superfluous traits of character, when he ought to endeavour to produce other impressions. Whenever the musical or the fanciful preponderate, the characteristical is necessarily thrown into the back ground. Hence many of the figures of Shakspeare exhibit merely external designations, determined by the place which they occupy in the whole: they are like secondary persons in a public procession, to whose physiognomy we seldom pay much attention; their only importance is derived from the solemnity of their dress, and the object in which they are engaged. Shakspeare's messengers, for instance, are for the most part merely messengers, yet not common, but poetical messengers the messages which they have to bring is the soul which suggests to them their language. Other voices too are merely raised as melodious lamentations or rejoicings, or reflections on what has taken place; and in a serious drama without chorus, this must always be more or less the case, if we would not have it prosaical.

If the delineation of all the characters of Shakspeare, separately considered, is inimitably firm and correct, he surpasses even himself in so combining and contrasting them, that they serve to bring out each other. This is the very summit of dramatic characterization; for we can never estimate a man altogether abstractedly by himself according to his true worth; we must see him in his relations with others; and it is here that most dramatic poets are deficient. Shakspeare makes

ill

each of his principal characters the glass in which the others are reflected, and in which we are enabled to discover what could not be immediately revealed to us. What in others is most profound, lies in him at the surface. We should be very advised were we always to take the declarations of the characters respecting themselves and others for sterling gold. Ambiguity of intention, very properly in him, overflows with the most praiseworthy principles; and sage maxims are not unfrequently put in the mouth of imbecility, to show how easily such common-place truisms may be acquired. Nobody ever painted as he has done the facility of self-deception, the half self-conscious hypocrisy towards ourselves, with which even noble minds attempt to disguise the almost inevitable influence of selfish motives in human nature. This secret irony of the characterization is deserving of admiration as a storehouse of acuteness and sagacity; but it is the grave of enthusiasm. But this is the conclusion at which we arrive when we have had the misfortune to see human nature through and through; and besides the melancholy truth that no virtue and greatness are altogether pure and genuine, and the dangerous error that the highest perfection is attainable, we have no remaining choice. Here we may perceive, notwithstanding his power in exciting the most fervent emotions, a certain cool indifference in the poet himself, but still the indifference of a superior mind, which has run through

the circle of human existence, and survived feeling.

The irony in Shakspeare has not merely a reference to the separate characters, but frequently to the whole of the action. Most poets who portray human events in a narrative or dramatic form, take themselves apart, and exact from their readers a blind approbation or condemnation of whatever side they choose to support or oppose. The more zealous this rhetoric is, the more easily it fails of its effect. In every case we perceive that the subject does not come immediately before us, but that we view it through the medium of a different way of thinking. When, however, the poet, by a dexterous manœuvre, occasionally allows us a glance of the less brilliant reverse of the picture, he then places himself in a sort of secret understanding with the select circle of the intelligent among his readers or spectators; he shows them that he previously saw and admitted the validity of their objections; that he himself is not tied down by the subject represented, but soars freely above it; and that, if he chose, he could unrelentingly annihilate the beautiful and irresistibly attractive scenes which his magic pen has produced. Wherever the proper tragic enters, it is true, every thing like irony immediately ceases; but from the avowed raillery of comedy, to the point where the subjection of mortal beings to an inevitable destiny demands the highest degree of seriousness, there are a multitude of human

relations which unquestionably may be considered in an ironical view, without confounding the eternal line of separation between good and evil. This purpose is answered by the comic characters and scenes which are interwoven in the most of Shakspeare's pieces, where romantic fables or historical events are made the subject of a noble and elevating exhibition. A determinate parody of the serious part is frequently not to be mistaken in them; at other times the connexion is more loose and arbitrary; and the more wonderful the invention of the whole, the more easily it becomes merely a light delusion of the fancy. The comic interruptions everywhere serve to prevent the play from being converted into an employment, to preserve the mind in the possession of its hilarity, and to keep off that gloomy and inert seriousness which so easily steals into the sentimental, but not tragical, drama. Most assuredly Shakspeare did not wish in this to comply with the taste of the multitude contrary to his own better judgment;

b

Notwithstanding one or two instances of physical suffering introduced on the stage in the plays of Shakspeare, and which had better, perhaps, have been omitted, there is yet nothing in the impression which his genuine tragic dramas leave behind them, of gloom and horror, nothing of that wild, painful, and harassing sensation so frequently felt from the perusal of the tragedies of his contemporaries. The lights and shades, indeed, are so skilfully mingled in his pieces, and the moral so broad and pure, that we perpetually recur to them as transcripts of human life and passion, which never cease to instruct and please the mind, never fail to soothe and satisfy the heart,

for in various pieces, and in considerable parts of others, especially when the catastrophe approaches, and the minds are consequently more on the stretch, and no longer susceptible of any entertainment serving to divert their attention, he has abstained from all comic intermixtures. It was also an object with him that the clowns or buffoons should not occupy a more important place than that which he had assigned them: he expressly condemns the extemporising with which they loved to enlarge their parts. Johnson founds the justification of the species of drama in which seriousness and mirth are mixed, on this, that in real life the vulgar is found close to the sublime, that the merry and the sad usually accompany and succeed one another. But it does not follow that because both are found together, they must not therefore be separated in the compositions of

The observation is in other respects just, and this circumstance invests the poet with a power to proceed in that manner, because every thing in the drama must be regulated by the conditions of theatrical probability; but the mixture of such

In Hamlet's directions to the players.

There is every reason to believe that much of what has been objected to as occurring in some passages in the parts of Shakspeare's clowns, has been foisted into these parts during their performance on the stage, by the presumptuous officiousness of the actors, and adopted into the text, as favourites with the lower orders, by the first editors, who were, as is well known, the very fellows and companions of those who had taken these unwarrantable liberties.