too late to be quoted for authentic anecdote, and yet I do not doubt is vocal by some inspiration of a genuine tradition. That geniality of temperament at least, if not joviality, was habitually associated with Shakespeare personally is indicated by many allusions, and might be safely inferred alone from the physiognomy of his bust and the expression that the sculptor at least aimed to give to it. The monument was erected to him before 1623, for it is alluded to in the commendatory verses of Digges, prefixed to the first folio edition of his plays-how much earlier cannot be said. The custom of the time would vouch for its being a portrait, and the indications seem conclusive that the head and face were modelled from a cast from the original after death. Such a cast requires to be taken with great skill and care, to obviate the compression of the softer and fleshy parts of the face; these are the most defective parts in the bust, and are in striking contrast to the decision and force with which the noble and refined outline of the bald head has been achieved. I have never seen this satisfactorily given in drawings, which too often show that the artist's hand was not more guided by what was set before him to copy than by his recollections of the better known but merely imaginary or unauthentic portraits. The form of the face and its general contours denote a person of decidedly the reverse of a spare habit, and though the half-length effigy is represented with pen in hand and paper spread for the act of writing, the lips are slightly opened, as if for speech, and curved, to give the expression of sportiveness or wit. I confess I have no faith whatever in the genuineness of any other likenesses than the Stratford bust and the portrait engraved by Martin Droeshout, prefixed to the first edition of the plays, and testified to by Ben Jonson these mutually confirm each other, and, I think, disprove the rest of the pretenders. The portrait, which may have been after Richard Burbage, who gained some celebrity in painting in addition to his supremacy as an actor, I have heard pronounced by high artistic authority as not by any means contemptible. It agrees with the bust-though probably of earlier date-in the character of the face, in general consistency and outline, in the fall of the hair, and in an attempted rendering of the character of the forehead. The exaggeration of the forehead seems to have been a general fault of the English draughtsmen of the time, to judge by the portraits of the time, and in the print the defect is made worse by certain inaccuracy of foreshortening or drawing; the remarkable length of the upper lip is common to both, as is the fashion of moustache and imperial. In the engraving there is the indication of vivacity, expressiveness, and sweetness about the mouth that is slurred in the ill-finished outline of the sculptor in this feature. The inscriptions on the monument are these :— 66 "Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem Stay, Passenger, why goest thou by so fast? Obiit Anno Dom. 1616, His valued fellows did not long survive him; Richard Burbage died in March, 1619, Henry Condell in December, 1627, and John Hemynge in October 1630. I am now at the conclusion of all that I have to say on the matter and subjects ordinarily current as forming the biography of the man Shakespeare, and the conclusion, I confess, is a relief. It is almost with a feeling of shame that one turns from the details that we have been longing for or investigating, to associate them with the divine endowments revealed in his poetic works I fear that zeal for the biography will not ordinarily improve the feeling and zest and purer enthusiasm of the critic what, after all, have we been enquiring after but the very rags and cast off clothes of the baser outward life, elevating the recovery of a veritable doublet or an actual hat to a level of importance with a moral conreption, intellectual insight, the embodied ideal. The poet refined and elevated the very essence of his being to express it without blemish in his works, and we must fain drag it back into the polluting or uncongenial crowd of common business, the necessities and uncertainties postulated in original sin, the lapses, actual or not impossible in the thousand contingencies of the unsettled, if we may not say ill-hung, constitution and nature of common men and common things. May a portion of the spirit of the first editors be transmitted to their successors. Heminge and Condell collected and published the plays "without ambition either of self-profit or fame; only to keep the memory of so worthy a Friend and Fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare:" and my quarrel with them is but small, that it did not occur to them as essential to their purpose to perpetuate in a memoir the trivialities that are the common accidents of all who are mortal. The very tone and terms of the quoted phrase express a biography, the better part of one; and so again the conclusion of their dedication : "In that name, therefore, we most humbly consecrate to your H. H. these remains of your servant Shakespeare; that what delight is in them may be ever your L. L. the reputation his and the faults ours, if any be committed, by a pair so careful to show their gratitude both to the living and the dead, as is Your lordship's most bounden, "JOHN HEMINGE, In consequence of the very partial and limited publication of his works during his lifetime, the not unfrequent literary notices of him as a poet appear to us now to lay undue or too exclusive stress on the sweetness of his verse and easy mastery and flow of language. This music and melody to ears then unaccustomed to it, seems to have charmed attention away from some of the graver qualities of his muse, and epithets are lavished upon him compounded of sugar, honey, and nectar, that now seem to have something of the childishness of sweetmeats. But beyond this there is sufficient trace of his great and effective dramatic reputation, of which the great depositories were the audiences and the actors. Then, as now, no doubt the theatres had their accustomed frequenters, whose sense of merit was expressed by constant attendance, not in publications appealing to the larger circle beyond the theatrical pale. So in later times, the growth of the reputation of Shakespeare went on after his plays were published, quite independently of any published appreciation of it. The professed and literary critic in these later times lagged as far behind the habitual readers as their predecessors behind the customary audiences. All that Germany has since said was thought and felt long before by readers, whose function it was not to write, and who were ill represented by those who took up the task; and so it was at the earlier date, that admiration at the Globe and the Blackfriars was fervent and sustained, and made the fortunes of all the sharers, while sets and classes of Englishmen lived long lives just within hearing, and yet wist not that they were losing words it were worth half a lifetime to have listened to. The comparative silence of contemporaries, I take to be then, mere intelligible repose upon a fact acknowledged by all within the range of cognizance, a silence broken, if ever, by mere futile grumblings of a Greene or a Nash in early days, and later by Ben Jonson. The most definite expression of Jonson's criticism is in his conversation with Drummond of Hawthornden, where he imputes to Shakespeare want of art, occasional absurdities, and incorrectness from neglect of blotting or revision. Other more satiric glances he gives elsewhere at his bold liberties with time and place, and multitude, and his superficial knowledge of the ancients and antiquity. In all this I would be lenient with Old Ben; I have never been able to get through one of his plays, but the points on which he reflects on Shakespeare are evidently those where he felt or supposed himself the strongest, and being what he was himself as a poet, it is not easy to see how he could have thought otherwise as a critic than he did of Shakespeare. The friends and fellows of Shakespeare, however, were not disposed to be so indulgent, and imputations of envy, a degrading vice, were not uncurrent; from this he is defended by J. Davies in his Scourge of Folly, printed about 1611:— "TO MY WELL ACCOMPLISHED FRIEND MR. BEN JONSON. "Thou art sound in body, yet some say thy soul Envy doth ulcer; yet corrupted hearts Such censurers must have." This was the tendency that was evidently thought to be indulged by him at the expense of one in all respects his superior, but whatever pique, or prompting of self-preference he may have given way to, he made most noble amends in the lines he furnished to the commendatory collection for the first folio of the plays. He seems to have sate down with all he had ever said or written or hinted disparagingly of the dramas of Shakespeare upon his mind, and partly on better advice, partly by greater explicitness, to have responded to the friendly expostulations of those who had an esteem for both, by showing that he could surpass even them in adjusting the terms of his criticism to the truth. His lines convey to me a conviction that he sincerely felt and meant them all; and if Dryden thought, as it is said, that they were sparing and invidious, it is only one of many instances where his judgment was astonishingly mistaken. A more plausible charge might be, that he commended extravagantly, and so contrived to damage by overwrought encomium; but he repudiates such a design, and cannot be charged with it, for, loftily as he sets the mark he aims at, his arrow at every shot flies to its centre, well guided and direct. He had once said that Shakespeare knew little of the ancients; he now justly expresses his equality-superiority of rank, to the best antique drama notwithstanding: he had said that Shakespeare wanted art, he aptly expresses |