nor modern times have produced, than the exhortation addressed by Patroclus to Achilles, to persuade him to shake off his passion for Polyxena, the daughter of Priam, and reassume the terrors of his military greatness: Sweet, rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane, Be shook to air. ACT iii, SCENE 3. Never did morality hold a language more profound, persuasive, and irresistible, than in Shakspeare's Ulysses, who in the same scene, and engaged in the same cause with Patroclus, thus expostulates with the champion of the Grecian forces: For emulation hath a thousand sons, That one by one pursue. If you give way, -O, let not virtue seek Remuneration for the thing it was! For beauty, wit, high birth, desert in service, To envious and calumniating time. One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,• More praise than they will give to gold o'erdusted. Then marvel not, thou great and complete man! And still it might, and yet it may again, But the great beauty of this play, as it is of all the genuine writings of Shakspeare, beyond all didactic morality, beyond all mere flights of fancy, and beyond all sublime, a beauty entirely his own, and in which no writer, ancient or modern, can enter into competition with him, is, that his men are men; his sentiments are living, and his characters marked with those delicate, evanescent, undefinable touches, which identify them with the great delineations of nature. The speech of Ulysses just quoted, when taken by itself, is purely an exquisite specimen of didactic morality; but when combined with the explanation given by Ulysses, before the entrance of Achilles, of the nature of his design, it becomes the attribute of a real man, and starts into life. Achilles (says he) stands in the entrance of his tent. Please it our general to pass strangely by him, Lay negligent and loose regard upon him: I will come last: 'tis like, he'll question me, Why such unplausive eyes are bent, why turn'd on him : To use between your strangeness and his pride, When we compare the plausible and seemingly affectionate manner in which Ulysses addresses himself to Achilles with the key which he here furnishes to his meaning, and especially with the epithet "derision," we have a perfect elucidation of his character, and must allow that it is impossible to exhibit the crafty and smooth-tongued politician in a more exact or animated style. The advice given by Ulysses is in its nature sound and excellent, and in its form inoffensive and kind; the name, therefore, of "derision" which he gives to it, marks to a wonderful degree the cold and self-centred subtlety of his character. The following is a most beautiful example of the genuine Shakspearian manner, such as I have been attempting to describe; where Cressida first proceeds so far as to confess to Troilus that she loves him: CRESSIDA. Boldness comes to me now, and brings me heart :- TROILUS. Why was my Cressid then so hard to win? CRESSIDA. Hard to seem won; but I was won, my lord, When we are so unsecret to ourselves? But, though I lov'd you well, I woo'd you not;- Of speaking first.-Sweet, bid me hold my tongue; The thing I shall repent.-See, see, your silence, ACT iii, SCENE 2. What charming ingenuousness, what exquisite naïveté, what ravishing confusion of soul, are expressed in these words! We seem to perceive in them every fleeting thought as it rises in the mind of Cressida, at the same time that they delineate with equal skill all the beautiful timidity and innocent artifice which grace and consummate the feminine character. Other writers endeavour to conjure up before them their imaginary personages, and seek with violent effort to arrest and describe what their fancy presents to them: Shakspeare alone (though not without many exceptions to this happiness) appears to have the whole train of his characters in voluntary attendance upon him, to listen to their effusions, and to commit to writing all the words, and the very words, they utter. GODWIN.i i Life of Chaucer, 8vo, vol. i. p. 499 et seq. No. XXII. SHAKSPEARE AND CALDERON COMPARED. It is only in the first and lowest scale of the drama, that I can place those pieces in which we are presented with the visible surface of life alone, the fleeting appearance of the rich picture of the world. It is thus that I view them, even although they display the highest sway of passion in tragedy, or the perfection of all social refinements and absurdities in comedy, so long as the whole business of the play is limited to external appearances, and these things are brought before us merely in perspective, and as pictures for the purposes of drawing our attention, and awakening the sympathy of our passions. The second order of the art is that, where in dramatic representations, together with passion and the pictoric appearance of things, a spirit of more profound sense and thought is predominant over the scene, wherein there is displayed a deep knowledge, not of individuals and their affairs alone, but of our whole species, of the world and of life, in all their manifold shapes, contradictions, and catastrophes, of man and of his being. Were this profound knowledge of us and our nature the only end of dramatic poetry, Shakspeare would not merely deserve |