turgid; so his characteristical excellences may possibly be reduced to these three general heads: his lively creative imagination; his strokes of nature and passion; and his preservation of the consistency of his characters.' These excellences, particularly the last, are of so much importance in the drama, that they amply compensate for his transgressions against the rules of Time and Place, which being of a more mechanical nature, are often strictly observed by a genius of the lowest order; but to pourtray characters naturally, and to preserve them uniformly, requires such an intimate knowledge of the heart of man, and is so rare a portion of felicity, as to have been enjoyed, perhaps, only by two writers, Homer and Shakspeare.

Of all the plays of Shakspeare, the Tempest is the most striking instance of his creative power. He has there given the reins to his boundless imagination, and has carried the romantic, the wonderful, and the wild, to the most pleasing extravagance. The scene is a desolate island: and the characters the most new and singular that can well be conceived: a prince who practises magic, an attendant spirit, a monster the son of a witch, and a young lady who had been brought to this solitude in her infancy, and had never beheld a man except her father.

As I have affirmed that Shakspeare's chief excellence is the consistency of his characters, I will exemplify the truth of this remark, by pointing out some master-strokes of this nature in the drama before us.

The poet artfully acquaints us that Prospero is a magician, by the very first words which his daughter Miranda speaks to him :

If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them:

N° 94. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1753.

Monstro quod ipse tibi possis dare.—Juv.

-What I shew,

Thyself may freely on thyself bestow.-Dryden.

SIR,

TO THE ADVENTURER.

You have somewhere discouraged the hope of idleness by shewing, that whoever compares the number of those who have possessed fortuitous advantages, and of those who have been disappointed in their expectations, will have little reason to register himself in the lucky catalogue.

'But as we have seen thousands subscribe to a raffle, of which one only could obtain the prize; so idleness will still presume to hope, if the advantages, however improbable, are admitted to lie within the bounds of possibility. Let the drone, therefore, be told, that if by the error of fortune he obtains the stores of the bee, he cannot enjoy the felicity; that the honey which is not gathered by industry, will be eaten without relish, if it is not wasted in riot; and that all who become possessed of the immediate object of their hope, without any efforts of their own, will be disappointed of enjoyment.

'No life can be happy, but that which is spent in the prosecution of some purpose to which our powers are equal, and which we, therefore, prosecute with success; for this reason it is absurd to dread business, upon pretence that it will leave few intervals to pleasure. Business is that by which industry pursues its purpose, and the purpose of industry is seldom disappointed: he who endeavours to arrive at a certain point, which he perceives himself perpe

tually to approach, enjoys all the happiness which nature has allotted to those hours, that are not spent in the immediate gratification of appetites by which our own wants are indicated, or of affections by which we are prompted to supply the wants of others. The end proposed by the busy, is various as their temper, constitution, habits, and circumstances: but in the labour itself is the enjoyment, whether it be pursued to supply the necessaries or the conveniencies of life, whether to cultivate a farm or decorate a palace; for when the palace is decorated, and the barn filled, the pleasure is at an end, till the object of desire is again placed at a distance, and our powers are again employed to obtain it with apparent success. Nor is the value of life less, than if our enjoyment did not thus consist in anticipation; for by anticipation, the pleasure which would otherwise be contracted within an hour, is diffused through a week; and if the dread which exaggerates future evil is confessed to be an increase of misery, the hope which magnifies future good cannot be denied to be an accession of happi

ness.

'The most numerous class of those who presume to hope for miraculous advantages, is that of gamesters. But by gamesters, I do not mean the gentlemen who stake an estate, against the cunning of those who have none; for I leave the cure of lunatics to the professors of physic: I mean the dissolute and indigent: who in the common phrase put themselves in Fortune's way, and expect from her bounty that which they eagerly desire, and yet believe to be too dearly purchased by diligence and industry; tradesmen who neglect their business, to squander in fashionable follies more than it can produce; and swaggerers who rank themselves with gentlemen, merely because they have no business to pursue.

Whatever spirit, careless of his charge,
Forsakes his post or leaves the fair at large,
Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o'ertake his sins,
Be stopp'd in vials, or tranfixt with pins;
Or plung'd in lakes of bitter washes lie,
Or wedg'd whole ages in a bodkin's eye:
Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain,
While clogg'd he beats his silken wings in vain;
Or alum styptics with contracting pow'r,
Shrink his thin essence like a shrivell'd flow'r :
Or as Ixion fix'd, the wretch shall feel
The giddy motion of the whirling wheel;
The fumes of burning chocolate shall glow,

And tremble at the sea that froths below!-POPE.

The method which is taken to induce Ferdinand to believe that his father was drowned in the late tempest is exceedingly solemn and striking. He is sitting upon a solitary rock, and weeping overagainst the place where he imagined his father was wrecked, when he suddenly hears with astonishment aërial music creep by him upon the waters, and the Spirit gives him the following information in words not proper for any but a Spirit to utter:

Full fathom five thy father lies:

Of his bones are coral made :
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,

Into something rich and strange.

And then follows a most lively circumstance;
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

Hark! now I hear them-Ding-dong-bell!

This is so truly poetical, that one can scarce forbear exclaiming with Ferdinand,

This is no mortal business, nor no sound

That the earth owns!

The happy versatility of Shakspeare's genius enables him to excel in lyric as well as in dramatic poesy.

But the poet rises still higher in his management of the character of Ariel, by making a moral use of it, that is, I think, incomparable, and the greatest effort of his art. Ariel informs Prospero, that he has fulfilled his orders, and punished his brother and companions so severely, that if he himself was now to behold their sufferings, he would greatly compassionate them. To which Prospero answers,

-Dost thou think so, Spirit?

ARIEL. Mine would, Sir, were I human. PROSPERO. And mine shall.

He then takes occasion, with wonderful dexterity and humanity, to draw an argument from the incorporeality of Ariel, for the justice and necessity of pity and forgiveness:

Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions; and shall not myself,

One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,

Passion'd as they, be kindlier mov'd than thou art?

The poet is a more powerful magician than his own Prospero: we are transported into fairy land; we are wrapt in a delicious dream, from which it is misery to be disturbed; all around is enchantment!

Z.

-The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not..
Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices;
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again: and then in dreaming,
The clouds, methought, would open and shew riches
Ready to drop upon me :- when I wak'd,
I cry'd to dream again!