physicians' Are you afraid to take a few drops of blood from a man who has made it flow in rivers?'

"In Italy, the history of the Cenci, renewing the ancient adventures of Venice, Verona, Milan, Bologna, and Florence.

"In Germany, Wallenstein's career had just commenced.

"In France, the nearest country to the native land of Shakspeare, what were the stirring events of the time?

"The tocsin of St. Bartholomew sounded when the author of Macbeth had attained his eighteenth year, and England was convulsed by the intelligence of that massacre; exaggerated accounts of it, (if exaggerated they could be,) details calculated to inflame even the imaginations of children, were printed in London and Edinburgh, and sold in every town and village throughout the country. A great deal was said about the reception given by Elizabeth to the ambassador of Charles IX. "The silence of night reigned through the royal apartments. The ladies and courtiers were ranged in rows on each side, clothed in deep mourning; and when the ambassador passed through the midst of them, none made their obeisance, nor even turned upon him a civil look.' Marlowe brought upon the stage his play entitled The Massacre of Paris,' and possibly Shakspeare may have made his debut in one of its characters.

"The reign of Charles IX. was succeeded by that of Henry III., so fertile in catastrophes: Catherine de Medicis, the favourites, the day of the barricades, the assassination of the two Guises at Blois, the death of Henry III. at St. Cloud, the agitations of the League, the murder of Henri IV., must have varied incessantly the emotions of a poet who beheld the long chain of events extending before him. The soldiers of Elizabeth, the Earl of Essex himself, took part in our civil wars, and fought at Havre, Ivry, Rouen, and Amiens. Some veterans of the English army might have recounted, at the fireside of William Shakspeare, the calamities they had witnessed in our fields of battle."

"Shakspeare was born in the interval between the religious revolution, which commenced under Henry VIII., and the political revolution which was preparing to burst forth under Charles I. Both before and after him, there was nothing throughout England but scenes of bloodshed and horror.

"In the reign of Edward VI., Somerset, the protector of the kingdom and uncle of the young king, perished on the scaffold.

"In the reign of Mary, there were the martyrs of protestantism, the beheading of Lady Jane Grey, and Philip, the exterminator of protestants, landing in England, as if to review and devote to destruction the camp of the enemy.

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With the reign of Elizabeth came the martyrs of catholicism. Elizabeth herself, anointed with the sacred oil in conformity with the Roman ritual, became the persecutrix of the faith which had placed the crown upon her head. Elizabeth! the daughter of that Anne Boleyn who caused the schism from the church of Rome, who was sacrificed after Thomas More, and who died half lunatic, praying, laughing, and contrasting the smallness of her neck with the breadth of the executioner's axe.

"Shakspeare in his youth must frequently have encountered old monks, chased from their cloisters, who had seen Henry VIII., his reforms, his destructive hand laid upon their monasteries, his court fools, his wives, his mistresses, and his executioners. When the poet died, Charles I. was in his sixteenth year.

"Thus Shakspeare might have laid one hand on the hoary heads menaced by the last but one of the Tudors, and the other on the auburn

locks of the second of the Stuarts;-on that head which was painted by Vandyke, and subsequently struck off by the parliament party. Filling this position, contemplating these tragic objects, the great poet descended into the tomb. His life was employed in drawing his spectres and his blind kings-in depicting female sorrow and the punishment of ambition-so as to unite, by analogous fictions, the realities of the past with the realities of the future." Vol. I. pp. 292–299.

Another charge is brought against Shakspeare which we feel desirous of repelling--a want of passion and true feeling. He is represented as a sceptic-a sort of abstract, metaphysicalminded man, who sported with the affections as with toys, the trifles of a vacant hour. Hear what the viscount says, after quoting some of his beautiful sonnets.

"There is more of poetry, imagination, and melancholy, in these verses than sensibility, passion, and depth. Shakspeare loved, but he believed no more in love than he believed in any thing else. A woman to him is a bird, a zephyr, a flower, which charms and passes away. Owing to his carelessness or ignorance of fame, and to his profession, which excluded him from good company and kept him aloof from the conditions which he could not attain, he seems to have taken life as a fleeting unoccupied hour, a transient and agreeable leisure.

"Poets love liberty and the muse more dearly than their mistresses. The pope offered to absolve Petrarch from his vows, in order that he might marry Laura. The bard replied to his holiness's obliging proposition, 'I have still too many sonnets to write.'

"Shakspeare, that great tragic spirit, drew his serious ideas from his scorn of himself and the human race. He doubted every thing. 'Perhaps' is a word which in his lines incessantly recurs. Montaigne, on the other side of the water, repeated: Peut-être que sais-je? 'Perhaps -what do I know?' Vol. I. pp. 315, 316.

The deep pathos and irresistible passion of his verse is the best answer to the charge.

Again he is supposed by Chateaubriand to have been unconscious of his genius-careless about fame. The author must have forgotten, or never read, the impressive verses beginning— "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

As little of an egotist, perhaps, as any great man who ever lived, Shakspeare still possessed the sense of innate greatness, or he would not have been human. While, therefore, we differ in toto with the writer in our estimate of Shakspeare's character, still we must do justice to the beauty of the following lines, with which he closes his notice of him:

"Shakspeare, during his life, never thought of living after death. What now to him is my song of admiration? In admitting all suppositions, in reasoning on the truths or the errors with which the human mind is penetrated or imbued, what were to Shakspeare a renown whose echoes cannot reach him? If a Christian, amidst eternal felicity, he care for the nothingness of this world? If a deist, freed from the

can

clouds of matter-clouds lost in the splendour of God-does he bestow one glance on the grain of sand that he has left? If an atheist, he sleeps, without breathing or awaking, the sleep called death. Nothing then is more vain than glory beyond the tomb-at least, unless it has kept friendship alive-unless it has been useful to virtue, serviceable to distress-and unless it be given us to enjoy in heaven the sense of one consoling, generous, liberating idea, left by us upon earth!" Vol. I. p. 319.

A very rapid sketch of the literature of England, from the time of Shakspeare to that of Milton, is next presented to usour author appearing desirous of hastening to his hero, to a consideration of whom he devotes most of the remainder of his work. Upon the second volume we cannot dwell so much at length as we have done upon the first, on account of the space we have already occupied, though there is in it an abundance of interesting matter to detain us. To Milton, then, the commonwealth, and Cromwell, let us direct our attention for a short time.

Milton's career is, we suppose, familiar to our readers. We shall not, therefore, present them with any part of Chateaubriand's account, except for the new dress in which he clothes his facts-serving up old things in a style to render them doubly agreeable. With his remarks upon Milton, too, we shall have but little fault to find, our admiration for him being equal to that of our author himself.

Milton traveled on the continent after he had finished his studies, and when he had already distinguished himself by his writings. The beauty of his person and his accomplishments procured him great consideration abroad. He hastened home, however, without visiting Greece, upon news of coming disturbances in his native country. His stand was at once taken -he went for liberty. He did not, indeed, instantly assume an active part in the first movements of the revolution. Domestic duties, and his studies, engrossed him for a while; but when his thoughts were matured, he poured them out unceasingly into the ears of his countrymen. They were the notes of freedom; and they sounded sweetly in the ears of her partisans. The pen, not the sword, fell to his share in the contest.

Johnson, in his rough way, attacks Milton for his temporary inactivity; he even attempts a joke at his expense. Chateaubriand defends him; though not at all at length, nor as ably as he might. Milton's character, however, will survive the assault even of a Johnson.

In Italy, Milton fell in love. The incident is thought to have so sensibly affected his feelings as to have cooled their natural fervour; he is supposed not to have loved any of the three wives he afterwards took to himself as ardently as the Italian VOL. XXI. NO. 41.

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beauty. His first marriage was a strange affair. Our author narrates it thus

"The Earl of Essex having taken Reading in 1643, Milton's father and mother, who had retired to that town, returned to London, and took up their residence with the poet. Milton was then thirty-five years old. One day, he stole away from home wholly unattended. His absence lasted a month, at the expiration of which he returned a married man to that abode which he quitted a bachelor. He had married the eldest daughter of Richard Powell, a justice of the peace, of Forest Hill, near Shotover, in Oxfordshire. Powell had borrowed of Milton's father five hundred pounds, which he never repaid; but he considered that he should settle the account by giving his daughter to the son of his creditor. This match, contracted as clandestinely as an illicit amour, was not less inconstant. Milton did not forsake his wife, like Shakspeare; it was his wife who forsook him. The family of Mary Powell were royalists; whether it was because Mary would not live with a republican, or for some other reason, she returned to her parents. She promised to come back at Michaelmas, but she did not keep her word. Milton wrote letter after letter, but received no reply ; at length he despatched a messenger, who threw away his eloquence and his time. The deserted husband then resolved to repudiate his runaway spouse. In order to extend to other husbands that independence which he asserted for himself, his genius suggested to him to convert a question of personal susceptibility into a question of liberty, and he published his treatise on 'The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce." " Vol. II. pp. 22, 23.

The issue, however, was creditable to both parties.

"In accordance with his principles respecting divorce, Milton solicited the hand of the young and accomplished daughter of a Dr. Davis, but she felt no partiality for the great genius who paid his addresses to her. The poet's wife now bethought herself of him: the Powell family, whose loyalty had cooled in proportion as the royal cause became less prosperous, wished for an accommodation. Milton having called upon a relative named Blackborough, the door of the room suddenly flew open; Mary threw herself in tears at the feet of her husband, and confessed her fault. Milton pardoned the offender. Posterity has profited by a connubial quarrel, for to this adventure we are indebted for that admirable scene between Adam and Eve, in the 10th book of Paradise Lost:

'Soon his heart relented

Tow'rd her, his life so late and sole delight,

Now at his feet submissive in distress!'

"The issue of a romantic marriage, begun in mystery, renewed in tears, was three daughters, and two of these Antigones reopened the pages of antiquity to their blind father.

After the triumph of the parliament, Milton offered an asylum to his wife's family." Vol. II. pp. 27, 28.

The civil war was now raging, and Milton's pen was untiringly at work. Publication after publication issued from the press. Every great act of the king's opponents found an advocate in the poet, while he as energetically attacked the doings of the royalists. Chateaubriand presents a graphic sketch of

Milton, quietly seated at his desk in composition, while all was in commotion around him.

"In 1645, Milton published a collection of the English and Latin poems of his youth. The songs were set to music by Henry Laws, who belonged to the chapel of Charles I.: the voice of the apologist was soon to penetrate to the coffin of the sovereign in the chapel of Windsor.

"Milton's father died; the parents of the poet's wife returned to their own home; and his house, says Phillips, once more became the temple of the muses. At this time, Milton was on the point of being employed as adjutant-general of the troops under Sir William Waller, a general of the presbyterian party, who has left us his memoirs.

"When, in the month of April, 1647, Fairfax and Cromwell had made themselves masters of London, Milton, in order to pursue his studies more quietly, gave up his large establishment in Barbican, and retired to a small house in High Holborn, near which I long resided. It may not be amiss here to repeat an observation which I made at the beginning of this work: A view of literature,' I said, 'apart from the history of nations, would produce a prodigious fallacy: to. hear the successive poets calmly singing their loves and their sheep, you would figure to yourself the uninterrupted existence of the golden age on the earth. . . . . . In every nation, even at the moment of the direst catastrophes, and of the greatest events, there will always be a priest who prays, a poet who sings,' &c.

"We see Milton marry, engage in the study of languages, instruct boys, publish compositions in prose and verse, as if England were enjoying the most profound peace; and yet civil war was kindled, a thousand parties were tearing one another in pieces, and people walked amidst blood and ruins.

"In 1644, the battles of Marstonmoor and Newbury were fought; and the head of the aged Archbishop Laud fell beneath the axe of the executioner. The years 1645 and 1646 beheld the battle of Naseby, the taking of Bristol, the defeat of Montrose, and the retreat of Charles I. to the Scotish army, who delivered up their sovereign to the English for the sum of four hundred thousand pounds.

"The years 1647, 1648, and 1649, were still more tragic. They com prise within their fatal period the rising of the army, the seizure of the king by Joyce, the oppression of the parliament by the soldiery, the second civil war, the escape of the king, his second apprehension, the violent sifting of the parliament, the trial and death of Charles I.

"Let the reader refer to these dates, and place under them successively the works of Milton which I am about to treat of. Milton was probably present as a spectator at the decapitation of his sovereign; he returned home perhaps to write some verses, or to arrange for boys a paragraph of his Latin grammar: Genders are three; masculine, feminine, and neuter.' The fate of empires and of men is of no more account than this in the movement by which societies are carried along.

"In France, too, there were, in 1793, poets who sang of Thyrsis, one of the characters of the Masque, and who were no Miltons; people went to plays, the dramatis personæ of which were honest country folk; shepherds trod the stage, while tragedy ran about the streets. We know that the Terrorists were remarkably mild in their manners; these gentle swains were particularly fond of little children. Fouquier Tinville and his man Sampson, who smelt of blood, amused themselves at night in the theatre, and wept at the delineation of innocent country life." Vol. II. pp. 32-35.