everywhere glimmers through this veil the bright joyful light of a futurity leading all to good; because we continually feel that the unhealthy darkness of the present will be again thrown off even through as obscure an inward necessity."

THIS Comedy is so thoroughly taken out of the region of the literal that it would be worse than idle to talk of its costume. When the stage-manager shall be able to reconcile the contradictions, chronological and geographical, with which it abounds, he may decide whether the characters should wear the dress of the ancient or the modern world, and whether the architectural scenes should partake most of the Grecian style of the times of the Delphic oracle, or of the Italian in the more familiar days of Julio Romano. We cannot assist him in this difficulty. It may be sufficient for the reader of this delicious play to know that he is purposely taken out of the empire of the real;-to wander in some poetical sphere where Bohemia is but a name for a wild country upon the sea, and the oracular voices of the pagan world are heard amidst the merriment of " Whitsun pastorals " and the solemnities of "Christian burial;" where the "Emperor of Russia" represents some dim conception of a mighty monarch of far-off lands; and "that rare Italian master, Julio Romano," stands as the abstract personification of excellence in art. It is quite impossible to imagine that he who, when it was necessary to be precise, as in the Roman plays, has painted manners with a truth and exactness which have left at an immeasurable distance such imitations of ancient manners as

the learned Ben Jonson has produced,-that he should have perplexed this play with such anomalies through ignorance or even carelessness. There can be no doubt that the most accomplished scholars amongst our early dramatists, when dealing with the legendary and the romantic, purposely committed these anachronisms. Greene, as we have shown, of whose scholarship his friends boasted, makes a ship sail from Bohemia in the way that Shakspere makes a ship wrecked upon a Bohemian coast. When Jonson, therefore, in his celebrated conversation with Drummond of Hawthornden, said "Shakspere wanted art, and sometimes sense, for in one of his plays he brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where is no sea near by a hundred miles," he committed the unfairness of imputing to Shakspere the fault, if fault it be, which he knew to be the common property of the romantic drama. Gifford, in a note upon this passage in his 'Life of Jonson,' says, "No one ever read the play without noticing the absurdity,' as Dr. Johnson calls it; yet for this simple truism, for this casual remark in the freedom of conversation, Jonson is held up to the indignation of the world, as if the blunder was invisible to all but himself." We take no part in the stupid attempt of Shakspere's commentators to show that Jonson treated his great contemporary with a paltry jealousy; but we object to Jonson, in the instance before us, talking of Shakspere wanting "sense," as we object to Gifford speaking of the anachronism as a "blunder." It is absurd to imagine that Shakspere did not know better. Mr. Collier has quoted a passage from Taylor, the water-poet, who published his journey to Prague, in which the honest waterman laughs at an alderman who "catches me by the goll, demanding if Bohemia be a great town, whether there be any meat in it, and whether the last fleet of ships be arrived there." Mr. Collier infers that Taylor "ridicules a vulgar error of the kind" committed by Shakspere. We rather think that he meant to ridicule very gross ignorance generally; and we leave our readers to take their choice of placing Greene and Shakspere in the same class with Taylor's "Gregory Gandergoose, an Alderman of Gotham," or of believing that a confusion of time and place was considered (whether justly is not here the question) a proper characteristic of the legendary dramasuch as A Winter's Tale.