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universally allowed. He was neither one who need be silent about a friend, lest he should be hurt by his enemy; nor one who nursed a style or a theory by himself, and so was obliged to take upon him a monopoly of admiration in self-defence; nor one who should gaze himself blind to every thing else, in the complacency of his own shallowness. If it should be argued, that he who saw through human nature, was not likely to praise it, we answer, that he who saw through it as Shakspeare did, was the likeliest man in the world to be kind to it. Even Swift refreshed the dry bitterness of his misanthropy in his love for Tom, Dick, and Harry; and what Swift did from impatience at not finding men better, Shakspeare would do out of patience in finding them so good. We instanced the sonnet in the collection called the Passionate Pilgrim, beginning

If music and sweet poetry agree,

in which Spenser is praised so highly. It was replied, that minute enquirers considered that collection as apocryphal. This set us upon looking again at the biographers who have criticised it; and we see no reason, for the present, to doubt its authenticity. For some parts of it we would answer upon internal evidence, especially, for instance, the Lover's Complaint. There are two lines in this poem which would alone announce him. They have the very trick of his eye.

O father, what a hell of witchcraft lies

In the small orb of one particular tear!

But enquirers would have to do much more than disprove the authenticity of these poems, before they made out Shakspeare to be a grudging author. They would have to undo all the modesty and kindliness of his other writings. They would have to undo his universal character for "gentleness," at a time when gentle meant all that was noble as well as mild. They would have to find bitterness in the sweet wisdom that runs throughout his dramatic works, and selfishness in the singular and exquisite generosity of sentiment that hallows his more personal productions. They would have to deform and to untune all that round, harmonious mind, which a great contemporary described as the very "sphere of humanity;" to deprive him of the epithet given him in the school of Milton, "unvulgar*;" to render the universality of wisdom liable to the same drawbacks as mere universality of science; to take the child's heart out of the true man's body; to un-Shakspeare Shakspeare. If Shakspeare had never mentioned a contemporary in his life, nor given so many evidences in his sonnets of a cordial and admiring sense of those about him, we would sooner believe that sheer modesty had restrained his tongue, than the least proach to a petty feeling. We can believe it possible that he may ave thought his panegyrics not wanted; but unless he degraded himself ilfully, in order to be no better than any of his fellow-creatures, we cannot believe it possible, that he would have thought his panegyrics wanted, and yet withheld them.

It is remarkable that one of the most regular contributors of Com

By Milton's nephew Philips in his Theatrum Pretarum. It is an epithet given in all the spirit which it attributes.

mendatory Verses in the time of Shakspeare, was a man whose blunt-
ness of criticism and feverish surliness of manners have rendered the
most suspected of a jealous grudgingness;-Ben Jonson. We mean
not to detract an atom from the good-heartedness which we sincerely
believe this eminent person to have possessed at bottom, when we say,
that as an excess of modest confidence in his own generous instincts
might possibly have accounted for the sparingness of panegyric in our
great dramatist, so a noble distrust of himself, and a fear lest jealousy
should get the better of his instincts, might possibly account for this
panegyrical overplus in his illustrious friend. If so, it shews how use-
ful such a distrust is to one's ordinary share of humanity; and how much
safer it will be for us, on these as well as all other occasions, to ven-
ture upon likening ourselves to Ben Jonson rather than Shakspeare.
It is to be recollected at the same time that Ben Jonson, in his age,
was the more prominent person of the two, as a critical bestower of
applause; that he occupied what may be called the town-chair of wit
and scholarship; and was in the habit of sanctioning the pretensions
of new authors by a sort of literary adoption, calling them his " sons,"
and "
sealing them of the tribe of Ben." There was more in him of
the aristocracy and heraldry of letters, than in Shakspeare, who, after
all, seems to have been careless of fame himself, and to have written
nothing during the chief part of his life but plays which he did not print.
Ben Jonson, among other panegyrics, wrote high and affectionate ones
upon Drayton, William Browne, Fletcher, and Beaumont. His verses
to the memory of Shakspeare are a most noble monument to both of
them. The lines to Beaumont, in return for some which we have
quoted in a former number, we must repeat. They are delightful for
a certain involuntary but manly fondness, and for the candour with
which he confesses the joy he received from such commendation.

How I do love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse
That unto me dost such religion use

How I'do fear myself, that am not worth

The least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth!
At once thou mak'st me happy, and unmak'd:

And giving largely to me, more thou tak'st!

What fate is mine, that so itself bereaves?

What art is thine, that so thy friend deceives?

When even there, where most thou praisest me,
For writing better, I must envy thee.

Observe the good effect which the use of the word "religion" has here, though somewhat over classical and pedantic. A certain pedantry, in the best sense of the term, was natural to the author, and therefore throws a grace on his most natural moments.

There is great zeal and sincerity in Ben Jonson's lines to Fletcher on the ill success of his Faithful Shepherdess; but we have not room for them.

Beaumont's are still finer; and indeed furnish a very complete specimen of his wit and sense, as well as his sympathy with his friend. His indignation against the critics is more composed and contemptuous. His uppermost feeling is confidence in his friend's greatness. The reader may here see what has always been thought by men of genius,

of people who take the ipse dixits of the critics. After giving a fine sense of the irrepressible thirst of writing in a poet, he says,

Yet wish I those whom I for friends have known,
To sing their thoughts to no ears but their own.
Why should the man, whose wit ne'er had a stain,
Upon the public stage present his vein,

And make a thousand men in judgment sit,
To call in question his undoubted wit,

Scarce two of which can understand the laws

Which they should judge by, nor the party's causè ?
Among the rout there is not one that hath
In his own censure an explicit faith.

One company, knowing they judgment lack,
Ground their belief on the next man in black;
Others, on him that makes signs, and is mute;
Some like as he does in the fairest suit;
He as his mistress doth, and she by chance:
Nor want there those, who as the boy doth dance
Between the acts, will censure the whole play;
Some if the wax-lights be not new that day;
But multitudes there are whose judgment goes
Headlong according to the actors clothes.
For this, these public things and I, agree
So ill, that but to do a right for thee,

I had not been perswaded to have hurl'd
These few, ill spoken lines, into the world,
Both to be read, and censur'd of, by those,

Whose very reading makes verse senseless prose.

One of the finest pieces of commendatory verse is Sir Walter Raleigh's upon the great poem of Spenser. He calls it a Vision upon the Faery Queen.

Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that temple where the vestal flame
Was wont to burn; and passing by that way
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb fair Love, and fairer Virtue kept,
All suddenly I saw the Faery Queen:

At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept,
And from thenceforth those graces were not seen;
(For they this Queen attended); in whose stead
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse.
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did perse,
Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief,
And curst th' access of that celestial thief.

This is highly imaginative and picturesque. We fancy ourselves in one of the most beautiful places of Italian sepulture,-quiet and hushing-looking upon a tomb of animated sculpture. It is the tomb of the renowned Laura. We feel the spirit of Petrarch present without being visible. The fair forms of Love and Virtue keep affectionate watch over the marble. All on a sudden, from out the dusk of the chapel door, the Faery Queen is beheld approaching the tomb. The soul of Petrarch is heard weeping;-a most intense imagination, which affects one like the collected tears and disappointment of living humanity. Oblivion lays him down on the tomb;

And from thenceforth those Graces were not seen.

One of its

The other marbles bleed at this: the ghosts of the dead groan; and the very spirit of Homer is felt to tremble. It is a very grand and high sounet, worthy of the dominant spirit of the writer. beauties however is its defect; if defect it be, and not rather a fine instance of the wilful. Comparisons between great reputations are dangerous, and are apt to be made too much at the expense of one of them, precisely because the author knows he is begging the question. Oblivion has laid him down neither on Laura's hearse nor the Faery Queen's; and Raleigh knew he never would. But he wished to make out a triumphant case for his friend, in the same spirit in which he pushed his sword into a Spanish settlement and carried all before him. The verses of Andrew Marvell prefixed to Paradise Lost, beginuing

When I beheld the poet, blind yet bold,

are well known to every reader of Milton, and justly admired by all who know what they read. We remember how delighted we were to find who Andrew Marvell was, and that he could be so pleasant and lively as well as grave. Spirited and worthy as this panegyric is, the reader who is not thoroughly acquainted with Marvell's history does not know all their spirit and worth. That true friend and excellent patriot stuck to his old acquaintance, at a period when all canters and time-servers turned their backs upon him, and would have made the very knowledge of him, which they themselves had had the honour of sharing, the ruin of those that put their desertion to the blush. There is a noble burst of indignation on this subject, in one of Marvell's prose works, against one Parker, who succeeded in getting made a bishop. Parker seems to have thought that Marvell would have been afraid of acknowledging his old acquaintance; but so far from resembling the bishop in that or any other particular, he not only publicly proclaimed and gloried in the friendship of the overshadowed poet, but reminded Master Parker that he had once done the same.

We must be cautious how we go on quoting verses upon this agreeable subject; for they elbow one's prose out at a great rate. They sit in state, with a great vacancy on each side of them, like Henry the 8th in a picture of Holbein's. The wits who flourished after the time of the Stuarts were not behind the great poets of the age of Elizabeth in doing justice to their contemporaries. Dryden hailed the appearance of Congreve and Oldham. Congreve's merits were universally acknowledged, except by the critics. We need not refer to the works of Pope, Gay, Steele, Prior, &c. If Swift abused Dryden (who is said to have told him he would never be a poet), he also abused in a most unwarrantable and outrageous manner Sir Richard Steele, for whose Tatler he had written. His abuse was not a thing of literary jealousy, but of some personal or party spite. The union of all three was a quintessence of consciousness, reserved for the present times. But Swift's very fondness vented itself, like Bonaparte's, in slaps of the cheek. He was morbid, and liked to create himself cause for pity or regret. "The Dean was a strange man." According to Mrs. Pilkington's account, he used to give her a pretty hard thump now and then,

of course to see how amiably she took it. Upon the same principle, he tells us in the verses on his death that

Friend Pope will grieve a month, and Gay

A week, and Arbuthnot a day.

This was to vex them, and make them prove his words false by complaining of their injustice. He himself once kept a letter unopened for some days, because he was afraid it would contain news of a friend's death. See how he makes his very coarseness and irritability contribute to a pauegyric :—

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We must finish our quotations with a part of some sprightly verses addressed to Garth on his Dispensary by a friend of the name of Codrington. Codrington was one of those happily tempered spirits, who united in high style the characters of the gentleman, the wit, the man of business. He was in the best sense of the words, son of wit and honour about town,"

and

a per

The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's, eye, tongue, sword. He was born in Barbadoes, where after residing some time in England, and serving with great gallantry as an officer in various parts of the world, he was appointed Governor-General of the Leward Islands, He resigned his government in the course of a few years, and died iu the same place in the midst of his favourite studies. Among the variety of his accomplishments he did not omit even divinity, and was ac counted a special master of metaphysics. His public life he had devoted to his country; his private he divided among his books and friends. If the verses before us are not so good as those of the old poets, they are as good in their way, are as sincere and cordial, and smack of the champaigne on his table. We like them on many accounts, for we like the panegyrist, and have an old liking for his friend :—we like the taste they express in friendship and in beauty; and we like to fancy that our good-humoured ancestors in Barbadoes enjoyed the Governor's society, and relished their wine with these identical triplets.

TO MY FRIEND THE AUTHOR, DESIRING MY OPINION OF HIS POEM

Ask me not, friend, what I approve or blame;

Perhaps I know not what I like or damn;

I can be pleased, and I dare own I am.

I read thee over with a lover's eye;

Thou hast no faults, or I no faults can spy;

Thou art ali beauty, or all blindness I.

Critics and aged beaux of fancy chaste,

Who ne'er had fire, or else whose fire is past,

Must judge by rules what they want force to taste.

I would a poet, like a mistress, try,

Not by her hair, her hand, her nose, her eye;

But by some nameless power to give me joy.

The nymph has Grafton's, Cecil's, Churchill's charms,

If with resistless fires my soul she warms,

With balm upon her lips, and raptures in her armsS

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