No. II.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE TEMPEST CONCLUDED.

'WHOEVER Ventures,' says Horace, to form a character totally original, let him endeavour to preserve it with uniformity and consistency; but the formation of an original character is a work of great difficulty and hazard.' In this arduous and uncommon task, however, Shakspeare has wonderfully succeeded in his Tempest: the monster Caliban is the creature of his own imagination, in the formation of which he could derive no assistance from observation or experience.

Caliban is the son of a witch, begotten by a demon: the sorceries of his mother were so terrible, that her countrymen banished her into this desert island as unfit for human society; in conformity, therefore, to this diabolical propagation, he is represented as a prodigy of cruelty, malice, pride, ignorance, idleness, gluttony, and lust. He is introduced with great propriety cursing Prospero and Miranda, whom he had endeavoured to defile; and his execrations are artfully contrived to have reference to the occupation of his mother:

As wicked dew, as e'er my mother brush'd
With raven's feather from un wholesome fen,
Drop on you both!-

-All the charms

Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!

His kindness is, afterwards, expressed as much in character as his hatred, by an enumeration of offices that could be of value only in a desolate island, and in the estimation of a savage.

I pr'ythee, let me bring thee where crabs grow;
And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts;
Show thee a jay's nest; and instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmozet. I'll bring thee
To clust'ring filberds; and sometimes I'll get thee
Young sea-malls from the rock ---

I'll show thee the best springs; I'll pluck thee berries;
I'll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough.

Which last is, indeed, a circumstance of great use in a place where to be defended from the cold was neither easy nor usual; and it has a farther peculiar beauty, because the gathering wood was the occupation to which Caliban was subjected by Prospero, who, therefore, deemed it a service of high importance.

The gross ignorance of this monster is represented with delicate judgment: he knew not the names of the sun and moon, which he calls the bigger light and the less; and he believes that Stephano was the man in the moon, whom his mistress had often shown him; and when Prospero reminds him that he first taught him to pronounce articulately, his answer is full of malevolence and

rage:

You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse:

the properest return for such a fiend to make for such a favour. The spirits whom he supposes to be employed by Prospero perpetually to torment him, and the many forms and different methods they take for this purpose, are described with the utmost liveliness and force of fancy:

Sometimes like apes, that moe and chatter at me,
And after bite me; then like hedgehogs, which
Lie tumbling in my bare-foot way, and mount
Their pricks at my foot-fall: sometimes am I
All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness.

It is scarcely possible for any speech to be more expressive of the manners and sentiments, than that in which our poet has painted the brutal barbarity and unfeeling savageness of this son of Sycorax, by making him enumerate, with a kind of horrible delight, the various ways in which it was possible for the drunken sailors to surprise and kill his master:

There thou may'st brain him,

Having first seiz'd his books; or with a log
Batter his skull; or paunch him with a stake;
Or cut his wezand with thy knife.-

He adds, in allusion to his own abominable attempt, above all be sure to secure the daughter; whose beauty,' he tells them, is incomparable.' The charms of Miranda could not be more exalted

than by extorting this testimony from so insensible a monster.

Shakspeare seems to be the only poet who possesses the power of uniting poetry with propriety of character; of which I know not an instance more striking than the image Caliban makes use of to express silence, which is at once highly poetical, and exactly suited to the wildness of the speaker:

Pray you tread softly, that the blind mole may not
Hear a foot-fall.

I always lament that our author has not preserved this fierce and implacable spirit in Caliban to the end of the play; instead of which, he has, I think injudiciously, put into his mouth words that imply repentance and understanding:

I'll be wise hereafter,

And seek for grace.

What a thrice double ass

Was I, to take this drunkard for a God,
And worship this dull fool?

It must not be forgotten that Shakspeare has artfully taken occasion from this extraordinary character, which is finely contrasted to the mildness and obedience of Ariel, obliquely to satirize the prevailing passion for new and wonderful sights, which has rendered the English so ridiculous. 'Were I in England now,' says Trinculo, on first discovering Caliban, and had but this fish painted, not an holiday-fool there but would give a piece of silver.-When they will not give a

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doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.'

Such is the inexhaustible plenty of our poet's invention, that he has exhibited another character in this play, entirely his own; that of the lovely and innocent Miranda.

When Prospero first gives her a sight of Prince Ferdinand, she eagerly exclaims,

What is't? a spirit?

Lord, how it looks about! Believe me, sir,
It carries a brave form. But 'tis a spirit.

Her imagining that, as he was so beautiful, he must necessarily be one of her father's aerial agents, is a stroke of nature worthy admiration; as are likewise her intreaties to her father not to use him harshly, by the power of his art:

Why speaks my father so ungently? This

Is the third man that e'er I saw; the first
That e'er I sigh'd for!

Here we perceive the beginning of that passion which Prospero was desirous she should feel for the prince, and which she afterwards more fully expresses upon an occasion which displays at once the tenderness, the innocence, and the simplicity of her character. She discovers her lover employed in the laborious task of carrying wood, which Prospero had enjoined him to perform. Would,' says she, the lightning had burnt up those logs that you are enjoined to pile!'