is man! How noble in reason! In form how moving! How express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust!"

It would be hard to cull from the whole body of our prose literature a passage which should demonstrate more strikingly the splendor and the majesty of our language when freed from the shackles of verse. Of all De Quincey's many inaccurate assertions, he never made one more inaccurate than when he asserted that he-the English opium-eater-had been the first to introduce English literature to what he calls poetical impassioned prose. He might have pretended to forget, possibly he might really have forgotten, Raleigh, who furnished him with the model for one of his finest apostrophes;* he might have overlooked Milton, Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, but it is strange indeed that he should have overlooked Shakespeare. Another very eloquent example, but in diction more subdued and less ornate, may be found in the jailer's speech in "Cymbeline,' act v. scene 4; in Lear's speech, "Why, thou wert better in thy grave," etc., "Lear, act iii. scene 3.

The above classification, necessarily arbitrary and imperfect, and adopted rather for purposes of convenience than proceeding on any fixed critical principle, leaves of course much of the poet's prose still unspecified. We have still to take into account his grave didactic style of which we have several examples in Hamlet-his many soliloquies and reflections where the language rises and falls in exquisite unison with the sentiments embodied in it, as in Benedick's speech, "Much Ado About Nothing," act ii. scene 3; Launcelot Gobbo's, "Merchant of Venice." act ii. scene 2; the speeches of Falstaff; the speech of Autolycus, "Winter's Tale," act iv. scene 4; of Thersites, "Troilus and Cressida," act ii. scene 4; the Porter's," Macbeth," act ii. scene 3; Edmunds, "Lear," act i. scene 2: the serious and set speeches, which might.be amply illustrated from Measure for Measure," from " 'Othello," and from "Cymbeline"; the epilogues, as at the conclusion of "As You Like It," and the second part of "Henry IV."; the various documents and letters cited by the characters.

It is interesting, for it is, we think, quite possible to watch the stages by which Shakespeare's prose arrived at maturity, and to see how it became, by degrees, a favorite instrument of expression with him. At first he used it very sparingly. In some of his earlier works it finds no place at all. There is no prose, for example, in the first part of "Henry VI."; there is none in "King John

or in "Rich

* Compare the concluding paragraph of the History of the World-"O eloquent, just, and mighty Death," etc.-with the celebrated apostrophe to opium, beginning, O just, subtle, and mighty Opium," in the second part of the Opium Eater.

ard II."; there are only about a dozen lines in "Titus Andronicus"; there is only one short scene in Richard III." In "Romeo and Juliet" the proportion of prose is very small, and in the conversation between the Nurse and Lady Capulet (act i. scene 2), where we should have expected to find it, we find blank verse. In the two parts of "Henry IV.," on the other hand, prose and verse are used in almost equal proportions, but the prose portions are, without exception, confined to the comic scenes. 66 In As You Like It" the tone of the prose is raised; in Hamlet it begins to encroach on the province of blank verse, that is to say, it is employed in grave and serious passages; and in this way the poet continues to employ it through the whole series of his maturer works, except in the "Tempest," where it is confined to the baser characters, and in "Henry VIII.," where we find it only in one short scene. The stages in the development of Shakespeare's prose are, we think, as clearly dis-. cernible as the stages in the development of his verse. It appears for the first time in the second and third part of "Henry VI.," and here it differs in no respect from the style of Marlowe and Peeleit has all their characteristics, all their stiffness, all their archaism, all their coarseness. In "Love's Labor's Lost" it is, of course, and is intended to be merely parody. In "All's Well that Ends Well" we find it in a state of transition. It is frequently rough, involved, and uncouth, but it is also occasionally compact and musical. Side by side, for instance, with periods like

66

'Now he hath a smack of all neighboring languages, therefore we must every one be a man of his own fancy; not to know what we speak one to another, so we seem to know, is to know straight our purpose.'

we find periods like

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not, and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues." In 66 As You Like It" the composition of the prose is as perfect as that of the verse.

"How delicately the poet understood and how carefully he studied the rhythm of his prose may be seen, not only in his use of expletives, in the arrangement of his antitheses, and in his introduction of balancing clauses, but in the nice measurement of his subordinate sentences, and in his frequent inversions of the natural order of the words. When he is at his best, Isocrates and Cicero were not more solicitous about the harmony of their periods. Take the following passage from "Henry V.":

66

'Now if these men have defeated the law and out-run native punishment, though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to fly from God. War is his beadle. War is his vengeance. So that here men are punished for before breach of the king's laws in the king's quarrel. Where they feared the death they have borne life away,

and where they would be safe they perish. Then if they die unprovided no more is the king guilty of their damnation than he was before guilty of those impieties for which they are now visited. Every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul is his

own.

Longinus has observed of a celebrated sentence in Demosthenes that so absolutely perfect is the construction, that if a synonym be substituted, if the slightest alteration be made in the order of the words, the whole is ruined, the music is a discord. What is true of the sentence in Demosthenes is true also of the paragraph we have just quoted, and of many other prose paragraphs in Shakespeare. Alter or omit a single word, invert a sentence, strike out a clause, change in the smallest particular a particle, and you would jar the ear of a sensitive critic, as a false note would jar the ear of a musician. Now, we do not believe that, with the exception of the translators of the Bible, any other Elizabethan prose writer had so fine a perception of the native harmony of our tongue, as distinguished from a harmony borrowed from Rome.

And now it remains to say a few words on the question whether we are justified in supposing that Shakespeare was guided by any fixed principle in his employment of verse and prose, or whether he employed them, as fancy suggested, for the sake of variety and relief. On this subject it would be dangerous to dogmatize. It must, of course, be obvious to every one that, as a general rule, he employs prose when he wishes to be emphatically realistic, when he is dealing with commonplace characters, and is embodying commonplace sentiments. There is always an instinct in a true artist prompting him, even at the cost of literary grace, to attain complete harmony between spirit and expression. We find this to be the case even in those schools where a rigid regard to form is the primary canon. We find traces of it in Euripides: we find it still more marked in Aristophanes and in the later schools of the Greek drama. We find it in Terence; we find it pre-eminently in Plautus. As a general rule, Shakespeare's poetical conceptions, naturally, and, as it were, spontaneously, clothe themselves in verse, while all that appertains to the familiar side of real life as naturally slides into its appropriate prose. The line of demarkation thus drawn between verse and prose is indeed another proof of Shakespeare's delicate appreciation of style, another proof that he was what the French critics deny-a reflective artist. Many of his disciples have written plays in a mixture of verse and prose, but the employment of the one or the other mode of expression is with them purely arbitrary, and appears to have been introduced simply to vary the dialogue or to save the trouble of yoking thought to meter. This is evident, not only from the fact that conceptions eminently and essentially poetical are often clothed in prose, but that their prose is very commonly nothing but loose blank verse. Webster, in his two great tragedies, con

stantly selects this mode of expression for his grandest and most striking images. The prose of Massinger and Tourneur is so rhythmical that their respective editors have boldly printed it as blank verse. And what applies to these poets will apply, with the exception of Fletcher, to all the other Elizabethan dramatists when writing tragedy. In Shakespeare's prose there is never such ambiguity. His prose is as clearly defined as his verse. However rich, however highly wrought it be, its rhythm is never the rhythm of meter, the style of its rhetoric is not the style of the rhetoric of verse. But it would not be true to say that the poet reserves prose simply for cases where prose is dramatically appropriate. True as a rule, it is a rule which admits of many exceptions. In "Hamlet," in "Antony and Cleopatra," and in "Cymbeline '—see particularly the scene between Posthumus and the jailer, in parts of Henry V.," and in parts of "Othello," several speeches are in prose where we might, so far as the subject-matter is concerned, have expected verse. In some cases it may possibly have been used to heighten the effect of the verse immediately following. The magnificent soliloquy of Henry V. is preceded by a scene in prose. Antony's splendid rhetoric in "Julius Cæsar" is ushered in by a prose speech from Brutus. In many cases which will at once suggest themselves to the student it is undoubtedly used for the purpose of relief and variety, and for that purpose only.

It would be idle to draw any parallel between the merits of our great poet in these two branches of composition; but we may observe that in one or two points his prose contrasts very favorably with his verse. His verse, in his later style at least, is frequently obscure, perplexed, and abrupt; his prose is uniformly smooth and lucid. His verse abounds in solecisms and anacolutha: his prose is, with a very few exceptions, singularly correct, and is marked by much greater purity, both of idiom and phrase. His verse is full of mannerisms, and of mannerisms which are not at all times pleasant: his prose is easy and natural. In a word, his most characteristic prose is, regarded merely as composition, decidedly superior to his most characteristic verse.

Margaret Fuller tells us in one of her letters that in a conversation at which she was once present, Mr. Carlyle gave it as his opinion that Shakespeare would have done far better if he had confined himself to prose. Such an opinion may well be put down as one of those paradoxes in which, in his younger days, the author of "Sartor Resartus" loved to indulge. Even a collection of such delightful stories as the "Decamerone," even a romance like "Don Quixote or "Tom Jones," would have been a poor exchange for such works "Lear" or "Othello." And yet, in one way at least, we share Mr. Carlyle's regret. What student of Shakespeare could doubt that that omnipotent genius might, had he so willed it, have accomplished for prose fiction what he has accomplished for the drama

as

have been the first of prose novelists, as he is the first of poets? Had he taken up the novel where Greene and Lyly left it, it is not likely that England would have had to wait a century and a half for a genius like Fielding, and more than two centuries for a genius like Walter Scott.

But we must bring this sketch to a conclusion. A careful examination of Shakespeare's prose is still a desideratum, and it would, we are convinced be a welcome accession to our present stock of Shakespearean criticisms. Unless we are much mistaken, such an examination would be, moreover, of inestimable value in affording internal evidence bearing on the chronology of the poet's works. His verse has been scrutinized with ludicrous minutenes: his prose remains virtually without a critic. Our literature has not yet found its Tiraboschi. Indeed, the history of our prose literature has never even been adequately sketched; but of one thing we feel very certain: that whenever such a work appears, the name of the greatest poet the world has ever beheld will be found to hold a high place, not only among the fathers, but among the masters of English prose. To judge him properly, we must judge him relatively.— J. CHURTON COLLINS, in The Gentleman's Magazine.

IN CHINA TOWN.

A PILGRIMAGE by night, under police escort, through the back slums and the opium-dens of the Chinese quarter in San Francisco did not appear to us a tempting prospect. It conveyed unpleasantly vivid ideas of various offenses to eye, ear, and nose. Darkness and dirt and evil odors did not seem the elements of an enjoyable evening. But we had always understood that it was the duty of every tourist in San Francisco, of whatever age, sex or condition, to undertake this little excursion, and we determined valiantly that the good old motto of "Fais-ce que dois !" should be ours, and in our duty as Englishwomen and tourists we would not fail.

An American gentleman, one of the leading residents of the city, made arrangements for the expedition, and kindly volunteered to share with the police officer, whose company he had secured, the onerous duty of protecting us against the possible dangers of the dens. It was a fine starlight night; such a beautiful, bracing, balmy winter night as only California knows. Kearney street was bright and crowded, its gay shops all a-blaze with lights. But within a stone's-throw of that fashionable thoroughfare lie dingy Dupont and Jackson streets, the main arteries of China Town, and thither led our road.