This is strongly resembled in Milton's fine soliloquy of Satan to the Sun:

"Oh, then, at last relent!-Is there no place

Left for repentance," &c.

The fourth Act is written, throughout, with great vigour and vividness of thought and diction. In the noble speech of Hamlet, beginning (Scene 4):

"How all occasions do inform against me!"

Shakspeare shows how his mind always awakes and brightens in soliloquy.

"To know a man well, were to know himself."

Act V., Scene 2.

The meaning is obscure, and may be thus variously interpreted : 1. It were to know him, as he knows himself.

2. It were to know, or to excel, himself; and thus to assume that he was, at least equal; the less being praised of the better. 3. It were to know himself, the highest point of knowledge, the famous γνωθι σεαυτον·

The second is the most appropriate meaning, as the preceding context implies. The sentiment is fine: it is only as we realise excellence in ourselves, that we can estimate it in others.

Goethe, Coleridge, Schlegel, Hazlitt, Strachey, and others, have written with great effort and talent on the character of HAMLET, A striking proof of SHAKSPEARE'S depth. Critics have won fame by elaborately analysing this single character of his creation.

CORIOLANUS.-Aristocratic pride personified. A prolonged, full-fraught, and very noble Tragedy; a majestic structure, on a small foundation. Very great tragic power and pathos are displayed. Perhaps, the finest of all (at least the Roman)

Historical Plays; the hero commanding, in the highest degree, alike our admiration and our grief. The first Act alone, with its ten great scenes, is a mighty drama in itself. The first Scene alone outweighs a whole play of our better modern dramatists. The old Æsopian fable of "the Belly and the Members," how excellently well is it told and applied by Menenius; with his singularly correct and vivid representation, (admired by medical judges,) of the Stomach. How the Poet's heroic fire sparkles forth in Volumnia, a true Roman mother of a Roman hero!-(Act I., Scene III.) In Act III., Scene II., the audience receive a most impressive lecture on the folly, the ruinous frenzy, of excessive pride, and uncurbed anger.

This idea is thus beautifully unfolded by CowPER :—

"Not to understand a treasure's worth,

Till time hath stolen away the slighted good,

Is cause of half our poverty."

It is what BYRON has called "the late remorse of love."

It is a favourite sentiment with SHAKSPEARE: thus, in

Antony and Cleopatra," Act I., Scene IV. :

"It hath been taught us from the primal state,

That the ebb'd man, ne'er lov'd till ne'er worth love,
Comes dear'd by being lack'd."

TEMPEST.-Considered with much internal probability, to be one of his very latest productions, as it is one of his finest and most enchanting creations. It stands well in the front of his volume, as the most purely Shaksperian of all the Plays. The first Act alone, stamps its author as the first imaginative genius

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extant; in this Act, the dialogue between Prospero and Miranda (Sc. II.) is most natural, and therefore most beautiful:— the dialogue between Prospero and Ariel, which follows it, is most fancifully natural:-the dialogue between Prospero and Caliban, contrasted with the last, is in the same marvellous style of fancy-and then, the passion between Ferdinand and Miranda, so naturally, yet suddenly coming upon each; all this throng of unexampled beauty, so diversified, in one scene! The mixture of true delicacy, and frank affection instantly rising at the first meeting of Ferdinand, is charmingly portrayed in Miranda, and recommended to us by her singular circumstances. Act II. opens with one of those inimitably natural, animated, racy conversations, which seem as if they must have been taken down from life. Those lines, "I saw him beat the surges, &c.," are one of those scraps of unimprovable eloquence, which, at times, he throws off in the full career of his dialogue. -Act II., Scene II. This dialogue, between such strange characters, is excellently comic, and shows us Shakspeare indulging in his frolics. Then, with the opening of the next scene (Act III.) we have an instant transition from tipsy fun to the most elegant tenderness imaginable; from the coarsest to the most refined cast of nature: a more lovely love-scene is nowhere to be found, than this between Ferdinand, bearing the logs, and his impassioned mistress.

It is remarkable how incidentally the grand and noted passage, inscribed on his monument in Westminster Abbey, comes in, "The cloud-capt towers, &c.," (Act IV.,) it is the reverse of the "splendidus assuetur pannus." In this fine fancy-piece, Shakspeare holds on to the close, in his best manner: a rare instance.

"Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve."

Act IV., Scene I.

This appears to be the true reading; though commonly quoted "all which it inherits." We are reminded of a sublime passage in Isaiah, (chap. LI., v. 6,) "The heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment,

and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner.” these things shall be dissolved." (II. Peter III., v. 11.)

"All

Act V., Scene I.

Shakspeare seems to have anticipated phrenology. He certainly beheld in a glass the reverse of this low-browed head in his own unequalled altitude of forehead.

"Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves!" &c.

This fine apostrophe has been supposed an imitation of Medea's speech in Ovid's Metam., Lib. VII., which was translated in Shakspeare's time :

"Auræque, et venti, montesque, amnesque, lacusque,

Dîque omnes nemorum," &c.

The resemblance is remarkable; but Shakspeare has left Ovid far behind, in richness of imagery, and energy of diction. There is an unusual and admirable stateliness and solemnity in the flow and tone of these noble lines.

This charming Play ranks among the richest creations of his fancy, and among the most matured and finished of his com. positions. How inimitably-conceived and combined are the solemn magician and his fascinating daughter; how happily contrasted those two preternatural creatures-the delicate Spirit and the human Monster! Such rare and varied figures are well placed in the foreground of the volume, and present a fine and perfect sample of the Universal Genius.

OTHELLO. This great production, exhibiting a tragedy in private life, is composed in a more careless style of verse and diction than Hamlet. Mighty in its interest and pathos, it is less interesting and less noble in its design and in its characters, than Hamlet, Lear, or Macbeth. It is the most neatly-constructed of all these great Tragedies; the most purely "sim

plex et unum." In this respect, and also in the character of its theme, it answers to the "Edipus Tyrannus" of SOPHOCLES. It is the most powerfully tragical of all tragedies, if we except Lear. It suffers, however, a serious injury, from the mixture of so much coarse vulgarity, which cannot be read aloud, and which tends to debase and defile the reader's mind.

Iago is the arch-fiend of dramatic monsters; the bye-word to brand slanderers He out-demons the Mephistopheles of FAUST. The magnificent soul of Shakspeare selected the vice of Slander for special abhorrence and reprobation—either in "discourse of thought, or actual deed." (Act IV., Scene II.) This is the reading of the old copies, and it is right. So we have "discourse of reason," in Hamlet, and again in Troilus and Cressida; discursus for exercise. The emendation, "discourse, or thought," was made by Pope, and adopted by Steevens.

i.e., ' much ado,' much difficulty, not to go,' &c. These lines of inimitable pathos have been exquisitely adapted to music, by Shield, showing how singularly susceptible of musical expression are some of the most beautiful passages. "She never told her love," from Twelfth Night, as represented by HAYDN, is, probably, the finest of all existing songs, at least of all comprised within so few lines and notes.

"It is the cause," &c.

Act V., Scene II. It is the cause, the crime which he supposes Desdemona to have committed, that forces him on to this horrible act of justice. Dr. JOHNSON allows that "the abruptness of this soliloquy renders it obscure."

"Put out the light; and then”

(a natural break of aposiopesis)

"Do the unutterable deed !"-Ibid.

"But they are cruel tears: this sorrow's heavenly," &c.—Ibid.