presents, with Addison's Cato as "the most perfect of English Tragedies, Pope as the most elegant of poets," Voltaire the King of the French stage, and Gottschid the great luminary of German letters, was the natural fruit of such an unnatural graft. To break the paralyzing spell which the classic models exerted over literature for so long a time and awaken it to fruitful activity, there was needed some preëminent master to display, together with a genius superior to that of the classic authors, the example of a successful form of composition not bound by conventional restraints but conformed to the real characteristics of modern life. This critical need Shakespeare met. With the true sympathy of genius Shakespeare had felt the tendency, the already emerging characteristics of modern life, and in his dramas he had stretched out the dimensions to the full breadth of the modern world; reproduced in them all its multitudinous diversity of forms and aspects, its intricate interweaving and limitless extension of action and reaction, its restless activity, its warring passions and infinite longings, and then secured the unity which art requires by blending all in "sweet contrast" and "divine respondence," like the hearse-like base and jocund carols, the soft breathings and clashing peals, the surging crescendos and dying diminuendos of one of Beethoven's Symphonies, into one full harmony.

Just as fast, consequently, as Shakespeare's works won the acknowledgment of their own artistic merit, just so fast they compelled a reconstruction of the principles of modern literary art, just so fast they have freed literature from the yoke of the French classical school, and from the blind reverence for antiquity that once threatened to crush life out of modern poetry, and just so fast they have led to the recognition of the true dramatic and poetic forms which are native to the spirit of modern culture. To this influence of Shakespeare's works, the rich crop of fresh and true poetical beauty, sympathetic to the feelings and in harmony with the ideas of modern life, which the last seventy-five years have added to the stores of English literature, is greatly owing. The connection between the recognition of the art of Shakespeare's dramas and the study of them in the new light, on the one

hand, and the Lake School and its relations to the traits which English poetry has taken on the last three-quarters of a century, on the other hand, needs only to be hinted at.

Germany is still more indebted to Shakespeare. Shakespeare's influence in evoking the famous Sturon und Dornng period, and in developing and giving direction to the new national and natural school of German literature of which those works were the commencement and Goethe's and Schiller's masterpieces the matured fruit, can hardly be over-estimated. Shakespeare was the victorious banner which Lessing waved in his onslaught upon the formality and artificiality of French classicism, the imitation of the imitation of which had so blasted German literature with sterility. A short extract from an Oration on Shakespeare delivered by the young Goethe before a club of fellow "Shakespeare bigots" will perhaps best give an idea of the enthusiasm which Shakespeare excited at that time. "The first page of his that I read," says Goethe," made me his for life. And when I had finished a single play, I stood like one born blind on whom a miraculous hand bestows sight in a moment *** I did not hesitate for a moment about renouncing the classical drama. The unity of place seemed to me irksome as a prison; the unities of action and of time burthensome fetters upon the imagination. I sprang into the air, and for the first time felt that I had hands and feet. And now that I see how much injury the men of rule did me in their dungeon, and how many free souls still crouch there, my heart would burst if I did not declare war against them, and did not seek daily to hatter down their towers."

Later, in giving an account of the origin of Goetz von Berlichingen, his first great work, Goethe assigned the "expansion of his mind produced by an increasing interest in Shakespeare," as a principal cause. The elder Schlegel called Schiller's Robbers a direct imitation of some parts of Richard the III. Though it is hardly fair to call it that, yet it may be said that there is an evident attempt to seize upon Shakespeare's manner as a whole, and that not only this but all Schiller's Dramas, however varying in form, are more or less of the school of Shakespeare. There was hardly an author of the

period eminent in German literature who did not give Shakespeare some service, either that of translation, commentary, study or imitation. In addition to the names of Goethe and Schiller, those of Wieland, Tieck, and the two Schlegels will readily suggest themselves. To all the young Germans of that day trying to escape from the house of bondage of French classicism, Shakespeare was the guide whose lead they followed to the land of Nature and of Freedom.

Half a century later, we find Shakespeare rendering the same service to young France. It was the performance of several of Shakespeare's plays in Paris, in 1827, by a company of English actors, from which Alexander Dumas dates the awaking of the genius to dramatic composition. It revealed to him a new life. It inspired him and several of his friends with the resolution of working in the French stage the reform which it so much needed, and determined their course into the channel of romanticism. The members of the Cenacle made Shakespeare the object of devoted study and enthusiastic admiration. Albert de Vigny and Victor Hugo, the other two triumvirs of L'Ecole romantique, have both published translations of Shakespeare's plays. As before to Lessing and his coadjutors, so now to the writers in the Globe Shakespeare was the strong defence and magazine of arms in their insurrection against the narrow critical canons of classicism.

Here, then, in this work of Shakespeare's in exciting and impelling the literary revolution which has swept sucessively over England, Germany and France with such happy results; the revolution to which we owe it that poetry has no longer to pattern after the Cid and Athalie and Aristotle's rules, but have been sent to search after and garner up whatever is freshest, strongest, deepest, most suggestive, of most power to charm or touch the heart of man in its manifold capabilities and mysterious phases, and is left free to choose as its embodying form whatever one will best exhibit the contents and best body forth the spirit of its theme and the breath of its time,-in Shakespeare's work in exciting and inpelling this revolution in literary art, is, in

addition to the great general indirect influence which has been his, a most powerful direct influence which he has exerted upon a most important movement of the human mind; and in the establishment of the fundamental difference between the requirements of ancient and modern art and of the true dramatic and poetic forms which are natural expressions of modern life, is a valuable truth for which also we are indebted to Shakespeare.

Three centuries ago, Shakespeare first opened his eyes upon the spectacle of this earth. Of the world of that day there is now very little that the mists of time have not sadly obscured. Its wars, questions, monarchs, statesmen, are remembered not much more than by naine. The authors who were Shakespeare's contemporaries are chiefly known by the reflection of his own fame. We talk of Beaumont and Fletcher, "Marlowe's mighty line," and "dainty Lyly" and 66 rare Ben Jonson," but there are very few that ever read them. Even on Spenser and Bacon has the same fate in great measure fallen. But Shakespeare is as fresh as ever, more living than ever. Poet after poet has succeeded him, poets of great and varied genius. But there is none of them that, compared with him, will not serve to exhibit more conspicuously the unsurpassable proportions of Shakespeare's heaventouching and myriad-peaked structure. He has invaded every part of Christendom, he has penetrated the Orient, he goes wherever Englishmen or the English language can gain a foothold, and everywhere he commands a unanimous allhail! But this is but the happy prologue of the imperial theme. Its swelling act is still to come. Every year greatens his sway. He has done more than "bated the scythe's dull edge" of "cormorant-devouring time." He has made the dread weapon his tool; its master, his minister. And when Macaulay's prophesied New Zealander shall stand by the ruins of London's bridges, Shakespeare's structures shall still shine forth in unblemished beauty, fresh and strong as the most ancient heavens !

Art. III.-1. Histoire médicale des maladies epidémiques! OZANAM, Paris.

2. Rapport à l'Académie de medecine au nom de la commission de la peste et des quarantaines. Paris, Bailliére.

3. Treatise on Febrile Diseases. Dr. WILSON.

London.

4. A brief History of Epidemical and Pestilential Diseases. By NOAH WEBSTER, London.

5. An Inquiry into the Laws of Epidemics. By J. ADAMS.

6. On Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases. MACLEAN.

7. On the Remote Cause of Epidemic Disease. Dr. JOHN PARKER. London.

LET man boast as he will of his knowledge, there will always be many of the phenomena of nature which he cannot understand. This it is idle to deny, for nothing is more easily proved. Accordingly, it is those who know most that are most willing to admit that there are many things of which they are ignorant. If we examine the works of the greatest thinkers, we shall find, in nine cases out of ten, that in proportion as their researches have been extensive and profound, have they been modest and unassuming in communicating the results of those researches; if, upon the other hand, we examine the works of smatterers and charlatans, we shall find that their arrogance and pretensions are boundless.

In nothing is this contrast more forcibly illustrated than in comparisons of the moderns with the ancients. Philosphers like Copernicus, Newton, Leibnitz, and Kepler, do justice to the ancients; instead of affecting to despise them, they express their admiration for the results they attained in science and

the

arts, as well as in literature and oratory, and give them credit for much that must have been destroyed by the ravages of time. But it cannot seem strange after all, on reflection, that those who are no philosophers pursue the opposite course; they have not taken the trouble to investigate; and because they do not know what the ancients were, they take it for granted that they could not have been otherwise than ignorant, seeing that they lived at such a remote