When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm.
Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joy'd to wear the dressing of his lines;
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As since she will vouchsafe no other wit:
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please;
But antiquated and deserted lie,

As they were not of Nature's family. —
Yet must I not give Nature all; thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part:
For, though the poet's matter Nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and that he
Who casts to write a living line must sweat,
Such as thine are, and strike the second heat

Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same,

And himself with it, that he thinks to frame;
Or, for the laurel, he may gain a scorn,·

For a good poet 's made, as well as born:

And such wert thou. Look how the father's face

Lives in his issue; even so the race

Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned and true-filed lines;

In each of which he seems to shake a lance,

As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance.

Sweet Swan of Avon, what a sight it were

To see thee in our waters yet appear,

And make those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James!

But stay; I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanced, and made a constellation there:
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage

Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage;

Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn'd 'like

night,

And despairs day, but for thy volume's light.

BEN JONSON.

The testimony to the author's literary craftmanship is explicit when he writes:

His lines

Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,

As since she [Nature] will vouchsafe no other wit. He gives him credit for natural powers and technical skill both:

Yet must I not give Nature all; thy art,

My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.

He speaks of his well-turned and true-filed lines' which is not altogether a just characterization of Shakespeare's later work, — Cymbeline, for example, where the emotion and idea seem almost too much for the line, and strain the words as if to tear them apart, occasionally striking out a great phrase where music and idea meet in a harmony far beyond the grace of 'well-filed lines.' But the poem is a noble tribute to friend, dramatist, and poet.

Leonard Digges, a university man, contributed twentytwo lines to the first folio, claiming immortality for the plays. He speaks of his 'wit-fraught book,' — wit, signifying thought. Both in these verses and in a longer poem introducing an edition of the poems (1640) he speaks of the acting quality of the plays, which were so much more acceptable than the Fox or Alchemist of Ben Jonson. In the first one he says:

Impossible with some new strain to outdo
Passions of Juliet and her Romeo,

Or till I hear a scene more nobly take

Than when thy half-sword-parleying Romans spake.

'Half-sword-parleying Romans' applies admirably to the dialogue between Brutus and Cassius.

In the preface to the 1640 edition of the poems, the

writer of them: 'You shall find them severe, clear,

says

and elegantly plaine, such gentle straines as shall recreate and not perplex your braine, no intricate or cloudy stuffe to puzzle intellect, but perfect eloquence.' As the sonnets, many of which are the most suggestive and profound poetry in the world, make up the major part of the volume and certainly 'perplex the braine' of the reader as to how far they are based on real experience, a question never to be settled, our trust in seventeenth-century prefaces is considerably shaken by this offhand utterance. It would be interesting to know how he gathers a 'severe, clear, and elegantly plaine' meaning out of Sonnets 121 and 125.

John Milton's first public appearance in print was made by sixteen verses in the Second Folio, 1632, he being then in his twenty-seventh year. It contains the well-known line :

Dear Son of memory, great heir of fame,

but he, too, speaks of Shakespeare's easy numbers which flow to the shame of slow, endeavoring art,' as if he were more struck with the natural grace of Shakespeare's verse than with the power and justness of his thought. But he speaks, too, of the unvalued book' and the 'Delphic lines.'

A year or two later, in L'Allegro, he writes:

If

Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,

Warble his native wood-notes wild,

and makes Ben Jonson the exemplar of English tragedy. It would seem from this that he did not appreciate the epic grandeur of Macbeth or the tragic pathos of Desdemona and Cordelia. But the reference need not be taken too seriously. He needed to refer to a dignified, stately play and to a charming pastoral comedy; possibly he

had Midsummer Night's Dream in mind, and naturally thought of Jonson and Shakespeare. But undoubtedly, like most of his learned contemporaries, he failed entirely to appreciate the nature and quality of Shakespeare's genius. For in Il Penseroso he says of serious plays :

And what, though rare, of later age,
Ennobled hath the buskined stage.

Lear and Macbeth evidently had not made much impression on him, or he would not have passed by English tragedy with such slighting mention.

In this Second Folio (1632), however, appeared a copy of verses signed I. M. S., initials which Mr. Singer supposes to stand for the last name of Richard James. These, too, must be transcribed in full, not only as an admirable specimen of overflow deca-syllabics, but as the first acknowledgment of one of the chiefest of Shakespeare's powers, his ability to make a character real:

A mind reflecting ages past, whose clear

And equal surface can make things appear,
Distant a thousand years, and represent
Them in their lively colours, just extent:
To outrun hasty Time, retrieve the Fates,
Roll back the heavens, blow ope the iron gates
Of Death and Lethe, where confused lie
Great heaps of ruinous mortality:

In that deep, dusky dungeon to discern

A royal ghost from churls; by art to learn.
The physiognomy of shades, and give

Them sudden birth, wondering how oft they live;
What story coldly tells, what poets feign
At second hand, and picture without brain,-
Senseless and soulless shows, to give a stage ·
Ample and true with life,-voice, action, age,

As Plato's year, and new scene of the world,
Them unto us, or us to them had hurl'd:
To raise our ancient sovereigns from their hearse,
Made kings his subjects; by exchanging verse
Enlive their pale trunks, that the present age
Joys in their joy, and trembles at their rage;
Yet so to temper passion, that our ears

Take pleasure in their pain, and eyes in tears
Both weep and smile; fearful at plots so sad,
Then laughing at our fear; abused, and glad
To be abused; affected with that truth
Which we perceive is false, pleased in that ruth
At which we start, and by elaborate play
Tortured and tickled; by a crab-like way
Time past made pastime, and in ugly sort
Disgorging up his ravin for our sport:-
While the plebeian imp, from lofty throne,
Creates and rules a world, and works upon
Mankind by secret engines; now to move
A chilling pity, then a rigorous love;

To strike up and stroke down both joy and ire;
To stir th' affections; and by heavenly fire
Mould us anew, stol'n from ourselves:

This, and much more which cannot be express'd
But by himself, his tongue, and his own breast,
Was Shakespeare's freehold; which his cunning

brain

Improved by favour of the nine-fold train;
The buskin'd Muse, the comic queen, the grand
And louder tone of Clio, nimble hand
And nimbler foot of the melodious pair,
The silver-voiced lady, the most fair
Calliope, whose speaking silence daunts,

And she whose praise the heavenly body chants;
These jointly woo'd him, envying one another, -
Obey'd by all as spouse, but loved as brother,-
And wrought a curious robe, of sable grave,
Fresh green, and pleasant yellow, red most brave,