extremity; whereat they look grave enough. Four of the afternoon is struck. Lepelletier, making nothing by messengers, by fraternity, or hat-waving, bursts out, along the southern Quai Voltaire, along streets and passages, treble-quick, in huge veritable onslaught! Whereupon, thou bronze artillery officer? "Fire!" say the bronze lips. And roar and thunder, roar and again roar, continual, volcano-like, goes his great gun, in the Cul-de-sac Dauphin against the church of Saint-Roch; go his great guns on the Pont Royal; go all his great guns ;-blow to air some two hundred men ; mainly about the Church of Saint-Roch! Lepelletier cannot stand such horse-play; no Sectioner can stand it; the forty thousand yield on all sides, scour towards covert. Some hundred or so of them gathered about the Théatre de la République; "but," says he, "a few shells dislodged them. It was all finished at six."

The ship is over the bar, then; free she bounds shoreward amid shoutings and riots! Citoyen Buonaparte is named general of the Interior by acclamation; quelled sections have to disarm in such humour as they may; sacred right of Insurrection is gone for ever! The Sieyes' Constitution can disembark itself, and begin marching. The miraculous convention ship has got to land;-and is, shall we figuratively say, changed, as epic ships are wont, into a kind of sea nymph, never to sail more; to roam the waste azure, a miracle in history!

"It is false," says Napoleon," that we fired first with blank charge; it had been a waste of life to do that." Most false; the firing was with. sharp and sharpest shot; to all men it was plain that here was no sport; the rabbets and plinths of Saint-Roch Church show splintered by it to this hour. Singular; in old Broglie's time, six years ago, this whiff of grapeshot was promised; but it could not have been given then; could not have profited then. Now, however, the time is come for it, and the man; and behold you have it; and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it, and become a thing that was ! '* -(Vol. iii. pp. 394-396.)

* The history of the days of Vendémiaire affords a remarkable instance of the worthlessness of official documents, as independent sources of history. Two elaborate reports of these events were presented to the Convention-one by Merlin of Thionville, the other by Barras. The first never mentions Napoleon at all; the other, once only, merely announcing his appointment as second in command. Barras takes all the credit of the military operations to himself; and if the career of Napoleon had ended there, Barras would certainly have kept it.

ART. V.-1. COLLIER'S New Facts regarding the Life of Shakspeare, 1835; and New Anecdotes regarding the Works of Shakspeare, 1836.

2. BOADEN on the Sonnets of Shakspeare, 1837.

3. BROWN on the Autobiographical Poems of Shakspeare, 1838. 4. DE QUINCEY's Life of Shakspeare: (Encyclopædia Britannica, 1840.)

1. COLLIER'S History of English Dramatic Poetry, 1831.

2. DYCE's Editions of the Dramatic Works of George Peele, 1829; and of Robert Greene, 1831.

3. COURTENAY's Commentaries on the Historical Plays of Shakspeare, 1840.

4. The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspeare; edited by CHARLES KNIGHT. (Uncompleted.)

1. MRS JAMESON'S Characteristics of Women, 1832. 2. COLERIDGE's Literary Remains, (vol. ii.) 1836.

3. HALLAM'S Literature of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, (vols. ii. and iii.) 1839.

1. TIECK'S Dramaturgische Blätter: Breslau, 1826.

2. HORN's Shakspeare's Schauspiele Erläutert: Leipzig, 18231831.

3. ULRICI Ueber Shakspeare's dramatische Kunst, und sein Verhältniss zu Calderon und Goethe: Halle, 1839.

IN

N no way, perhaps, could one be enabled to comprehend so readily the revolutions of English literature since the end of the sixteenth century, as by examining the amount, and method, and spirit of the study, which, in each of the principal stages of the period, has been bestowed upon the works of Shakspeare. Not only in the drama, but in every other walk of poetical art, the degree of genuine excellence has always been exactly proportional to the closeness of the approach towards a just appreciation of those masterpieces. In criticism again, ever since the first feeble beginnings of that science among us, the writings of the great dramatist have been a text on which no one has refrained from commenting; and the very names of the books which have been devoted exclusively to their elucidation form a considerable volume. But, in regard to the poet's critics, that is true which some of them have rashly said regarding himself. They have written both much better and much worse than others of their class. In their ranks are enrolled

any

many men of genius as well as learning, who, attracted towards the greatest of modern poets by the same irresistible fascination which assembled the philosophers and scholars of ancient Greece in homage around the throne of Homer, are fair representatives of the literature of their times, in its strength not less than in its weakness. But others there are, lower than helots in the republic of letters, who have attached themselves to the triumphal car as their only means of reaching notoriety; and these men, resembling in their intrusion lazy schoolboys who cling to the back of a stage-coach, resemble them also in the chance they have of obtaining conveyance to their destination, at the expense of certain contempt and probable punishment from the rightful occupants of the vehicle.

It has always seemed to us, that the strongest of testimonies to the majesty of Shakspeare's genius, is to be gathered from what has been said of him in times when he was most depreciated because least understood. No one endowed with even a glimmering of poetical feeling has ever studied the poet, and attempted to enunciate his own impressions, without betraying the operation of the spell which the great magician had worked. Let his philosophy have been the shallowest possible-his theories of dramatic art the most thoroughly erroneous-his purpose in commenting the most decidedly hostile,-the mind of the critic is overborne by an influence not to be resisted. He who came to scoff or cavil remains to admire and reverence; and his words are like those of a false prophet, compelled, in spite of himself, to utter truth. We cannot pause to indicate how this incongruity appears, amidst the indifference of the period between the breaking out of the civil war, and the end of the seventeenth century. The light of nature often shone through during the revolutionary age, when political emancipation was purchased at the expense of gloomy puritanism, and when stern realities chased the illusions of imagination; and not less frequently did it emerge in the yet darker time that followed, when the restored monarchy, like a ship infected with the plague, brought with it a corruption that degraded equally literature, morality, and religion.

But our purpose invites us to bestow more particular notice on the same phenomenon, as it presented itself during the eighteenth century. In science and letters, not less than in political enquiry, the spirit of the time was that of negation. The institutions of states, the opinions of philosophers, the monuments of literature and art-all things, in short, that advanced a claim to reverence-were brought to the bar of the understanding, and required to prove the grounds of the demand

they made. The task allotted to those generations was that of pioneers employed in removing-slowly, silently, and in part unconsciously-the rubbish which choked up the path of mankind; and it was unavoidable, especially in the departments of thought most alien to such a cold and practical temper, that nothing new could be built up, if, indeed, much that was old and good did not perish by violence or neglect. In the belles-lettres, the character of the original works to which the times gave birth, was reproduced in the opinions and feelings entertained in regard to masterpieces already existing. Pope attempted to judge Shakspeare by the rules of didactic poetry; Warburton was satisfied that the player of Elizabeth's court must have been familiar with the Exercitations of Julius Cæsar Scaliger; and Johnson never read Othello till he had written Irene. All the leading commentators on the poet's works in those days, presented, in their views regarding him, contradictions that are curiously amusing; and it is to these that we wish to call attention. As long as their eye is on the book, they perceive peculiarities not justifiable by any rules which they were accustomed to recognise as binding; when they attempt to bring each drama as a whole to the test which they conceived to be applicable, they discover things not dreamt of in their philosophy; and almost every opinion of theirs, which either involves a critical analysis, or appeals to general principles of composition, is a censure on the poetoften severe, and sometimes even compassionately contemptuous. But, amidst all this dogmatical self-sufficiency, the heart is in rebellion. Even in the midst of what is intended for reproof, an admiration breaks out to confute the censurer; and if a temptation ever occurs to desert analytical enquiries, and to speak of Shakspeare simply in reference to the impression which his works leave on the mind, the triumph of natural feeling over artificial training is instantaneous and complete. The secret influence, warming to an eloquence beyond itself the sparkling imagination of Pope, breathes soul into the dull brain of Theobald; it makes Johnson sometimes descend from his pedagogic chair, and reverently stoop to acknowledge himself the pupil; and on a few memorable occasions it dictates intelligible words to the pen of Capell, the impotent organ of a sensitive and discerning mind. Two other circumstances must be remarked in regard to the estimation in which Shakspeare was held among us during the last century. However far he may have seemed to his critics to fall short of their standard of absolute perfection, they are unanimous in assigning to him the first place relatively to all other dramatic poets; and farther, the judgment thus formally pronounced was

not merely confirmed by the public voice, but was assented to with a warmth of enthusiasm which probably surprised the very originators of it. That feeling, though its symptoms were sometimes a little ludicrous, was the most encouraging phenomenon of the literature of the age.

Since the beginning of the present century, Shakspeare's influence on our literature has been very great; and the recognition of his supremacy not only more unqualified, but more intelligent than ever. In many instances, indeed, and particularly by reason of the exaggerated emphasis which is so apt to infect periodical writing, the veneration for the greatest of all poets has risen to a height which amounts literally to idolatry. But the error is the safest which can be committed in judging the works of genius; and the risk of any evil consequences is excluded by that inquiring temper, which is as characteristic of literature in our times, as is its appearance of comparative animation.

The growth of that philosophical spirit, which seeks to gain the proper point of view for contemplating a literary monument as a whole, instead of poring microscopically over the details of parts, has led by necessity to the most important of all advances which have been made towards a full appreciation of Shakspeare. It is now a rare thing to hear him spoken of in the tone which was once so commonly adopted towards him ;-as being one whose genius was accompanied by the most lamentable deficiency both in taste and judgment, and whose works owed their excellence to a felicitous chance, which the design of the writer had little, if any, share in modifying. Opinions like this were quite consistent in such men as were blind to all merit in him, except those overwhelming bursts of strength which made Diderot give to him the nickname of Saint Christopher, and suggested to Voltaire his description of the drunken savage. But to those who made a nearer approach to thinking and feeling justly, the assumptions involved in the opinions must have sometimes appeared to contain very strange self-contradictions. It was, in truth, very marvellous that he, whose imagination poured forth at one moment strains of the sweetest and richest poetry, should in the next instant mar their effect by transgressing the most authoritatively fixed boundaries of his art; it was very marvellous that he, who knew how to paint human passions with a vigour and animation never previously reached, should often throw over the pictures thus admirably outlined, the chilling curtain of quibbles or antitheses; it was very marvellous that he, who sometimes showed himself capable of sustaining emotion at its utmost height through whole scenes, should immediately endeavour to make us forget