known, if his ambition had been turbulent and noisy, or if he had been endowed with a little of that demonstrative vanity which brings the popularity-hunter eternally before the foot lights. In most of those who obtain the privilege of being pointed at by the crowd, the envied quod monstrer digito prætereuntium-there is a spice of the charlatan. In him there was not a particle of it; and no thronging associations are kindled, no familiar chord is struck, no phosphoric light emitted, by his name. But there is providentially a self-adjusting, compensating principle in human affairs. The clamorous applause of the many may prove less durable than the calm approval of the few; and whatever outward marks of renown have been withheld from the meritorious public servant by contemporaries, will be amply made good by the discriminating judgment of posterity.

ART. II.-The Works of William Shakespeare. The Text revised by the Rev. Alexander Dyce. In 6 vols. 8vo. London, 1858.

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MINUTE examination has satisfied us that this is the best text of Shakespeare which has yet been given to the world. Though our great dramatist never had an editor more careful than Mr. Dyce, there is no edition of his works, the product of original reflection and research, in which the labour bestowed upon it is put forward with so little ostentation. Not a single knot of comment breaks the thread of the poet's argument. We find, on examination, that a rare skill has been spent in the endeavour to set down Shakespeare's words with the least possible inaccuracy, but there is no suggestion of the vast amount of thought and reading by which the result has been attained. Over his own course the hero moves without impediment.

He

is the knight, his editor the squire, who has spent many an hour in rubbing time-spots from the polished shield. But he does not therefore, on every occasion, demand attention to the leather and the brickdust. Nothing diverts attention from the poet's ideas to a discussion of his words until each play having been read to the end, we are at leisure to consider the verbal questions that arise out of it. The notes then given are few, brief, and to the point.

Shakespeare himself being thus clearly set before us, we are left free to think of his works as something else than a repertory of grammatical riddles. Not that we undervalue the minute research and criticism that have been spent during the last century and a half on his life and writings. In the midst of their contentions, Shakespeare's editors have, as a body, done fair justice to his works, and service to his fame. From Rowe downwards there is not one person of name among the number who has not furnished something towards the perfecting of that text which Mr. Dyce now seeks to give us in its purest state, and to dissociate, as much as possible, from the controversies through which it has passed. But there is another sort of homage due to Shakespeare than that which consists in the reverent endeavour to restore his text―the homage due to him from 'all scenes of Europe,' and which Ben Jonson expressed when he said, 'I do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any.' Of this also Mr. Dyce is a worthy exponent. He opposes the saying of Hazlitt, that Shakespeare, amongst the dramatists of Elizabeth and James's days, was one of a race of giants, the tallest, the strongest, the most graceful and beautiful of them; but that nevertheless it was a common and a noble brood.

A falser remark,' Mr. Dyce observes, I conceive, has seldom been made by critic. Shakespeare is not only immeasurably superior to the dramatists of his time, in creative power, in insight into the human heart, and in profound thought, but he is moreover utterly unlike them in almost every respect,-unlike them in his method of developing character, in his diction, in his versification; nor should it be forgotten that some of those scenes which have been most admired in the works of his contemporaries were intended to affect the audience at the expense of nature and probability, and therefore stand in marked contrast to all that we possess as unquestionably from the pen of Shakespeare.'

This sharp line of division between Shakespeare and his fellows' is drawn for us by the student of our literature who speaks with the fullest knowledge of the men whom he seems to disparage; for Mr. Dyce was the first editor of Peele, Greene, Middleton, and Webster, and the first competent editor of Beau

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mont and Fletcher, and of Marlowe, true men of their time, and foremost men in it. But Shakespeare had the spirit of all time contained within himself; and never did he make his independence of the taste and knowledge of his day more evident, than in his manner of fulfilling its demands. Kyd or Webster could not, in a play of a dozen persons, have done more for the groundlings than produce one as a ghost, kill eight in the course of the performance by sword, drowning, or poison, and leave the one character of any note among the three survivors, only biding the right time for suicide. Yet under one aspect this is a summary of Hamlet.' Which of Hazlitt's other giants could have written anything resembling Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' from such materials?

In England it is generally understood that Shakespeare's plays are the first in which all the persons of the drama became, in the true sense of the word, its characters. This is the fact that made him as fertile among poets after death, as Bacon has been fertile among philosophers. Before he arose, the habit of referring everything to an exact study of nature did not exist. Shakespeare and Marlowe are not more unlike than Bacon and Cardan. But it is not until we see the state of the drama both in this and other countries at the same period that we can perceive the true place and comparative greatness of Shakespeare. Indeed, the shifting influences exercised by the several nations of Europe upon each other are not less marked in their literature than in their politics. The writings of the Italian novelists, and the history of the stage in Spain and Germany, nearly concern the student of our Elizabethan drama; and the English stage in the days of the Restoration can be understood only by reference to the theatres of Spain and France.

Everywhere starting from the same point of connexion with the church, the drama made unequal progress in each country, moving always by like steps. The monks made use of the instinct of mimicry which they found blended among the people with their gayest sports. An infant begins life with mimicry : its first intellectual exercise is a dramatic effort. The priests, having a rude people to instruct, compiled of old that famous book of anecdotes and tales, the Gesta Romanorum,' which is a repertory of entertaining matter, classed, like the contents of a modern hymnbook, under such heads as Of Love,' 'Of Fidelity,' 'Of Depravity,' 'Of Inordinate Pride,' and intended to be used for the enlivenment of sermons. Every tale was followed by its interpretation, duly beginning with the church phrase, 'My beloved :'

My beloved, the emperor is,'-'My beloved, the lady is,' or 'My beloved, the soldier is,'—and so forth. In the like spirit the

leading

leading facts of Scripture or church legend were told in Miracleplays. The leading doctrines were put into a dramatic form, as Mysteries; due care being taken to provide fun for the crowd in such details as were furnished by the behaviour of devils, by disputes between Cain and his Man, by the interchange of abuse between Herod's soldiers and the angry mothers at the massacre of innocents, or by the avarice of Judas, who higgles with Caiaphas for the thirty pieces of silver and then gets them in base coin. No irreverence was intended; but nothing can prove more strongly how low and degraded men's conceptions of religion had become. Our earliest plays of the kind were performed in French or Latin, and the church was the theatre; but in this country the foreign tongue was soon laid aside, and town guilds, on behalf of the church, presented its series of animated Scripture pictures for instruction of the people on great festival days at the street corners, on convenient hills, and in the squares of any town. The pageants were exhibited upon carts constructed for the purpose, with floors to represent the place of the Pater Cœlestis and of angels, that of the saints, and that of man. Hell mouth was in the corner of man's stage; and here burnt a fire, up and down which demons came. Payd for mending hell mought ijd,' says an old account; 'Item payd for kepyng of fyer at hell mothe, iiija;' and,-cost of a grand stage effect, Payd for setting the world of fyer, vd'

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Scenes in heaven often included representatives of heavenly virtues, who became talkative in course of time, and mixed with actions upon earth. Thus a way was made for a second form of entertainment, the Moralities, in which allegorical persons were employed upon the stage to make a moral lesson palatable to the people. But abstract morality needed enlivenment by actual example. Appius and Virginia served this purpose as well as David and Bathsheba. Stories from profane history found their way upon the platform; and as the living human interest won more upon the people than the allegorical machinery to which it was attached, increased stress came to be laid upon the acts of men and women. Of this gradation no writer upon our English drama has pointed out the several steps so carefully as Mr. Collier, who cites as one of the last pieces written in English without mixture of history or fable, and consisting wholly of abstract personages, a drama by George Wapul, of which the single known copy is in the library of the Duke of Devonshire. It was printed only eight years before Shakespeare came to London. It is called 'The Tide tarryeth no Man,' and the principal persons introduced into it are Painted-profit, Nogood-neighbourhood, Wastefulness, Christianity, Correction,

Courage,

Courage, Feigned-furtherance, Greediness, Wantonness, and

Authority-in-despair.

Authors as well as managers were furnished by the Church. The work which ranks as the first comedy (Udall's 'Ralph Roister Doister'), because 'it is the first known effort to present actual life and character, apart from Scriptural or allegorical machinery, came from the pen of a churchman. The 'Gammer Gurton's Needle' of Still, which was once supposed to have preceded it, though it is now known to have been written several years later, was also the production of a man who died a bishop. But a new feature here enters into the story of our drama. The revival of letters brought Latin authors into note and favour, and particular regard was paid to the comedies of Plautus and the tragedies of Seneca. Their reputation was still great at the close of the century, when we find Meres writing that' as Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage.' Seneca,' says Polonius, cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light.' The first, or ecclesiastical chapter of the history of our drama leaves our lay comedy writers with the works of Plautus open at their elbows, Udall himself loved Terence, but the world read Plautus most.

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A lay lord and a lawyer were the writers of 'Gorboduc,' the oldest extant tragedy; they wrote it when they were young men, one a student, the other a lounger in the Inner Temple, and it was produced scarcely five and-twenty years before Shakespeare became associated with the London stage. We may accept, if we please, the fact, that Norton, one of the authors of Gorboduc,' was a fierce zealot in religion, as furnishing a point of contact between the end of the drama as a religious and the beginning of it as a social institution. Suddenly, however, and abruptly, it was separated from the church. Paul's boys continued to act; Latin stage-directions were still written, according to old priestly fashion; but the drama had fallen among lay wits, and ceased to be obedient to the clergy.

London was then a metropolis in which the drama could not fail to thrive. It can be developed only where men live in fellowship together; where every man is near the centre of a hundred great and small intrigues; where sins are blackest, virtues most conspicuous; where little is seen of sunsets and buttercups, but life is made up of the stir and dialogue of men, of clashing human interests and the incessant change of human hopes and fears; and where leisure is left to no man to brood for days over a single incident. No national drama has been formed among any people that had not a town Vol. 105.-No. 209. teeming

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