have already referred, has administered a castigation upon these offenders, from the effects of which they are not likely to recover. He says: "First of all, they never see we really doubt if any even of their better men, except Schlegel and Goethe (who never went leisurely into the subject), had the least glimpse of—the immense gulf that intervenes between Shakspeare and those whom it has been too common to speak of as the other great dramatists of the Elizabethan period. One makes every allowance for the purblind ecstasies of professed black-letter moles and grubs at home or abroad; but what are we to say when we find persons enjoying the reputation in their own country, not only of universal critics, but of original poets, who painfully translate, edit, and comment upon the Fore-school of Shakspeare,' that is, the limping poetasters that wrote plays before Shakspeare produced his master-pieces, and from whom he occasionally borrowed the thread of a story, or the dim and tremulous outline of a character; and gravely proceed, from first to last, on the notion that these worthies have been comparatively neglected here, not because they are poetasters, but because Shakspeare is with us a blind, bigoted, intolerant superstition? In like manner, when they grapple with the great bard himself, the mark nine times out of ten is to saddle him with some play which he had nothing to do with, or at most, in his capacity of Globe proprietor, had gone over pen in hand, touching up the dialogue here and there, and perhaps sticking in some vivid speech or scene of his own, ad captandum; or else it is to prove that what his benighted countrymen have voted a blot, is one of his sublimest beauties; to elucidate the profound philosophy lurking under what Warburton and Johnson took for a mere pun; or how completely all English readers, for two hundred and fifty years, have mistaken one of his really simplest and most elementary characters; that men had always read him, in fact, straightforward, or

from left to right, or at best boustrophedon-never in the real authentic way—that is, upside down-until salvation flashed on the world from some farthing candle at Heidelberg. For example, one luminous professor makes it clear as mud, that 'Arden of Feversham' was penned wholly by Shakspeare, and ranks with his very first master-pieces; to wit, not 'Macbeth' or 'Othello,' but 'Titus Andronicus,' or 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre,' or the 'Two Noble Kinsmen.' Another establishes, in one hundred and fifty pages of text, with footnotes as long but not so light as Bayle's, that the same poet never could have created both a Lear and a Falstaff. Another delivers as the result of a not less laborious investigation, that we are wholly wrong about Dolly Tearsheet, whose genuine affection for Sir John ought to cover a multitude of early indiscretions, and who was uttering the deepest emotion of a true heart when she declared that she would never dress herself handsome again, till her little tidy boar-pig came back from the

wars.

"Then there is a whole school who consider it as a capital blunder to take Shakspeare's dramas for the best of his performances, but fight lustily among themselves as to whether that character belongs righteously to his Sonnets or his 'Venus and Adonis ;' but we think the Sonneteers are now the topping sect, though what half the Sonnets are about, hardly two are agreed. Such is the art of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, exhibited with equal success in the Homeric and Shakspearian departments. * * * Much of the same happy discrimination is to be admired in their estimates of British authors generally-dead or living. Ossian has stood his ground: they are not to be gulled with the vulgar romances about Macpherson; the originals were examined and approved by Sir John Sinclair, and published in extenso by the Highland Society. Ossian is infinitely the greatest as well as the oldest of our insular bards; he can never be too much studied,

22 ONSLAUGHT UPON HOMER AND SHAKESPEARE.

whether for mythology, history, manners, or metres. Richardson, too, flourishes; he, not Fielding, is the real 'life-painter' of George the Second's time. Blackmore is not without friends. Hervey (not Sporus, but the Meditator) is in great feather. There are two charms which never fail- - dulness and finery; choose between drab and pink, but with either you are sure of immortality. Creep, or walk on stilts. If you dance, let it be on a barn-floor, or a tight-rope; if you fiddle, play on one string, or with your toes. Nature vibrates between truism and conceit; these are the legitimate alphabet, the rest intrusive, not real Cadmus. If any gifted son of any Muse be vilipended at home, whether on pretence of platitudes or of affectations, let him be of good cheer,-few prophets are honoured in their own land. If Germany should by any miraculous infelicity overlook him, America will not; but commonly the critical sentiment of these grand arbiters will be in unison. Look at any Leipzig catalogue, and consider what sort of English books are most translated. The only thing you may be confident of, is that, if you see one author worried among half a dozen rival oversetters, you had never heard of him in England. And so in the other high appeal court of Parnassuswhen Sir Charles Lyell last arrived at Boston, he found all the town agog about some Professor's course of lectures (we think the name was Professor Peabody) on the poetry of Miss Eliza Cook, the Sappho, or Corinna, we believe, of the 'London Weekly Dispatch.' We cannot doubt that she has also been illustrated by Frescoists of Düsseldorff."

Such was one kind of that fierce warfare waged against Shakespeare and his productions, until Mr. William. Henry Smith discovered a fresh method of assault, in comparison with which all former systems may be called mild and benevolent.

* Quarterly Review, vol. 87, No. 174, p. 440. The whole article is well worth perusal.

23

CHAPTER IV.

THE BACONIAN THEORY.

"I had rather be a tick in a sheep, than such a valiant ignorance." TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.

THERE is nothing more remarkable in the annals of English literature than the vicissitudes that have attended both the fame and the writings of Shakespeare. During the Great Rebellion that broke out soon after his death, the Puritans endeavoured to root out the stage from among the institutions of the country, and to obliterate all traces of dramatic literature. Not only were the writings of Shakespeare and those of his contemporaries, sought out and destroyed, but his character was libelled, and his fair fame assailed. Then came the adapters and mutilators of every kind, and various denominations. Some cut down, others amended; some struck out a scene, others annihilated a character. Improvement of Shakespeare was their great canon of criticism. According to the general idea, he had become famous by accident, and grew a poet in his own despite.

Schlegel in Germany, and Coleridge in this country, first instituted a more genial kind of criticism, and suc ceeded in restoring Shakespeare to the pedestal from which he had been unjustly displaced, "Let me now proceed," says Coleridge, "to destroy, as far as may be in my power, the popular notion that he was a great dramatist by mere instinct, that he grew immortal in his own despite, and sank below men of second or third-rate power, when he attempted aught beside the drama-even as bees construct their cells and manufacture their honey to

admirable perfection; but would in vain attempt to build a nest. Now this mode of reconciling a compelled sense of inferiority with a feeling of pride, began in a few pedants, who having read that Sophocles was the great model of tragedy, and Aristotle the infallible dictator of its rules, and finding that the Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and other masterpieces, were neither in imitation of Sophocles, nor in obedience to Aristotle,—and not having (with one or two exceptions) the courage to affirm, that the delight which their country received from generation to generation, in defiance of the alterations of circumstances and habits, was wholly groundless,-took upon them, as a happy medium and refuge, to talk of Shakspeare as a sort of beautiful lusus naturæ, a delightful monster,-wild, indeed, and without taste or judgment, but, like the inspired idiots so much venerated in the East, uttering, amid the strangest follies, the sublimest truths. In nine places out of ten in which I find his awful name mentioned, it is with some epithet of 'wild,' 'irregular,' 'pure child of nature,' &c. If all this be true, we must submit to it; though to a thinking mind it cannot but be painful to find any excellence, merely human, thrown out of all human analogy, and thereby leaving us neither rules for imitation, nor motives to imitate ;-but if false, it is a dangerous falsehood;—for it affords a refuge to secret self-conceit,— enables a vain man at once to escape his reader's indignation by general swollen panegyrics, and merely by his ipse dixit to treat as contemptible, what he has not intellect enough to comprehend, or soul to feel, without assigning any reason, or referring his opinion to any demonstrative principle;-thus leaving Shakspeare as a sort of grand Lama, adored indeed, and his very excrements prized as relics, but with no authority or real influence. I grieve that every late voluminous edition of his works would enable me to substantiate the present charge with a variety of facts, one-tenth of which would of themselves exhaust the time allotted to me. Every critic, who has