and he is suspected of practising against the Duke

of Buckingham :

He was a man

Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking

Himself with princes;

but not without reason, for if he had faults, he had also many virtues :

-From his cradle

He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one;
Exceeding wise, fair spoken, and persuading:
Lofty and sour to them that loved him not;
But to those men that sought him, sweet as summer.
And though he were unsatisfied in getting,

(Which was a sin,) yet in bestowing

He was most princely.

Such a man is not without a claim upon our sympathies he is within the sphere of our common humanity. The last acts of his life redeem the preceding. We have often admired the patience which he displays when Norfolk, Suffolk, and Surrey produce to him

-the grand sum of his sins,

The articles collected from his life ;

while, in their malice, they exultingly specify the charges against him in the king's possession, he stands in silent endurance, until they leave him with the taunting valediction

So fare you well, my little good Lord Cardinal;

-then follows his fine soliloquy, beginning with

So farewell to the little good you bear me;
Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness:

This is the state of man, &c.

and the touching dialogue with Cromwell, wherein he tells him that he has recommended him to the king, and warns him against ambition :

By that sin fell the angels; how can man then,
The image of his Maker, hope to win by it?

and concludes with

Oh! Cromwell! Cromwell!

Had I but served my God with half the ze al
I served my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.

The circumstances of his death are equally affecting:

After the stout Earl of Northumberland

Arrested him at York, and brought him forward
(As a man sorely tainted) to his answer,
He fell sick suddenly, and grew so ill

He could not sit his mule.

At last, with easy roads, he came to Leicester,
Lodged in the abbey, where the reverend abbot,
With all his convent, honourably received him,
To whom he gave these words, 'O father abbot,
An old man, broken with the storms of state,
Is come to lay his weary bones amongst ye;
Give him a little earth for charity!'

So went to bed, where eagerly his sickness
Pursued him still; and three nights after this,
About the hour of eight, (which he himself
Foretold should be his last,) full of repentance,
Continual meditations, tears, and sorrows,

He gave his honours to the world again,

His blessed part to heaven, and slept in peace.

Thus it is always with Shakspeare. His worst characters have some claim upon our kindly feelings. Genius is the power of reflecting nature; for genius, as the word imports, is nature. The mind of Shakspeare was as a magic mirror, in which all human nature's possible forms and combinations were present, intuitively and inherently —not conceived-but as connatural portions of his own humanity. Whatever his characters were besides, they were also men. Such they were in the world of his imagination-such they are also in the world of reality. It is this harmony and correspondence between the world without and the world within, that gives the charm to his productions. His characters are not the mere abstractions of intellect from an understood class or species, but are generated in his own mind, as individuals having personal being there, and are distinctly brought out, not so much as representatives of character in actual nature, as the original productions of a plastic genius, which is also nature, and works like her. This is to be a poet; this is what is meant by a creative imagination.

QUARTERLY REVIEW.'

i No. 70.

No. XVI.

ON SHAKSPEARE, IN REFERENCE TO THE AGE IN WHICH HE FLOURISHED.

SHAKSPEARE flourished and wrote in the last half of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and the first half of that of James the First; and consequently under monarchs who were learned themselves, and held literature in honour. The policy of modern Europe, by which the relations of its different states have been so variously interwoven, commenced a century before. Such was the zeal for the study of the ancients, that even court ladies, and the queen herself, were intimately acquainted with Latin and Greek, and could speak the former with fluency; a degree of knowledge which we should in vain seek for in the European courts of the present day. The trade and navigation of the English, which they carried on with all the four quarters of the world, made them acquainted with the customs and mental productions of other nations; and it would appear that they were then more indulgent to foreign manners than they are in the present day. Italy had already produced nearly all for which her literature is distinguished; and translations were diligently, and even successfully, executed in verse from the Italians. They

were not unacquainted with the Spanish literature, for it is certain that Don Quixote was read in England soon after its first appearance. Bacon, the founder of modern experimental philosophy, and of whom it may be said that he carried in his pocket all that merits the name of philosophy in the eighteenth century, was a contemporary of Shakspeare. His fame, as a writer, did not indeed burst forth till after his death; but what a number of ideas must have been in circulation before such an author could arise! Many branches of human knowledge have, since that time, been cultivated to a greater extent, but merely those branches which are totally unproductive to poetry: chemistry, mechanics, manufactures, and rural and political economy, will never enable a man to become a poet. I have elsewhere* examined into the pretensions of modern cultivation, as it is called, which looks down with such contempt on all preceding ages; I have shown that it is all little, superficial, and unsubstantial at bottom. The pride of what has been called the present maturity of human reason has come to a miserable end; and the structures erected by those pedagogues of the human race have fallen to pieces like the baby-houses of children.

The tone of society at present compels us to remark that there is a wide difference between cultivation and what is called polish. That artificial polish which puts an end to every thing like

* In my Lectures on the Spirit of the Age.