cautious, careless, and generous. Shylock on the other hand is meanly careful, cautiously circumspect, and systematically quiet, ever shufflingly occupied as a genuine son of his race, not disdaining the most contemptible means nor the most contemptible object, speculating in the gaining of a penny, and looking so far into the future and into small results that he sends the greedy Launcelot into Bassanio's service, and against his principle eats at night at Bassanio's house, only for the sake of feeding upon the prodigal Christian. This trait is given to him by the poet in a truly masterly manner, in order subsequently to explain the barbarous condition on which he lends Antonio that fatal sum. Shakespeare after his habit has done the utmost to give probability to this most improbable degree of cruelty, which, according to Bacon, appears in itself a fabulous tragic fiction to every honest mind. Antonio has mistreated him; at the moment of the loan he was as like to mistreat him again; he challenges him to lend it as to an enemy; he almost suggests to him the idea, which the Jew places, as if jestingly, as a condition of the loan; and he, the man railed at for usury, is ready generously to grant it without interest to the man who never borrowed upon advantage. The same crafty speculation and reckoning, attended at all events with one advantage, underlie this proposal; in one case it has the show of disinterestedness, in the other it promises opportunity for a fearful revenge. If the Jew really had only partially trifled with the idea of such a revenge, the poet does everything to make the jest fearfully earnest. Money had effaced everything human from the heart of this man, he knows nothing of religion and moral law but when he quotes the Bible in justification of his usury; he knows of no mercy but that to which he may be compelled; there is no justice and mercy in his heart nor any of the love of kindred. His daughter is carried away from him; he is furious, not because he is robbed of her, but because she has robbed him in her flight; he would see his daughter dead at his feet, provided that the jewels and

1 Shylock's demand for the pound of flesh, which is to us the most horrible and revolting detail both in Shakespeare's play and in the sources from which the story is derived, is not without historical precedent. There was a barbarous old Roman law which gave a creditor the right over his debtor's life and liberty; when there were several creditors, they were even privileged to cut the defaulter into pieces; but if any one cut more or less than his exact share, he forfeited his rights.

gems were in her ears; he would see her 'hearsed' before him, provided the ducats were in her coffin. He regrets the money employed in her pursuit; when he hears of her extravagance, the irretrievable loss of his ducats occasions fresh rage. In this condition he pants for revenge against Antonio even before there is any prospect of it, against the man who by long mortifications had stirred up rage and hatred in the bosom of the Jew, and with whose removal his usury would be without an adversary. Obduracy and callousness continue to progress in him, until at the pitch of his wickedness he falls into the pit he had dug; and then, according to the notions of the age, he learns from the conduct of Antonio and of the duke that mercy exercised in a Christian spirit produces other actions than those suggested by the unmerciful god of the world, who had imposed upon him its laws alone. This awful picture of the effects of a thirst for possession, however strongly it is exhibited, will not appear as a caricature to him who has met with similar instances in the actual world, in the histories of gamblers and misers.

The interpretation which we have thus given to the Merchant of Venice perfectly coincides with all the characters of the play, and even with the subordinate ones. The self-interested suitors of Portia, corrupted by glitter and show, choose amiss. The parasitical companions of Antonio forsake him with his fortune; those loquacious acquaintances, though foreboding his danger before he does, do not even write to Bassanio. Again, Lorenzo and Jessica-an extravagant, giddy couple, free from restraint squander their pilfered gold in Genoa, and give it away for monkeys, and reach Belmont like famished people. The little Jessica is placed no higher by the poet than she could be; brought up, as she was, without a mother, in the society of Shylock and Launcelot, with a mind entirely childlike, naïve, true, and spotless; and if we may trust Lorenzo's words and her sure perception of the greatness of Portia, with a capacity for true wisdom. Thus as she is, she is a thoroughly modest child, whom on the threshold of moral consciousness unnatural circumstances have driven to feel ashamed of her father, and to fly from him concealed in boy's clothes-a dress painful to her easily excited modesty. Thus delicately feminine, she has no scruples of conscience in stealing the ducats and the jewels of her father. A new relation to possession is exhibited in this nature: it is that of the inexperienced child,

totally unacquainted with the value of money, who innocently throws it away in trifles, having learnt in her paternal home neither domestic habits nor economy. In this Lorenzo is only too congenial with her, although he would have her believe that he was as a man what Portia is as a woman; Antonio, who knows them better, takes both under his guardianship, and manages their inheritance for them. Launcelot also bears a relation to the common idea of the piece. Greedy and rough as he is, he also is inclined to lack economy; thus knowing Bassanio, and aware that he would live better in the house of the Jew, out of a sense of honour he prefers to go to the generous poor man than remain with the rich miser. Otherwise the scene with his father, as we have already pointed out, is exhibited in parodic contrast to Jessica's relation to hers. The emphasis of the scene lies in the words that the son of a father must ever come to light, that childlike feeling can never be renounced, not even by so coarse and blunt a fellow as this. How much more should this be the case with a being so ethereal as Jessica! But that it is not so is the strongest shadow thrown by the poet upon Shylock; he has not designed by it to cast any upon Jessica. She is damn'd,' says Shylock. 'That's certain, if the devil may be her judge,' answers Salarino.

II. HISTORICAL PLAYS.

WE have gone through the group of love-plays belonging to the second period of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry, and we turn now to the group of historical plays, which are arranged according to time in the following manner :-Richard III., which is closely linked by its subject with the three parts of Henry VI., already discussed, stands also as regards time as the first of Shakespeare's independent histories. The composition of the latter parts of Henry VI. may be assigned a date not long prior to 1592; Collier places Richard III. in 1593, and subsequent editors assume that it was written somewhat later, not long before the first publication of the piece in 1597. In opposition to the tetralogy thus completed of the rise and fall of the House of York, Shakespeare next prepared the tetralogy of the rise of the House of Lancaster; Richard II., printed likewise in 1597, must have been written between Richard III. and Henry IV., certainly not long after the first of these plays; the two parts of Henry IV. were written between 1597-98, and Henry V. in 1597. King John is distinct from this series, both in subject and purport; as regards the time of its origin, it belongs to this second period of the poet's writings (before 1598). Henry VIII. alone belongs to the third period, and for this and other reasons it will be discussed in another place.

The poet here passes into a distinctly opposite sphere. Hitherto we have seen him in the range of private life and of personal existence, insinuating himself into the internal history of single individuals, or occupied with the productions of their brain. Here, in this series of historical plays, he enters the wide outward sphere of public life; he is occupied with states and histories, and is stirred by thoughts political and national, and not merely by moral ideas and psychological truths. And in this field of action and noble ambition the poet shows himself no less at ease than in the regions of man's internal life of

thought and feeling. Fettered by historical tradition, and by the sober reality of the subject, he is as a poet no less great than in the fantastic creations of the comedies which are his own invention. We feel the boundless scope which this twofold diffusion of the mind of Shakespeare gave to his poetry; we shall only endeavour to illustrate by a single comparison, easily understood by us Germans, the superiority of human gifts. which this two-sided nature manifests. It was Goethe's repeated complaint that he lacked the great historical and political life in which Shakespeare moved, and that great market of popular intercourse, which might have accustomed him early to a comprehensive historical survey; and we cannot but acknowledge that from this want his poetic genius, however great in our esteem, became contracted and stunted, and remained below the measure of that which, under other circumstances, it would have accomplished and effected. That which Shakespeare united in himself was divided between our two dramatists; the great historical life of outward action appears in the historical dramas of Schiller, to whom the inner nature of man was not revealed with such rich and pure experiences as to Goethe; and on the other hand the inner life of the individual soul is portrayed in Goethe, to whom, on the contrary, history was strange and unfamiliar. By this division the life of thought and feeling, and the world of sentiments and ideas, contained in the poems of the one, is generally deprived of the great background of national or political life upon which Shakespeare almost always placed his pictures of private and individual life; and in the historical plays of the other we miss the psychological many-sidedness and the fulness of individual characterisation which is never wanting in Shakespeare's histories. We possess a whole in two halves, which is far from being the same as possessing the whole as a whole. For on this very account we have split into parties under two writers, while England belongs entirely and undividedly to one; in the passion of this party feeling we become infatuated in favour of the one, whilst the nature and being of both combined alone constitutes the image of a perfect humanity, worthy of our devoted admiration.

If we consider the series of the historical dramas in themselves, and investigate their merits as belonging to a different style of dramatic writing, the first thing which strikes us is their national and political importance. The English possess