and tempered with mature judgment, in some one or other of Shakspeare's great pieces.*

* By Hieronimo Mr. Coleridge meant The Spanish Tragedy, and not the previous play, which is usually called The First Part of Jeronimo. The Spanish Tragedy is, upon the authority of Heywood, attributed to Kyd. It is supposed that Ben Jonson originally performed the part of Hieronimo, and hence it has been surmised that certain passages and whole scenes connected with that character, and not found in some of the editions of the play, are, in fact, Ben Jonson's own writing. Some of these supposed interpolations are amongst the best things in the Spanish Tragedy; the style is singularly unlike Jonson's, whilst there are turns and particular images which do certainly seem to have been imitated by or from Shakspeare. Mr. Lamb at one time gave them to Webster. Take this passage, in the fourth act:

"HIERON. What make you with your torches in the dark?

PEDRO. You bid us light them, and attend you here.
HIERON. No! you are deceived; not I; you are
deceived.

Was I so mad to bid light torches now?
Light me your torches at the mid of noon,
Whenas the sun-god rides in all his glory;
Light me your torches then.

PEDRO. Then we burn daylight.

HIERON. Let it be burnt; Night is a murd'rous slut, That would not have her treasons to be seen;

I THINK I could point out to a half line what is really Shakspeare's in Love's Labour Lost,

And yonder pale-faced Hecate there, the moon,
Doth give consent to that is done in darkness;
And all those stars that gaze upon her face
Are aglets on her sleeve, pins on her train ;
And those that should be powerful and divine,
Do sleep in darkness when they most should shine.
PEDRO. Provoke them not, fair sir, with tempting
words.

The heavens are gracious, and your miseries and

Make

sorrow

you speak you know not what.

HIERON. Villain! thou liest, and thou dost nought But tell me I am mad: thou liest, I am not mad:

I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques ;

I'll prove it thee; and were I mad, how could I?

Where was she the same night, when my Horatio was

murder'd!

and some other of the non-genuine plays. What he wrote in that play is of his earliest

She should have shone then: search thou the book: Had the moon shone in my boy's face, there was a kind of grace,

That I know

His

him,

nay,

I do know, had the murderer seen

weapon would have fallen, and cut the earth, Had he been framed of nought but blood and death,” &c.

"HIERON. But are you sure that they are dead?

CASTILE. Ay, slain too sure.

HIERON. What, and yours too?

VICEROY. Ay, all are dead; not one of them survive. HIERON. Nay, then I care not

friends;

Let us lay our heads together.

come, we shall be

See, here's a goodly noose will hold them all.
VICEROY. O damned devil! how secure he is!
HIERON. Secure! why dost thou wonder at it?
I tell thee, Viceroy, this day I've seen Revenge,
And in that sight am grown a prouder monarch
Than ever sate under the crown of Spain.
Had I as many lives as there be stars,
As many heavens to go to as those lives,
I'd give them all, ay, and my soul to boot,
But I would see thee ride in this red pool.
Methinks, since I grew inward with revenge,
I cannot look with scorn enough on death.

manner, having the all-pervading sweetness which he never lost, and that extreme condensation which makes the couplets fall into epigrams, as in the Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece.* In the drama alone, as

KING. What! dost thou mock us, slave? Bring tortures forth.

HIERON. Do, do, do; and meantime I'll torture you. You had a son, as I take it, and your son

Should have been married to your daughter: ha! was it not so?

You had a son too, he was my liege's nephew.

He was proud and politic― had he lived,

He might have come to wear the crown of Spain:

I think 'twas so 'twas I that killed him;

Look you - this same hand was it that stabb'd
His heart
do you see this hand?

For one Horatio, if you ever knew him

A youth, one that they hang'd up in his father's garden — One that did force your valiant son to yield," &c.--ED.

"In Shakspeare's Poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length, in the drama, they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky

Shakspeare soon found out, could the sublime poet and profound philosopher find the conditions of a compromise. In the Love's Labour Lost there are many faint sketches of some of his vigorous portraits in after-life · as, for example, in particular, of Benedict and Beatrice.*

Gifford has done a great deal for the text of Massinger, but not as much as might easily be done. His comparison of Shakspeare with his contemporary dramatists is obtuse indeed.+

banks, mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly, and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current, and with one voice." - Biog. Lit., vol. ii. p. 21.

*

Mr. Coleridge, of course, alluded to Biron and Rosaline; and there are other obvious prolusions, as the scene of the masque with the courtiers, compared with the play in A Midsummer Night's Dream.-Ed.

+ See his Introduction to Massinger, vol. i. p. 79., in which, amongst other most extraordinary assertions, Mr. Gifford pronounces that rhythmical modulation is