What are all Shakspeare's females in comparison with Esther?

Est-ce toi, chère Elise? O jour trois fois heureux !
Que béni soit le Ciel qui te rend à mes vœux!
Toi, qui, de Benjamin comme moi descendue.
Fus de mes premiers ans la compagne assidue,
Et qui, d'un même joug souffrant l'oppression
M'aidais à soupirer les malheurs de Sion.

On m'élevait alors solitaire et cachée,
Sous les yeux vigilans du sage Mardochée.

Du triste état des Juifs, jour et nuit agité,

Il me tira du sein de mon obscurité,

Et, sur mes faibles mains fondant leur délivrance,
Il me fit d'un empire accepter l'espérance.

Cependant mon amour pour notre nation
A rempli ce palais des filles de Sion,
Jeunes et tendres fleurs, par le sort agitées,
Sous un ciel étranger comme moi transplantées.

Aux pieds de l'Eternel je viens m'humilier,

Et goûter le plaisir de me faire oublier.
Mais à tous les Persans je cache leurs familles.
Il faut les appeler. Venez, venez, mes filles,
Compagnes autrefois de ma captivité,

De l'antique Jacob jeune postérité.

If there are any Huns, Hottentots, Hurons, Goths, Vandals, or other barbarians, insensible

to the feminine modesty, the dignity, and the melody of this exquisite passage, may they be seventy times seven-fold delighted by the charms of their own native productions. "I thought," says Racine in his preface to Esther, "that I could fill up the whole of my dramatic action with such scenes as God himself has in a manner prepared." Racine justly thought so, for he alone possessed the harp of David consecrated to the scenes prepared by God.

Judging with an impartiality the general character of foreign productions and our own (if indeed we are capable of judging foreign literary works, which I much doubt) it may be said that, though equal in power of thought, ours have the advantage of regularity and taste in composition. Genius creates, taste regulates. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste genius is but a sublime madness: the sure touch which draws from the lyre the exact tone it ought to render is more rare than even the faculty which creates. Talent and genius, diversely diffused, latent and unrecognized, as Montesquieu says frequently pass through us without unpacking," they exist in equal proportion in all ages, but in the course of those ages, it is only among certain natures, and at certain periods of time, that taste is developed in its

purity. Before this period arrives, and after its conclusion, all will be imperfect through deficiency or excess. Hence the reason why finished productions are so rare; for they must necessarily emanate from the happy union of taste and genius. But this rare concurrence, like the concurrence of certain stars, seems to require the revolution of ages for its consummation, and then its duration is but momentary.

THE ERA OF SHAKSPEARE.

THE period of the appearance of a great genius should be well considered, to explain certain affinities of that genius, to show what it received from the past, gathered from the present, or left to the future. The extravagant imagination of the present age, which elevates every great name to the clouds, that morbid imagination which, disdains reality, begot a Shakspeare after its own fashion. The son of the Stratford butcher is a giant who has fallen from some Pelion upon Ossa in the midst of his barbarous countrymen and by his seven-league strides left his cotemporaries far behind him. Nay, Shakspeare, we are told, is like Dante, a solitary comet which, having traversed the constellations of the ancient firmament, returns to the feet of the Deity, and says to him, like the thunder, "Here I am."

The extravagant and the romantic are not to be admitted into the domain of fact. Dante ap

peared in what may justly be called an age of darkness. The compass had then scarcely enabled the mariner to steer through the well known waters of the Mediterranean.. America and the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope were yet undiscovered. The inventor of gunpowder had not changed the whole system of war, nor had the introduction of printing operated a complete metamorphosis in society, and the feudal system pressed with all the weight of its darkness upon enslaved Europe.

But when the mother of Shakspeare gave birth to her obscure son, there had already elapsed in the year 1564 two thirds of the famous age of human regeneration and reformation, of that age in which the principal discoveries of modern times were accomplished, the true system of the universe ascertained, the heavens and the earth explored, the sciences cultivated, and the fine arts carried to a pitch of perfection which they have never since attained. Great deeds and great men appeared in all parts. Families repaired to the woods of New England, to sow the seeds of a fertile independence; provinces broke the yoke of their oppressors, and raised themselves to the rank of nations.

On the thrones of Europe, after Charles V. Francis I and Leo X, there were seated Sixtus V,