trated with equal clearness through the darkness of coming centuries and the clouds of a far-distant past, Shakspere wrote this deeply-significant satire upon the Homeric herodom. He had no desire to debase the elevated, to deteriorate or make little the great, and still less to attack the poetical worth of Homer, or of heroic poetry in general. But he wished to warn thoroughly against the over-valuation and idolatry of them, to which man so willingly abandons himself. He endeavoured, at the same time, to bring strikingly to view the universal truth that everything that is merely human, even when it is glorified with the nimbus of a poetic ideality and a mythical past, yet, seen in the bird's-eye perspective of a pure moral ideality, appears very small.” All this may seem as super-refinement, in which the critic pretends to see farther than the poet ever saw. But to such an objection there is a very plain answer. A certain result is produced :—is the result correctly described? If it be so, is that result an effect of principle or an effect of chance? As a proof that it was the effect of principle, we may say that Dryden did not see the principle; and that, not seeing it, he entirely changed the character of the play as a work of art. For example, there is no scene in the drama so entirely in accordance with the principle as that in which Ulysses stirs up the slothful and dogged Achilles into a rivalry with Ajax. It is altogether so Shaksperian in its profundity,-it presents such a key to the whole Shaksperian conduct of this wonderful drama,- that we can scarcely be content merely to refer to it.

Achil. What are you reading?
Ulyss.
A strange fellow here
Writes me, That man, how dearly ever parted,
How much in having, or without, or in,

Cannot make boast to have that which he hath,
Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection;
As when his virtues shining upon others
Heat them, and they retort that heat again
To the first giver.

Achil.
This is not strange, Ulysses.
The beauty that is borne here in the face
The bearer knows not, but commends itself
[To others' eyes: nor doth the eye itself
(That most pure spirit of sense) behold itself,]
Not going from itself; but eye to eye oppos'd
Salutes each other with each other's form.
For speculation turns not to itself,

Till it hath travell'd, and is married there

Where it may see itself: this is not strange at all.
Ulyss. I do not strain at the position,

It is familiar; but at the author's drift:
Who, in his circumstance, expressly proves,
That no man is the lord of anything,

(Though in and of him there is much consisting,)
Till he communicate his parts to others:

Nor doth he of himself know them for aught
Till he behold them form'd in the applause

Where they are extended; which, like an arch, rever

How one man eats into another's pride,
While pride is feasting in his wantonness!
To see these Grecian lords-why, even already
They clap the lubber Ajax on the shoulder;
As if his foot were on brave Hector's breast,
And great Troy shrinking.

Achil. I do believe it: for they pass'd by me
As misers do by beggars; neither gave to me
Good word, nor look: What, are my deeds forgot?
Ulyss. Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,

A great-sized monster of ingratitudes :

Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon

As done: Perseverance, dear my lord,

Keeps honour bright: To have done, is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail

In monumental mockery. Take the instant way;
For honour travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast: keep then the path;
For emulation hath a thousand sons,
That one by one pursue: If you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by,
And leave you hindmost;-

Or, like a gallant horse fallen in first rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,

O'errun and trampled on: Then what they do in pre

sent,

Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours:

For time is like a fashionable host,

That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand;
And with his arms out-stretch'd, as he would fly,
Grasps-in the comer: Welcome ever smiles,

And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;

For beauty, wit,

High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,

Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all

To envious and calumniating time.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,-
That all, with one consent, praise new-born gawds,
Though they are made and moulded of things past;
And give to dust, that is a little gilt,
More laud than gilt o'er-dusted.

The present eye praises the present object:

Then marvel not, thon great and complete man,
That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax;
Since things in motion sooner catch the eye,
Than what not stirs. The cry went once on thee,
And still it might; and yet it may again,

If thou wouldst not entomb thyself alive,

And case thy reputation in thy tent;

Whose glorious deeds, but in these fields of late,
Made emulous missions 'mongst the gods themselves,
And drave great Mars to faction."

Now, of this scene Dryden has not a word. This was a part of the "rubbish" which he discarded. But in the place of it he gives us an entirely new scene between Hector and Troilus-" almost half the act." He says, "the occasion of raising it was hinted to me by Mr. Betterton; the contrivance and working of it was my own." This scene, he admits, was an imitation of the famous scene in Julius Cæsar between Brutus and Cassius. And so Dryden transposes the principle of one play into another; destroys the grave irony of Troilus and Cressida by the introduction of the heroic seriousness which was in its place in Julius Cæsar; and gives us, altogether, a set of mongrel characters, compounded of the commonplace heroic and Shakspere's reduction of the false heroic to truth and reason. And yet, with all his labour, Dryden could not make the thing consistent. He is compelled to take Shakspere's representation of Ajax, for example. One parallel passage will be sufficient to show how Dryden and Shakspere managed these things:

DRYDEN.

"Thank Heav'n, my lord, you're of a gentle nature,
Praise him that got you, her that brought you forth;
But he who taught you first the use of arms,
Let Mars divide eternity in two,

And give him half. I will not praise your wisdom,
Nestor shall do't; but pardon, father Nestor,
Were you as green as Ajax, and your brain
Temper'd like his, you never should excel him,
But be as Ajax is."

SHAKSPERE.

Ulyss. Thank the heavens, lord, thou art of sweet com-
posure;

Praise him that got thee, she that gave thee suck:
Fam'd be thy tutor, and thy parts of nature
Thrice-fam'd, beyond all erudition:
But he that disciplin'd thy arms to fight,
Let Mars divide eternity in twain,
And give him half: and, for thy vigour,
Bull-bearing Milo his addition yield

To sinewy Ajax. I will not praise thy wisdom,
Which, like a bourn, a pale, a shore, confines
Thy spacious and dilated parts: Here's Nestor,-
Instructed by the antiquary times,

He must, he is, he cannot but be wise ;

But pardon, father Nestor, were your days
As green as Ajax, and your brain so temper'd,
You should not have the eminence of him,
But be as Ajax."

One of the most extraordinary subtleties of Shakspere's Troilus and Cressida arises out of the circumstance that the real heroic tragedy is found side by side with the ironical heroic. Cassandra, short as the character is, may be classed amongst the finest creations of art. Dryden omits Cassandra altogether. Was this a want of a real perception of "the grounds" of tragedy; or an instinct which avoided the higher heroic, when it would come into contrast with his own feebler conceptions? The Cassandra of Shakspere is introduced to heighten the effect of the petty passions, the worldliness, which are everywhere around her. The solemn and the earnest are in alliance with madness.

Ulrici has a curious theory about this drama. Without yielding our assent to it, we give it as a specimen of very ingenious conjecture::

"Shakspere, in working up these materials, has had another design in the background respecting himself and his art. We know that Ben Jonson, his friend as a man, but his decided opponent as a dramatist, had taken, as the object of his critical and poetical activity, the restoration of the dramatic art in his lifetime to the ancient form according to the (certainly misunderstood) rules of Aristotle; and afterwards, upon that principle, to form the English national drama. Shakspere, although frequently attacked, has never openly and directly engaged in the advocacy of the contrary principle. He despised the contest; doubtless because nothing was to be decided upon by vague abstract reasoning upon the merits of a theory. But the points of his opponent's arrows were broken off as soon as it was proved, in the most striking manner, that the spirit and character, customs and forms of life, of antiquity were essentially different and distinct from those founded upon Christian opinions and represented iu a Christian point of view. It would appear at once as a most contradictory beginning to wish to transfer foreign ancient principles of art into the poetry of Christianity. And how could Shakspere, the poet, produce a proof more strong, striking,

and convincing, than to embody his own principles in a poem open to all eyes? But we must not expect to find such a by-end made prominent; the poet, indeed, hedges it round, and scarcely leaves anything palpable. ***Only one single dismembered feature he suffered to remain, perhaps in order to act as a direction to the initiated. I mean the passage where Hector reproaches Troilus and Paris that they had discussed very superficially the controversy as to the delivering up of Helen:

'Not much

Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought
Unfit to hear moral philosophy.'

The words have certainly their value in themselves for their comic effect. Nevertheless, may not this very useless and unfitting anachronism contain a satirical horsewhip for Shakspere's pedantic adversaries, who everywhere invoked their Aristotle without sense or understanding?"

[Hector's Body dragged at the Car of Achilles.]