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F late years a number of valuable and interesting works on the subject of Shakespeare have issued from the press. With an industry which nothing could exhaust, and a research which nothing could escape, Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps has furnished us in his Outlines with an authentic collection of all the known facts respecting the personal and literary history of the great dramatist.' Mr. Sidney Lee, who, in his Life of Shakespeare, for the moment, has superseded Mr. Phillipps in popular regard, has given us a most interesting account of the Elizabethan Sonneteers, and has shown, in opposition to the received opinion, that the Sonnets of Shakespeare were addressed to Lord Southampton. Mr. Wyndham, amid his preoccupations as a politician, has found time. to publish an edition of Shakespeare's Poems, in which he too has given us a valuable reading on

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the Sonnets, and, differing from Mr. Lee, regards them as addressed to the young lord who was afterwards the Earl of Pembroke. Mr. Castle, one of His Majesty's Counsel, in his Study, has followed the footsteps and completed the work of Lord Campbell on the legal acquirements of Shakespeare, and has advanced a novel and ingenious theory on the subject. Mr. Justice Madden, the ViceChancellor of the University of Dublin, claims to have discovered the distinctive note distinctive note' of the workmanship of Shakespeare,' and, in his Diary of Master William Silence, has interwoven the Poet's allusions to Elizabethan sport in a romance which in point of interest may be compared to Queenhoo-Hall, as animated by the magic wand of Scott. And, last and not least, Mr. Swinburne, in his Study of Shakespeare has shown the laborious and elaborate revision to which the Shakespearian Plays were subjected by their author, and has for ever dispelled the notion that the great Poet was insensible to the value of his writings, and indifferent to their fate.

The Critical Study of the Professor of Literature in the University of Dublin, after a lapse of thirty years, retains its popularity as an analysis of the 'Mind and Art' of the great Dramatist; but the works which have been mentioned justify, if they do

not necessitate, a reconsideration of the notions. which we are accustomed to entertain of Shakespeare. Nor can we overlook the obligations under which America has laid us in the discussion of all Shakespearian questions. Judge Holmes, Mr. Donnelly, and Mr. Reed have received but scant consideration from the accredited organs of opinion on this side of the Atlantic, but the services which these distinguished writers have rendered to the literature of the subject cannot be ignored. Their predecessors, from the time of Farmer, had confined their attention to the discovery of parallelisms between the works of Shakespeare and the works of the Ancients. The American writers, on the contrary, have directed their efforts, with remarkable success, to the discovery of parallelisms between the works of Shakespeare and the acknowledged works of Bacon; and if they have not succeeded in convincing the world that Bacon and Shakespeare were really one, they have given a powerful stimulus to the study of two of the greatest men that the world has ever seen, if we are still to consider them as two. Moreover, it is not merely the question of the Identity of Shakespeare which is involved in the discussions which they have raised. These discussions involve the question of his Unity, the question of the extent of his Authorship, and

above all the question whether in the received text we possess his writings cur'd and perfect of their limbs' and 'absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.'

In spite of all that has been written, there is a vague feeling of unrest as to Shakespeare in the public mind; and a new study on the subject may, perhaps, be welcomed. Whoever the great dramatist was, we can form no adequate conception of his mind; but what Lord Rosebery says of Napoleon is equally true of Shakespeare. Mankind will always delight to scrutinise something that indefinitely raises its conceptions of its own powers and possibilities, and will seek, though eternally in vain, to penetrate the secret of this prodigious intellect.