CONCLUDING ESSAY; CONTAINING THREE MINIATURE PORTRAITS OF SHAKSPEARE BY DRYDEN, GOETHE, AND SIR WALTER SCOTT; AND A BRIEF PARALLEL BETWEEN SHAKSPEARE AND SIR WALTER SCOTT AS DELINEATORS OF CHARACTER. I HAVE reserved for insertion in this fourth and concluding portion of my volume, three miniature portraits of Shakspeare from the pens of DRYDEN, GOETHE, and SIR WALTER SCOTT. Amongst the numerous editors, commentators, and critics on Shakspeare, there are few perhaps, if any, who, in point of genius, can be put in competition with these three celebrated characters; and it is therefore truly gratifying to record, as emanating in all of them from great, and, in some degree, kindred talent, their deep-felt and pointedly expressed admiration of our immortal bard. The criticisms of Dryden, indeed, couched as they were in the most rich, mellow, yet spirited prose composition of which our language affords an example, and annexed too, for the most part, in the form of prefaces and dedications, to works of great popularity, contributed more than any other means, perhaps, to keep alive, in an age of un paralleled frivolity and dissipation, some relish for manly and nervous composition; and there can be as little doubt but that the noble and comprehensive character of the genius of Shakspeare which the following striking though brief passage unfolds, must have powerfully recalled the attention of the public, even retrograding and debased as its taste had long been, to the matchless productions of this first of all dramatic writers. "Shakspeare was the man," he remarks, "who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets, Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi. "The consideration of this made Mr. Hales of |