trifling of love the sharp contrarieties of right and wrong are playfully reconciled. In the same way that in all the preceding scenes the tragic gloom, which the misfortunes of Antonio diffuse, is painted with the softest touch and lightest shades, and their bitterness seems dissolved into sweet, soothing, and melancholy strains, amid which a happier note may be not indistinctly heard, so the concluding act impresses on the whole its appropriate comic stamp, and puts a playful mask on the profound seriousness of the entire subject. We cannot, in short, sufficiently adinire the artistic skill of our poet, who, at the risk of censure, and of failure of effect on the weak-sighted and superficial reader, dares to appear indeed to be violating the rules of his art, while he is constantly and steadily pursuing it, and was attaining it so surely and unerringly.

Equally untenable is the censure, that the clown of the piece, Lancelot Gobbo, with his silly gossip, is unsuited to the rest of the piece, and does not harmonize with the first four acts, or at any rate is redundant. Nothing of the kind. He is not merely in his place, but we could not do without him. As in all other comedies of Shakspeare, we have in him a comic representative of the leading idea. He exhibits it in travestie; it is concentrated in his living personality, and in all his individual deeds and pursuits, and therein rendered directly and vividly perceptible. Compare, for instance, the amusing humour and parody where he balances the right and wrong of running away from the Jew, (Act II., Scene 2); or when, in a similar spirit, he plays the Judge over Jessica and Lorenzo. (Act III., Scene 5.) In truth, we have not space to dilate upon his importance in the piece, or the amiableness of his personal character. This, however, we must say, that Shakspeare has employed him wherever possible, in order to bring out his fundamental idea.

As to its date, the "Merchant of Venice" must have been written before 1598, since it also is mentioned by Meres. It falls, therefore, within the first ten years of Shakspeare's artistic labours, and so in all probability belongs to the year 1597, to which it is assigned by Chalmers, Drake, and Tieck. Malone, who places it in 1598, without remark, does not appear to have considered that it could not well be written in this year, and yet

be mentioned by Meres. The date of the earliest impression is 1600. Wonderful, indeed, does the poet's progress appear, when we compare the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," or " All's Well," with the "Merchant of Venice."

"Measure for Measure," although ten years younger,* and in external form, in tone, and colouring, widely differing from the "Merchant of Venice," is nevertheless related to it by its ideal subject-matter. The basis on which its story is constructed is closely allied, and at the same time essentially divergent. A Duke of Vienna forms the determination of committing his sceptre and authority to another, under the pretext of being called to take an urgent and distant journey, and by exchanging the royal purple for a monk's hood to observe incognito the condition of his people, but especially the manner and effect of his vicegerent's administration. At first sight the design looks like a strange arbitrary whim, but more closely examined it appears to possess a reasonable motive both in the character and situation of the Duke. He is an ardent lover of virtue, and of pure and exalted morality. Accordingly, he has hitherto tempered his authority with prudence and mildness; he has been, he fears, even too mild, for vice and crime have of late increased among his subjects. Partly with a view of ascertaining whether his fears are well-grounded, and in that case of correcting his fault without the appearance of inconsistency, and partly perhaps from a longing for such an amusing interruption of the monotony of state, as might at the same time afford him an opportunity of observing both his chief mini

*Tieck places it in 1612; his reasons for so doing are drawn partly from the language and style, and partly from an allusion which he fancies he has detected in it to the literary club which usually assembled at St. Dunstan's Tavern, under the presidency of Ben Jonson. But the later origin of the piece-certainly it did not precede 1609-is vouched still more strongly by the profound masculine earnestness which invests the piece, and by the prevalence of the same tone of feeling which led Shakspeare to abandon the life and pursuits of London for his native town. Malone and Drake are unquestionably wrong in setting it down to 1603. Their arguments in favour of this date are drawn from trifling details and allusions, which, however, are all refuted by Tieck's discovery. Besides, the conjecture is not without weight, which supposes that Shakspeare was led to the composition of this piece by the rigoristic sentiments and arrogant virtue of the Puritans, which were fast spreading at the close of his artistic career.

sters and his people, he invests with supreme authority the zealous, and, to all appearance, sternly virtuous Angelo, associating with him in an inferior rank the mild old Escalus. At first, as all expected, Angelo exercises his deputed power with rigour, and seeming conscientiousness. He revives an old law which punishes all crimes of incontinency with death, and under it throws into prison Claudio, a light-minded but far from vicious young nobleman, who had seduced his mistress before marriage. The attempted deliverance and final rescue of the youth by the exertions of his sister, and with the aid of the Duke, forms the groundwork of the intrigue. The very Angelo who makes such loud profession of strict moral integrity, who insists on the necessity of order and a rigorous execution of the law, and inexorably punishes sin and weakness in others, who boasts of his own virtue and has indeed a real desire to be what he seems, falls from his arrogated superiority, and with far greater criminality into the same fault which, in spite of his pledge and promise to the contrary, he is even resolved to visit with its extreme penalty. Having once yielded to human weakness, he quickly becomes a worthless hypocrite and deceiver. For so it invariably happens; the pride of virtue and moral arrogance, which thinks itself proof against all temptation, such inflated self-righteousness, sinks the more easily for its lofty pretensions into the lowest abyss of guilt. That the hypocrite should be finally unmasked by the counteracting intrigue of the Duke, aided and favoured by Chance,-Claudio rescued, and his truly virtuous and amiable sister rewarded for her magnanimity,the fantastic and talkative Lucio put to open shame, and the pimping Clown, with a harsh rebuke,—is in perfect keeping with the spirit of the whole, in so far as it cannot possess a poetic justification except within the limits of the comic domain.

The preceding hasty sketch is sufficient to reveal the organic centre of the whole composition. Human virtue and morality, in so far as they pretend to be something in and by themselves, and claim to be self-sufficient, is the mark against which Comedy directs its mockery, and which the dialectic of irony, or rather their own immanent dialectic, soon resolves into absolute nothingness. Virtue and morality are, no doubt (who will pretend to deny it?) the principle and the end of human existence. But they are so merely

through and in God. Mere human virtue, which pretends to a strength of its own, and, as if it had with free creative energy made itself, arrogates a self-sufficiency, is but a mere factitious virtue, a nothing, like the glittering soap-bubble which bursts with the first breath of air; nay, it is infinitely lower than nothing, since it is the vilest of sins, and the seed and germ of all wickedness. The whole piece, accordingly, rests on the prime christian truth-we are all sinners, children of wrath, and in need of in other words, life is here contemplated in its gravest and profoundest principle of virtue and morality. But even this foundation is found to be frail, hollow, and worm-eaten, when employed exclusively in its earthly and human nature to prop up and support the human and the earthly.

It is not man's moral energy, but the divine grace, which is the stay of human life, because it is only in and through the latter, that human virtue becomes practicable, and that it is truly and properly virtue ;-a truth similar to that which the "Merchant of Venice" illustrated in the case of law. If it be true that it is only by God's grace, and upon penitent acknowledgment of his own frailty and sinfulness, that man receives the faculty of virtue and perfection, then most assuredly is he bound to shew mercy and not justice; and, for punishment, pardon upon his repentant and sorrowing fellows; as Shakspeare beautifully expresses it:

"Alas! alas!

Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once;
And he that might the vantage best have took,
Found out the remedy. How would you be,
If he, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that,
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made!"

And again in these sublime words :

"Could great men thunder

As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,

For every pelting, petty officer,

Would use his heaven for thunder;

Nothing but thunder. Merciful heaven !

Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt

Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,
Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man!
Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assured,

His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,

As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal."

When the poem itself furnishes such abundant explanations of its deep and pregnant meaning, it would be worse than folly to presume to add one word on the subject. All that remains for me to do is, to point out the manner the fundamental idea is again reflected in the several parts-the characters, the situations, and the circumstances, attracting them all to its magnetic centre, and there arranging them into one organic body. I have already pointed out this in the principal moments of the action; in the conduct of Angelo (the utter worthlessness of which requires to be exposed, for which purpose the cheat which is played upon him by Mariana and Isabella, with the Duke's assistance, is indispensable,) in the danger and deliverance of Claudio, and in the part which the Duke and Isabella, as the representatives of true virtue, take in the plot, and in bringing about the result. The Duke, Angelo, and Isabella, are the principal characters; in the piece itself these are pretty fully developed, and therefore, after our previous remarks, do not require any further examination. Escalus stands by the side of Angelo like the mild, peaceful, and aged sage, by impetuous and energetic manhood: his long years have taught and purified him, and he no longer mistakes proud pretension for virtue, nor rigour for justice. His part is indispensable as an organic counterpoise to Angelo; and partly as a mean between him and the Duke. For the Duke and Isabella stand far higher than he does; they have the grace of God with them, while he possesses nothing more than human experience and compassion. With equal wisdom, Claudio and Juliet appear only in the background; they are the well-executed pictures of human weakness which sins from too great liberty, and being brought by constraint and suffering to repentance, on its penitent return is received and forgiven. They stand in contrast to the Pharisaic virtue of Angelo,