There has been nothing written about Shakespeare so worthy of surviving; and whatever becomes of it now, its final place will probably be found near that everlasting name.

Its plan is the simplest possible. Excepting the justice and the culprit, the only persons present at the examination are the justice's chaplain Sir Silas Gough, his clerk Mr. Ephraim Barnett who reports it, and the two countrymen who watched Shakespeare and his fellows in the forest and give evidence of the offence, Joseph Carnaby and Euseby Treen. It is an hour before noontide in the great hall at Charlecote, and the case is proceeding as an ordinary sessions matter, when suddenly, one hardly understands how, the offence of the culprit has become nothing, and the culprit himself everything: for justice, chaplain, witnesses, reporter, all without seeming to intend it, are but adding in their several ways to the interest he has contrived to awaken; and even the anger of the worshipful knight, which had fallen heavily on him at first for his girdings at the chaplain, only succeeds in so finding utterance as to foreshadow something humorously different.

'Young man, I perceive that if I do not stop thee in thy courses, thy name, being involved in thy company's, may one day or other reach across the county; and folks may handle it and turn it about, as it deserveth, from Coleshill to Nuneaton, from Bromwicham to Brownsover. And who knoweth but that, years after thy death, the very house wherein thou wert born may be pointed at and commented on by knots of people, gentle and simple! What a shame for an honest man's son!... But with God's blessing the hundred shall be rid of thee, nay the whole shire. We will have none such in our county: we justices are agreed upon it, and will keep our word now and forevermore. Woe betide any that resembles thee in any part of him!'

When the evidence comes to be taken, the witnesses have less to tell of seeing Willy in Charlecote-park helping to carry off the deer, than of hearing him with his wonderful talk frighten his companions in its moonlit glades; and a few touches reproduce the scene so vividly that we seem ourselves to have part in his strange vagaries, his Windsor whimsies, his Italian girl's nursery sighs, his Pucks and pinchings, his sleep under the oaks in the ancient forest of Arden, and his waking from sleep in the Tempest far at sea. But the witnesses have not more difficulty in their effort to prove the offence than the worshipful Sir Thomas

in his resolve to punish the offender. I cannot fix my eyes (as one would say) on the shifting and sudden shade-and-shine, which cometh back to me, do what I will, and mazes me in a manner and blinks me.' The end of it is therefore that the warrant of commitment is put aside, and the lad has a lecture read to him, instead, upon his ill character in the county; that he is dissolute and light, much given to mummeries and mysteries, wakes and carousals, cudgel-fighters, mountebanks, and wanton women; also that it was said of him (his worship hoped this might be without foundation) that he enacted parts, and not simply of foresters and fairies, girls in the green-sickness and friars, lawyers and outlaws, but likewise, having small reverence for station, of kings and queens, knights and privycouncillors, in all their glory. Reason and ruminate with thy'self now,' he adds, as the chaplain declares folks had been consumed at the stake for pettier felonies, and Willy holds down his head:

Canst thou believe it to be innocent to counterfeit kings and queens? Supposest thou that if the impression of their faces on a farthing be felonious and ropeworthy, the imitation of head and body, voice and bearing, plume and strut, crown and mantle, and everything else that maketh them royal and glorious, be aught less? Perpend, young man, perpend. Consider who among inferior mortals shall imitate them becomingly? Dreamest thou they talk and act like checkmen at Banbury fair? How can thy shallow brain suffice for their vast conceptions? How darest thou say, as they do, Hang this fellow, Quarter that; flay, mutilate, stab, shoot, press, hook, torture, burn alive? These are royalties. Who appointed thee to such office?'

But I may not indulge myself by farther description. Profuse as are the striking thoughts and images in the book, and wonderful everywhere the fitness and felicity of its style, its higher wealth of imagination and wit is inseparable from the subtlety of its art and design. A true book suffers and fades when only the good things of its author are made prominent; but, taken each at its worth, all here are so very masterly that nothing remains to be said of a writer from whom such things drop so abundantly on any subject that engages him, than that, however distant be his full inheritance of fame, he can afford to wait the time. One more extract alone shall be taken, and not from the Examination itself. To it are appended by its reporter,

upon the relation of one of the retainers of the Earl of Essex, not only a conference on the condition of Ireland between the earl and Master Edmund Spenser, but also a delightful sketch of the burial of Spenser shortly afterwards in Westminster Abbey. What follows, on the common lot, is from the Conference.

'Look at any old mansion-house, and let the sun shine as gloriously as it may on the golden vanes, or the arms recently quartered over the gateway, or the embayed window, and on the happy pair that haply is toying at it; nevertheless thou mayest say that of a certainty the same fabric hath seen much sorrow within its chambers, and heard many wailings: and each time this was the heaviest stroke of all. Funerals have passed along through the stout-hearted knights upon the wainscot, and amid the laughing nymphs upon the arras. Old servants have shaken their heads, as if somebody had deceived them, when they found that beauty and nobility could perish. Edmund, the things that are too true pass by us as if they were not true at all; and when they have singled us out, then only do they strike us.'

Landor justly valued this Dialogue, and was in great alarm on hearing from England that the friends who had charge of the printing could not understand why the same volume should contain both it and the Examination. Expressly for this, he wrote to Lady Blessington (11th of October 1834): I have written an Introduction which quite satisfied me; which hardly anything 'does upon the whole, though everything in part. Pray relieve me, then, from this teasing anxiety, for the Examination and the Conference if disjoined would break my heart.' He had his wish; yet wellnigh broke his heart notwithstanding, on seeing the printed book. 'I hope,' he wrote to Southey, ‘my pub'lisher sent you the Examination of Shakespeare,—alas that I 'should say it! the very worst-printed book that ever fell into my hands. "Volubly discreet"!" slipped into" for "stripped "unto"! "Sit mute" for "stand;" with many, many others! And then there are words I never use, such as "utmost;" I always write "uttermost." In fact the misprints amount to 'forty of the grosser kind, and I know not how many of the 'smaller!' He added, with kindly allusion to the notice I had written of it, that if a friendly report of the thing had not put him in good humour before it reached him, he would have flung it into the fire then and there, and dismissed it from his thoughts forever.

6

The friendly report had outstripped the volume in Florence by some days, and when the single copy afterwards arrived he had to lend it round to all his circle. He carefully kept the little notes from successive applicants for the loan, among them Milnes, Brown, Leckie, Kirkup, and the novelist Mr. James, also for the time his neighbour; and the flutter of pleasure and praise among them had not been without pleasure for himself, and a flutter of encouragement too. 'I did not believe such kind things would 'be said of me for at least a century to come.' The effect survived even the less hopeful side of the picture; and when Crabb Robinson wrote from London (10th of February 1835), that the Shakespeare book would have fallen dead-born but for one review, that, though this had proclaimed its beauties, others had found it unintelligible, and that a paper of high character had thrust it aside as a mere silly imitation of obsolete law proceed'ings and phrases,' Landor only replied to this part of the letter, that he was busy with something else which he hoped might have better fortune.

The 'something else' was Pericles and Aspasia, also written for the most part in this last year of residence in Italy, which it helps to make memorable.

VII. PERICLES AND ASPASIA.

LANDOR TO SOUTHEY (early in 1835).

'My friend Mr. Robinson has not told me whether Charles Lamb has left any writings behind him. Nothing can be more delightful than the Essays of Elia; and his sister's style is perfect. I have read Mrs. Leicester's School four times, and each time with equal if not fresh delight. She is now far advanced in years, and no friend can be in the place of a brother to her. He was a most affectionate creature, pleasurable and even-tempered. Him too I saw but once, and yet I think of him as if I had known him forty years.

Once, and once only, have I seen thy face,
Elia! once only has thy tripping tongue
Run o'er my breast, yet never has been left
Impression on it stronger or more sweet.
Cordial old man! what youth was in thy years,
What wisdom in thy levity, what truth
In every utterance of that purest soul!

Few are the spirits of the glorified

I'd spring to earlier at the gate of Heaven.

Is there anything yet left upon the earth? or is there only a void space between you and me?... I began a conversation between Pericles and Aspasia, and thought I could do better by a series of letters between them, not uninterrupted; for the letters should begin with their first friendship, should give place to their conversations afterwards, and recommence on their supposed separation during the plague of Athens. Few materials are extant: Bayle, Menage, Thucydides, Plutarch, and hardly anything more. So much the better. The coast is clear: there are neither rocks nor weeds before me. But I am writing as if I had not torn to pieces all their love-letters and orations! Few were completed.'

So Landor wrote in the letter, the last addressed to his friend from Italy, which Mr. Milnes brought over as an introduction to the poet-laureate. But even while he wrote, the subject of Pericles had recast itself in his mind; in the few more months that remained to him at the villa Gherardescha it was brought nearly to completion; and though, having carried the manuscript to England in the December of 1835, it was published while he resided there, it is to Italy the book belongs. Here therefore brief account of it is given.

The first notion mentioned to Southey, of including conversations in his plan, was thrown over afterwards; and he restricted himself to a series of imaginary letters, opening at the arrival of Aspasia in Athens from her native Miletus, and closing at the death of Pericles in the third year of the Peloponnesian war. He interspersed occasional speeches; and relieved his theme, which he also adorns and illustrates, by a variety of fragments of verse the most thoroughly Greek that any Englishman has written. It was a daring choice to select a time which within the compass of a single life took in the lives of the foremost of the ancient poets, philosophers, historians, and men of action, by whom humanity and the human race have been exalted; and it was trebly daring to advance to such a task, trusting solely to the force of his genius and unassisted but by the treasures of his memory. In writing my Pericles and Aspasia,' he says, in a letter of the 27th April 1836, I had no books to 'consult. The characters, thoughts, and actions are all fictions. 'Pericles was somewhat less amiable, Aspasia somewhat less virtuous, Alcibiades somewhat less sensitive; but here I could represent him so, being young, and before his character was 'displayed.' Besides these, his only leading persons are Aspasia's