tain alterations are made in his armour, and even orders what particular horse he intends to charge with; he is gay with his chief officers, and even gracious to some he confides in; his gallantry is of so dazzling a quality, that we begin to feel the pride of Englishmen, and overlooking his crimes, glory in our courageous king: Richmond is one of those civil, conscientious gentlemen, who are not very apt to captivate a spectator, and Richard, loaded as he is with enormities, rises in the comparison, and I suspect carries the good wishes of many of his audi ence into action, and dies with their regret. As soon as he retires to his tent the poet begins to put in motion his great moral machinery of the ghosts. Trifles are not made for Shakspeare; difficulties, that would have plunged the spirit of any other poet, and turned his scenery into inevitable ridicule, are nothing in his way; he brings forward a long string of ghosts, and puts a speech into each of their mouths without any fear of consequences. Richard starts from his couch, and before he has shaken off the terrors of his dream, cries out Give me another horse! -bind up my wounds! - But I may conclude my subject; every reader can go on with the soliloquy, and no words of mine can be wanted to excite their admiration. NUMBER LXXIII. WHEN it had entered into the mind of Shakspeare to form a historical play upon certain events in the reign of Henry the Fourth of England, the character of the Prince of Wales recommended itself to his fancy, as likely to supply him with a fund of dramatic incidents; for what could invention have more happily suggest ed than this character, which history presented ready to his hands? a riotous disorderly young libertine, in whose nature lay hidden those seeds of heroism and ambition which were to burst forth at once to the astonishment of the world, and to achieve the conquest of France. This prince, whose character was destined to exhibit a revolution of so brilliant a sort, was not only in himself a very tempting hero for the dramatic poet, who delights in incidents of novelty and surprise, but also offered to his imagination a train of attendant characters, in the persons of his wild comrades and associates, which would be of themselves a drama. Here was a field for invention wide enough even for the genius of Shakspeare to range in. All the humours, passions, and extravagances of human life might be brought into the composition, and when he had grouped and personified them to his taste and liking, he had a leader ready to place at the head of the train, and the truth of history to give life and interest to his drama. With these materials ready for creation the great artist sat down to his work; the canvass was spread before him, ample and capacious as the expanse of his own fancy; nature put her pencil into his hand, and he began to sketch. His first concern was to give a chief or captain to his gang of rioters; this would naturally be the first outline he drew. To fill up the drawing of this personage he conceived a voluptuary, in whose figure and character there should be an assemblage of comic qualities: in his person he should be bloated and blown up to the size of a Silenus, lazy, luxurious, in sensuality a satyr, in intemperance a bacchanalian: as he was to stand in the post of a ring-leader amongst thieves and cut-purses, he made him a notorious liar, a swaggering coward, vainglorious, arbitrary, knavish, crafty, voracious of plunder, lavish of his gains, without credit, honour, or honesty, and in debt to every body about him. As he was to be the chief seducer and misleader of the heir apparent of the crown, it was incumbent on the poet to qualify him for that part in such a manner as should give probability and even a plea to the temptation; this was only to be done by the strongest touches and the highest colourings of a master; by hitting off a humour of so happy, so facetious, and so alluring a cast as should tempt even royalty to forget itself, and virtue to turn reveller in his company. His lies, his vanity, and his cowardice, too gross to deceive, were to be so ingenious as to give delight; his cunning evasions, his witty resources, his mock solemnity, his vapouring self-consequence were to furnish a continual feast of laughter to his royal companion; he was not only to be witty himself, but the cause of wit in other people; a whetstone for raillery; a buffoon, whose very person was a jest: compounded of these humours, Shakspeare produced the character of Sir John Falstaff: a character, which neither ancient nor modern comedy has ever equalled, which was so much the favourite of its author as to be introduced in three several plays, and which is likely to be the idol of the English stage as long as it shall speak the language of Shakspeare. This character almost singly supports the whole comic plot of the first part of Henry the fourth; the poet has indeed thrown in some auxiliary humours in the persons of Gadshill, Peto, Bardolph, and Hostess Quickly; the two first serve for little else except to fill up the action, but Bardolph as a butt to Falstaff's raillery, and the hostess in her wrangling scene with him, when his pockets had been emptied as he was asleep in the tavern, give occasion to scenes of infinite pleasantry: Poins is contrasted from the rest of the gang; and, as he is made the companion of the prince, is very properly represented as a man of better qualities and morals than Falstaff's more immediate hangers-on and dependants. | and Falstaff, and the description given by the latter of Shallow's youthful frolics, are as true nature and as true comedy as man's invention ever produced: the recruits are also in the literal sense the recruits of the drama. These personages have the further merit of throwing Falstaff's character into a new cast, and giving it the seasonable relief of variety. The humour of Falstaff opens into full display upon his very first introduction with the prince; the incident of the robbery on the highway, the Dame Quickly also in this second part rescene in Eastcheap in consequence of that ridi-sumes her rôle with great comic spirit, but with culous encounter, and the whole of his conduct some variation of character, for the purpose of during the action with Percy, are so exquisitely introducing a new member into the troop in the pleasant that, upon the renovation of his drama- person of Doll Tearsheet, the common trull of tic life in the second part of Henry the Fourth, the times. Though this part is very strongly I question if the humour does not in part eva- coloured, and though the scene with her and porate by continuation; at least I am persuaded Falstaff is of a loose as well as ludicrous nature, that it flattens a little in the outset, and though yet if we compare Shakspeare's conduct of this his wit may now flow less copiously, yet it incident with that of the dramatic writers of his comes with more labour and is farther fetched. time, and even since his time, we must confess The poet seems to have been sensible how diffi- he has managed it with more than common cult it was to preserve the vein as rich as at first, care, and exhibited his comic hero in a very and has therefore strengthened his comic plot in ridiculous light, without any of those gross inthe second play with several new recruits, who decencies which the poets of his age indulged may take a share with Falstaff, to whom he no themselves in without restraint. longer intrusts the whole burden of the humour. In the front of these auxiliaries stands Pistol, a character so new, whimsical, and extravagant, that if it were not for a commentator now living, whose very extraordinary researches, amongst our old authors, have supplied us with passages to illuminate the strange rhapsodies which Shakspeare has put into his mouth, I should, for one, have thought Ancient Pistol as wild and imaginary a being as Caliban; but I now perceive, by the help of these discoveries, that the character is made up in great part of absurd and fustian passages from many plays, in which Shakspeare was versed and perhaps had been a performer: Pistol's dialogue is a tissue of old tags of bombast, like the middle comedy of the Greeks, which dealt in parody. I abate of my astonishment at the invention and originality of the poet, but it does not lessen my respect for his ingenuity. Shakspeare founded his bully in parody, Jonson copied his from nature, and the palm seems due to Bobadil upon a comparison with Pistol: Congreve copied a very happy likeness from Jonson, and by the fairest and most laudable imitation produced his Noll Bluff, one of the pleasantest humorists on the comic stage. Shallow and Silence are two very strong auxiliaries to the second part of Falstaff's humours, and though they do not absolutely belong to his family, they are nevertheless near of kin, and derivatives from his stock: surely two pleasanter fellows never trod the stage: they not only contrast and play upon each other, but Silence sober and Silence tipsy make the most comical reverse in nature: never was drunkenness so well introduced or so happily employed in any drama: the dialogue between Shallow The humour of the Prince of Wales is not so free and unconstrained as in the first part; though he still demeans himself in the course of his revels, yet it is with frequent marks of repugnance and self-consideration, as becomes the conqueror of Percy, and we see his character approaching fast towards a thorough reformation; but though we are thus prepared for the change that is to happen when this young hero throws off the reveller and assumes the king, yet we are not fortified against the weakness of pity, when the disappointment and banishment of Falstaff take place, and the poet executes justice upon his inimitable delinquent, with all the rigour of an unrelenting moralist. The reader or spectator, who has accompanied Falstaff through his dramatic story, is in debt to him for so many pleasant moments, that all his failings, which should have raised contempt, have only provoked laughter, and he begins to think they are not natural to his character, but assumed for his amusement. With these impressions we see him delivered over to mortification and disgrace, and bewail his punishment with a sensibility that is only due to the sufferings of the virtuous. As it is impossible to ascertain the limits of Shakspeare's genius, I will not presume to say he could not have supported his humour, had he chosen to have prolonged his existence through the succeeding drama of Henry the Fifth: we may conclude that no ready expedient presented itself to his fancy, and he was not apt to spend much pains in searching for such he therefore put him to death, by which he fairly placed him out of the reach of his contemporaries, and got rid of the trouble and difficulty of keeping him up to his original pitch, if he had attempted to carry him through a third drama, after he had removed the Prince of Wales out of his company, and seated him on the throne. I cannot doubt but there were resources in Shakspeare's genius, and a latitude of humour in the character of Falstaff, which might have furnished scenes of admirable comedy by exhibiting him in his disgrace, and both Shallow and Silence would have been accessaries to his pleasantry: even the field of Agincourt, and the distress of the king's army before the action, had the poet thought proper to have produced Falstaff on the scene, might have been as fruitful in comic incidents as the battle of Shrewsbury: this we can readily believe from the humours of Fluellen and Pistol, which he bas woven into his drama ; the former of whom is made to remind us of Falstaff, in his dialogue with Captain Gower, when he tells him that "As Alexander is kill his friend Clytus, being in his ales and cups, so also Harry Monmouth, being in his right wits and his goot judgments, is turn away the fat Knight with the great pellydoublet he was full of jests and gypes and knaveries and mocks: I am forget his name.Sir John Falstaff.-That is he."-This passage has ever given me a pleasing sensation, as it marks a regret in the poet to part with a favourite character, and is a tender farewell to his memory: it is also with particular propriety that these words are put into the mouth of Fluellen, who stands here as his substitute, and whose humour, as well as that of Nym, may be said to have arisen out of the ashes of Falstaff. : NUMBER LXXIV. I was surprised the other day to find our learned poet Ben Jonson had been poaching in an obscure collection of love-letters, written by the sophist Philostratus in a very rhapsodical style, merely for the purpose of stringing together a parcel of unnatural far-fetched conceits, more calculated to disgust a man of Jonson's classic taste than to put him upon the humble task of copying them, and then fathering the translation. The little poem he has taken from this despicable sophist is now become a very popular song, and is the ninth in his collection, entitled The Forest. I will take the liberty of inserting Jonson's translation, and compare it with the original, stanza by stanza I. Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine; Or leave a kiss but in the cup, And I'll not look for wine. “ Εἰ δὲ βούλει τι φίλῳ χαρίζεσθαι, τὰ λείψανα αὐτῶν ἀντίπεμψον, μηκέτι πνέοντα ῥόδων μόνων ἀλλὰ καὶ σοῦ. If thou wouldst do a kindness to thy lover, send back the reliques of the roses [I gave thee,] for they will smell no longer of themselves only, but · of thee." When the learned poet published this lovesong without any acknowledgment to Philostratus, I hope the reason of his omitting it was because he did not choose to call the public curiosity to a perusal of such unseemly and unnatural rhapsodies as he had condescended to copy from. Now I am upon the subject of Ben Jonson, I shall take notice of two passages in the Induction on the Stage prefixed to his play of Bartholomew Fair, in which he gives a sly glance at Shakspeare-" And then a substantial watch to have stolen in upon them, and taken them away with mistaken words, as the fashion is in the Y stage practice." It is plain he has Dogberry and Verges in his eye, and no less so in the following, that he points his ridicule against Cali- | ban and the Romance of the Tempest-" If there be never a servant monster in the fair who can help it, he says, nor a nest of antics? He is loath to make nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries, to mix his head with other men's heels." If any of our commentators upon Shakspeare have anticipated my remark upon these instances of Jonson's propensities to carp at their favourite poet, I have overlooked the annotation, but when I find him recommending to his audience such a farrago of vulgar ribaldry as Bartholomew Fair, by pretending to exalt it above such exquisite productions as The Tempest and Much Ado about Nothing, it is an act of warrantable retaliation to expose his vanity. It is not always however that he betakes himself to these masked attacks upon that sublime genius which he professed to admire almost to idolatry, it must be owned he sometimes meets him upon equal ground, and nobly contends with laudable emulation for the chaplet of victory: what I now particularly have in my eye is his Masque of the Queens. Many ingenious observations have been given to the public upon Shakspeare's imaginary beings; his Caliban, Ariel, and all his family of witches, ghosts, and fairies, have been referred to as examples of his creative fancy, and with reason has his superiority been asserted in the fabrication of these preternatural machines; and as to the art with which he has woven them into the fables of his dramas, and the incidents he has produced by their agency, he is in these particulars still more indisputably unrivalled; the language he has given to Caliban, and no less characteristically to his Ariel, is so original, so inimitable, that it is more like magic than invention, and his fairy poetry is as happy as it can be: it were a jest to compare Eschylus's occasion, and leave it with the spectators to decide upon the contest. I will only, as their herald, give notice that the combatants are enchanters, and he that has no taste for necromancy, nor any science in the terms of the art, has no right to give his voice upon the trial of skill. SHAKSPEARE. 1 Witch. Where hast thou been, sister? 2 Witch. Killing swine. 3 Witch. A sailor's wife had chesnuts in her lap, And mouncht, and mouncht, and mouncht-Give me quoth I! Aroint thee, witch, the rump-fed ronyon cries. And like a cat without a tail, 2 Witch. I'll give thee a wind. 3 Witch. Thou art kind. 1 Witch. And I another. 3 Witch. I myself have all the other, Shall he dwindle, peak and pine; 2 Witch. Show me, show me. 3 Witch. Here I have a pilot's thumb, Wreckt as homeward he did come. 1 Witch. A drum, a drum! Macbeth doth come. All. The weird sisters hand in hand, JONSON. Dame. Well done, my hags! ghost of Darius, or any ghost that ever walked, But first relate me what you have sought, with the perturbed spirit of Hamlet. Great and merited encomiums have also been passed upon the weird sisters in that wonderful drama, and a decided preference given them over the famous Erichtho of Lucan: preferable they doubtless are, if we contemplate them in their dramatic characters, and take into our account the grand and awful commission, which they bear in that scene of tragic terror; but of their poetical superiority, simply considered, I have some doubts; let me add to this, that when the learned commentator was instancing Lucan's Erichtho, it is matter of some wonder with me, how he came to overlook Jonson's witches, in the Masque of the Queens. As he has not however prevented me the honour of bringing these two poetic champions together into the lists, I will avail myself of the Where you have been and what you have brought. I snatch'd this morsel out of her mouth. 6 Hag. I had a dagger; what did I with that? Kill'd an infant to have his fat; A piper it got at a church ale, I bade him again blow wind in its tail. Hag. A murderer yonder was hung in chains, I brought off his rags that danced in the air. A purset to keep Sir Cranion in. 9 Hag. And I ha' been plucking (plants among) Hemlock, henbane, adder's tongue, Nightshade, moonwort, libbard's bane, And twice by the dogs was like to be ta'en. 11 Hag. I went to the toad, breeds under the wall, I charm'd him out, and he came at my call, I scratcht out the eyes of the owl before, I tore the bat's wing-What would you have more? - The fig tree wild, that grows on tombs, SHAKSPEARE'S CHARM. 1 Witch. Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd. 2 Witch. Twice and once the hedge-pig whined. 3. Witch. Harper cries, " 'tis time! 'tis time!" 1 Witch. Round about the cauldron go, In the poison'd entrails throw. -Toad, that under the cold stone All. Double, double toil and trouble, 2 Witch. Fillet of a fenny snake All. Double, double toil and trouble, Fire burn and cauldron bubble! 3 Witch. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witch's mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravening salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock, digg'd i' th' dark; Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse, All. Double, double toil and trouble, 1 Witch. Cool it with a baboon's blood Then the charm is firm and good. JONSON'S CHARM. The owl is abroad, the bat and the toad, The dogs they do bay and the timbrels play, The moon it is red and the stars are fled, 2nd Charm. Deep, oh deep, we lay thee to sleep, We leave thee drink by, if thou chance to be dry, Both milk and blood, the dew and the flood. We breath in thy bed, at the foot and the head; We cover thee warm, that thou take no harm, A cloud of pitch, a spur and a switch, About, about and about! Till the mists arise and the lights fly out: I should observe that these quotations from Jonson are selected partially, and not given in continuation, as they are to be found in the Masque, which is much too long to be given entire; they are accompanied with a commentary by the author, full of demonological learning, which was a very courtly study in the time of James the First, who was an author in that branch of superstitious pedantry. I am aware there is little to gratify the reader's curiosity in these extracts, and still less to distract his judgment in deciding between them they are so far curious however as they show how strongly the characters of the poets are distinguished even in these fantastic specimens; Jonson dwells upon authorities without fancy, Shakspeare employs fancy, and creates authorities. NUMBER LXXV. Usus vetusto genere, sed rebus novis. PROLOG. PHÆD. FAB. LIB. V. A plagiarist in manner, not in matter. BEN JONSON in his prologue to the comedy of The Fox says that he wrote it in the short space of five weeks, his words are To these there needs no lie but this his creature And though he dares give them five lives to mend it, "Tis known five weeks fully penn❜d it. This he delivers in his usual vaunting style, spurning at the critics and detractors of his day, who thought to convict him of dulness by testifying in fact to his diligence. The magic move |