AN Englishman, criticising Shakspere, is not unlikely to bring a hornet's nest about his ears. Our national poet is known, more or less, by every one, and yet those who can speak of him with full authority, so as to command assent, are still to seek. In Dr. Johnson's instructive but not very lively story, familiar to men, by name at least, as 'Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia,' the sage Imlac, a learned but, as you will remember, not an amusing person, enumerates the qualifications without which no one can claim to be a poet.

It takes so much time to reckon them all up, that the royal pupil, accustomed to his own way in the Happy Valley, and as impatient of des longueurs as the most vivacious Parisian extant, cuts him short with this natural interruption— 'Enough, you have convinced me that it is impossible for any man to be a poet.'

This, however, does not suit Imlac's purpose, who begins again at once without mercy. To be a poet is indeed difficult, but not impossible.' Imlac's object is, unless my memory fails me, to insinuate that he himself might have been great in verse, if he had not preferred being greater still in philosophy; but I forget how the homily ends, nor is it of much importance. Taking the Abyssinian professor, however, as our

example, we may acknowledge that to be a complete, exhaustive, and infallible critic on Shakspere is nearly as difficult as to stand forth an accredited poet after the order of Imlac.

Of our great dramatist we may say, as I believe one of the Fathers said of the Bible: 'There are to be found here bright shallows along which a lamb may wade, and dark places deep enough to drown an elephant.' And, indeed, many illustrious elephants, German as well as English, whether drowned or not, have at least got out of their depth, and found their footing fail them, whilst splashing and trumpeting among our author's plays. Still, however, acting in the spirit of Imlac, I would say this is no reason for abandoning in despair the task before us.

Any criticism upon Shakspere must be, at best, a criticism of contributions. A. may have a keener feeling as to one phase of his genius, and a deeper insight into its causes and consequences, than B. B., again, may be better worth listening to on other points than A. Thus a knowledge is gradually built up, by no means at one time, nor in exactly the same style, but like a cathedral, united together and mellowed down into one great whole-a whole not unworthy of the illustrious poet in whose honour it has been upreared. From this point of view I have undertaken to discuss some of Shakspere's tragedies.

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A field lies before me which, no doubt, has been reaped long ago, but it is so rich that gleaners can still go on, and find something left in it from generation to generation. The tragedies selected by me are, or rather were, Lear,' 'Othello,' 'Hamlet,' and 'Macbeth.' I believe that, in the general opinion, these tragedies stand out pre-eminently above the rest, so that none of the others, although many among them have singular and special merits of their own, attain unto the first four.

Hamlet is one of the lectures which have disappeared.

Before, however, beginning an analysis of our four selected plays, I must make one or two qualifying remarks.

In the deeper and more austere tragedies, the play of complicated motives, that change and glance and recover their primitive colouring, as the circumstances change around them, is not what we have mainly to look for. As with the flickering of a shot-silk, or of a piece of Labrador spar, alternations of light and gradations of shadow are required, to do full justice to all the hidden elements of character.

Without, therefore, being absent in such tragedies, this particular dramatic excellence-I mean the complete analysis of character-is usually made subordinate to the great central passions of the play. The shifting gleams of common life, under which alone such delicate variations start out before our eyes, are swallowed up in the gathering darkness that runs onward before the earthquake and the hurricane. It is in the brilliant comedies, and in the tragedies of a less awful power, that characters are lingeringly dwelt upon, and painted with a loving minuteness of detail, setting the whole man or woman before us. We cannot have everything at once, images such as those of Miranda, Prospero, Caliban, Perdita, and Rosalind. Falstaff again, and all the quaint portraits belonging to the Falstaff gallery, rise up more naturally where the artist is working with a lighter hand, and less intent upon fathoming one form of passion, or one part of man's nature, to its lowest depths. Nor is it true of Shakspere alone. Edipus and Medea are revealed to us but partially, and in connection with each terrible circumstance of their respective positions; whilst Neoptolemus, in 'The Philoctetes'—according to our notions not a tragedy at all—charms us as the complete representation of chivalrous generosity, natural to a high-born youth, over whom ambition has less hold than a love of truth and a sense of honour. Mrs. Siddons, who certainly knew 'Macbeth' better than we do, is reported, when she was asked if she could

name a single virtue that the savage tyrant possessed, to have replied in her deepest tones: 'At any rate, he was a good husband.'

This remark, though perhaps not a very wise one, illustrates sufficiently what I mean. There are endless aspects, whole sides of Macbeth's character, of Lear's, of Othello's, left in shadow, designedly and necessarily so left; whilst as to Portia, or Miranda, to Falconbridge, or Falstaff, we have absolutely nothing to learn.

We cannot, as I said just now, have everything at once; and intensity of passion, the primal quality of a great tragic drama, must be bought, as a rule, by sacrificing, in some degree, variety and completeness of delineation.

There is one other subject as to which I wish to say a few words before embarking upon the separate plays.

I find, as I stated in my preface, that I recur to this point in the lecture on 'Macbeth.' A considerable time intervened between the delivery of the two lectures; they were thus addressed to different audiences. It was not unnatural, therefore, that I should return to a subject, on which I entertain very strong and decided opinions, and I have not thought it necessary to cancel any part of either lecture in consequence.

I refer to those comic scenes occurring every now and then in the pauses even of the deepest tragedy.

It is rather the fashion at present to look askance at these interruptions, to pass lightly over them, as hardly worthy of Shakspere's pen; nay, at times to strike them out bodily, as not coming from Shakspere's hand at all.

Great names, such as the name of Coleridge, are cited in support of this opinion. Now I may be wholly in error, but I promised to myself when I undertook my present office, that, whether right or wrong, I would always speak out exactly what I felt. Accordingly, no name however great shall hinder me from saying that I consider this opinion to be, in point of taste,

a pestilent heresy. Shakspere, doubtless, admonishes his fools not to speak anything but what is set down for them; and here and there a joke or an expression, accepted as authentic, may have crept irregularly into the text; however this may be, those intrusive speeches were, I apprehend, almost without exception the offspring of the moment, and as such, were not ever written down. At any rate they do not, I am sure, afford the least justification for the erasure of whole scenes, because Coleridge, who had about as much sense of humour as the Monument on Fish Street Hill, did not approve of them.

To treat of this matter generally. The great tragic artists, who stand at the head of the great tragic schools, agree in this, as well they may, that the human mind cannot endure, for any great length of time, an extreme tension of the faculties without collapsing. Hence it was that the Greeks, by solemn choric songs, impassioned music, and majestic dancing, arrested for an instant the march of their tragedies, and gave the relief and repose that is needed. If the murderous jealousy of Medea had developed itself without pause or relaxation, if the terrible destiny that coils itself round Edipus had kept tightening its grasp from first to last with monotonous intensity of pressure,

the nerves of those who listened would have been overwrought then, as surely as our nerves would be overwrought now, if whole plays of Shakspere were made up of passages like the most tempestuous and heart-rending outbursts in 'Othello' and Lear.'

Nay, even on the French stage, whenever the narrower limits and the more conventional treatment of human passion forced by circumstances upon France are transgressed, the great instincts of art act upon them as they acted upon the Greeks. The plot is retarded in Esther,' for instance, and in 'Athalie,' just as it would have been on the theatre at Athens by lyrical interludes, which enable the hearer to recover his overstrained powers and reinforce his exhausted attention.