the mental process by which his dramas became the perfection of art in their perfect reflection of refined and ordered nature. For the personal character of Shakespeare, Jonson becomes, from the very peculiarities of his relative position and his own character and failings, the most important and satisfactory witness. The epithet of "gentle" that he employs in the epigram attached to the portrait he repeats in the commendatory verses, and yet associates it, as Spenser did before, with characteristics of energy and effect : "Look, how the father's face Lives in his issue; even so the race Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines In each of which he seems to shake a lance This is the very combination of gentleness with force that places Raphael at an advantage to Michael Angelo; the suffrage of the world goes at last with the genius as with the character that at once commands respect and engages affection. The power to command and marshal mankind only attains its highest influence when associated with the love that casts out fear: a sense of danger and uncertainty attaches to the leading of the highest powers when there is a doubt of the balancing control of sympathy; the ability to exert force is but half an endowment without that of restraining it. We rest in the greatest confidence on that display of exertion which does not suggest exhaustion, as on that repose which does not threaten torpor or forgetfulness: energy becomes weak so soon as it is deficient in grace, and it is the union of the two, -the union in which the ultimately governing and inspiring element is tender sensibility, that gave and still continues the vitality that is in Christianity itself. The circumstance that most surprises us in the research into the outward details of Shakespeare's life, is the perfection with which he brought poetic and artistic exertion into harmony with business-like and systematic prudence, and the promotion of his social and domestic interests; and if in the investigation it seems sometimes that the spirit of getting and storing might be too strong for him, we find, on turning to the other sources, that he achieved a still rarer combination, and poet and actor, manager and thriving capitalist, as he becamethe memory he left was most engrossed by good nature, candour, honesty, friendliness, conviviality, and social wit. In the Microcosmus of Davies (1603) we have this testimony to his qualities, which gives us also welcome information how far his friend and great aid, Richard Burbage, was in sympathy with him. "If Pride ascend the stage, O base ascent! All men may see her, for nought comes thereon In blazing her by demonstration, Then Pride, that is more than most vicious, That hath for better uses you refused; Wit, courage, good shape, good parts, and all good, And though the stage doth stain pure gentle blood, In the last stanza there seems to be a manifest allu- The crown and glory, however, of all the testimonies is still to be quoted, in the affectionate, reverential, and earnest prose of Jonson, take his critical suggestions with what acceptance or indifference we may :— "I LOVED THE MAN AND DO HONOUR HIS MEMORY, ON THIS SIDE IDOLATRY, AS MUCH AS ANY: HE WAS INDEED HONEST, AND OF AN OPEN AND FREE NATURE." That Shakespeare was indifferent about the fate of his plays, and was even unconscious of their poetic excellence, is a notion that is almost too absurd for notice; the player editors distinctly hint, that had he lived longer he would in ordinary course have edited them himself. Of fretful and fidgetty anxiety for honour and glory and about honour and glory, certainly no hint or sign remains; but that he knew his true position on the Muses' mount in relation to the poets that were anterior to and about him, it were absurd to doubt, though the examination of the sources of the plays may have taught us how well he knew to qualify contempt even for evil so bad as bad fiction and bad poetry, by eagle insight into a soul of goodness. "He died a Papist," says the tradition of Davies,— which means, I suspect, little more than that, as poet and player and the servant of monarchs whose courts were the last hope and home of his art and the tendencies it implied, he had but slight sympathy with much of the activity of the Puritan party, who were striving all his life to extinguish the world's best light, and pull in actual fact his house about his ears. If we inquire further what were his opinions on a subject which a mind of his order always treats and settles for itselfwhat is to be said. Direct evidence we have none, but if we may transfer an obvious inference from his English plays, I should be disposed to say, that the national feeling that appears there did not desert him personally— that ix an age of grievous and savage controversies, urged by massacre at Paris or rack in the torture-chamber at the Tower, he held it patriotic, like Socrates of old, to worship, in a certain fashion, the gods that the state worships; by no means from absolute confidence in the teaching and decisions of churchmen, whose motives he dissected and set forth with shrewd and scarcely covert criticism, but for the sake of making the best of circumstances, sinking some not slight differences, in order to keep the country united and together, which no consideration, he thought, could justify the disablement of For the rest, I should infer from absence of satiric girds at the Puritans, so frequent with his fellow dramatists, and by one instance (in Twelfth Night) of defence of them from senseless satire, that he was well content to look forward to the advance of the good sense of the country-which others fairly held it a duty to promote by overt agitation,-to lighten the labour of conformity, and to allow the best end to be attained without the heavy burden of giving countenance, though merely formal, to surplusage and superstition, that neither the English of his day nor their fathers had been able to bear. xcii SHAKESPEARE'S WILL' FROM THE ORIGINAL IN THE OFFICE OF THE PREROGATIVE COURT OF CANTERBURY. Vicesimo quinto die Martii,2 Anno Regni Domini nostri Jacobi nunc Regis Angliæ, &c. decimo quarto, et N the name of God, Amen! I William Shackspeare of Stratford upon Avon, in the countie The will is written on three sheets of paper, fastened together at top. Shakespeare's name is signed at the 2 Originally written Januarii. 3 Originally sonne and daughter. |