France, led on by the injured

with greater fierceness than ever. Warwick, comes forward in support of Margaret to attack England, distracted with domestic troubles, on her own soil. So completely has the aspect of affairs changed with the loss of intrinsic virtue and integrity; so deeply is England corrupted without hope or prospect of immediate deliverance. Her best and noblest sons have fallen, and none remain to supply their places; the wicked abound more and more, and every where gain ascendancy. In such periods of convulsion, the sons are usually more evil and corrupt than their sires. This truth is fully confirmed by the children of Henry and York, and by the younger Clifford and Buckingham. Darker clouds gather around the horizon, while Henry, driven at first to flight, and then in prison, resigns himself to prayer and meditation. And what is the subject of his thoughts? He calls himself "A man at least, for less he should not be," a king-"whose crown is called content." He is ready to do, and humbly yields himself to, whatever God wills; he sees into the future with a prophet's eye, and dies asking forgiveness for himself and his murderer. In death the storm which had spent itself on his troubled life clears off. His last moments bespeak a mind strong in its victory over self, and the renunciation of all earthly interests to which by the sufferings of life he had attained.

It is this profound Christian truth that the third part of this trilogy unfolds before our eye. In times like those which are here depicted no one is the complete master of his own movements, while the soil totters beneath his feet. He cannot escape the contagion which infects the whole community. In a period of such disorder, it is only some mighty and heaven-sent spirit that can restore peace; while the heavenly deliverer is absent, the evil must rage until it has exhausted or destroyed itself. Having brought ruin upon himself chiefly by his own weakness and inactivity, he becomes, by the way in which he meets his fate, a pattern of noble resignation. In such trials and emergencies, the man who does not feel a divine commission inciting him to action, does better to suffer than to act; he must receive the times as a divine visitation, and dispose himself in humble hope to suffering and to patience. By means of them he is to raise himself above all that is earthly-by submitting to affliction, as a just visitation

on his inability to act with moral firmness, amid the general corruption which has mixed together right and wrong, good and evil, in indistinguishable confusion. Who can presume to decide whether the right was on the side of York or Lancaster? Both were equally in the wrong, and all who sided with one or the other partook of this injustice. It is not occasionally only that such cases are to be met with in history-they are of daily occurrence, especially where parties, civil war, and rebellion abound. For contending factions must ever be both in the wrong, inasmuch as they can never come into collision without injury and without doing violence both to Church and State,-which are absolutely superior to any interest of party,-and consequently without setting themselves loose from the moral constitution of human society. The wider the quarrel spreads, the more rapidly does it whirl around with it the whole of life: so that the doo uoi Tov σry becomes a moral impossibility, and the less forward ought the individual to be in looking to himself for delivery; but he must resign himself the more implicitly to history, and look to God's guiding hand to loose the tangled knot, and pass judgment upon all.

It was even because she was a stranger to such humility, that, after a brief success, Margaret proved the ruin of herself, her husband, and her son. While the young Prince and the youthful Rutland commit themselves with forward rashness to the tearing stream of history, which they have never before tried, a just retribution overtakes their presumption, and the beardless boys are swallowed up by the mighty torrent. York, because he refused to be content in a private station, fell beneath the cruel hands of his enemies, and soon after him, the king paid the penalty of the guilt which he incurred, by not at once resigning a crown for which he possessed neither a title nor a qualification. The kingmaker, Warwick, is doomed to witness the frustration of all his pains and exertions, because in proud presumption he believed himself called to play the judge with those from whom he ought naturally to have awaited his own sentence. An early death overtakes Clifford, Oxford, and Somerset, for venturing to choose a side where both parties were equally culpable, and between whom right and wrong fluctuated undecided. Because Edward the Fourth was unable to restrain himself in a position difficult even to any one every

way qualified to restore order to the distracted state, and because he undertook a task beyond his powers, he is quickly driven from his throne; and, although restored to it again, we learn from his brother's (Richard) words, that he was unfitted to retain it long. Lastly, at the close of " Henry the Sixth" we see the same fate hovering over the heads of Lady Grey and her family, who have allowed themselves to be tempted to assume a place in history which belonged neither to them nor their lineage, and for which, besides, they possessed not the necessary qualifications. Thus, in all the several parts of this drama, we have the same idea reflected-the same law, that is, the same view of history, which, in this third part, forms the modification of the ground-idea of the whole trilogy; around this centre all adjusts itself into an organic whole. At the same time, at its close, Richard comes forward conspicuously into the foreground. He, the fearfully consistent villain-that has neither pity, love, nor fear-ordained to be an executioner, nature's abortion-stands forth in full vigour and freshness-the dregs of the antidote of the poisoned period, in order to close the last act of the grand tragedy.

It will not be unprofitable to take another survey from the present point of the whole edifice, whose structure we have been describing. In "Henry the Sixth," civil war is depicted as the natural consequence of an original disturbance of the due order of history, and of the wide-spread corruption of morals to which it led. This grand idea is the ground-work of the whole, and is conceived in the spirit of a truly christian view of history. The three parts in the next place exhibit the principal laws and stages of the development of such a state of things. In the first part we see how history once corrupted overthrows what is truly noble in itself, but which, however, are themselves touched with the general colours of the age, while at the same time we discover how, in such times, the great and pure are ill understood, and unable to keep themselves entirely from contamination. The second stage of this corrupt state of things is exhibited in the second part. The complication grows gradually into an undistinguishable chaos, in which right and wrong are inseparably blended together, and consequently the evil and the good, or, to speak more correctly, the more and less wicked, are involved in one common ruin.

Arrived at this height, it demands that men in general, abstaining from all interference, should resign themselves to the guidance of those to whose hands God has committed the restoration of right and order; every unauthorised proceeding is punished as a sinful presumption, while the humble and meek are purified and amended by suffering, until at last death exalts them above all earthly desires. This idea forms the grand thought of the third part.

Our observations on "Richard the Third," the fifth act of the grand drama, will be brief. The significance of this particular piece follows at once from our previous remarks, while the much admired character of Richard has been so abundantly discussed, criticised, and reviewed, that it is difficult to advance any new remark. I must therefore leave it to the reader's own judgment to cull the best from the host of critics and commentators. Even Hazlitt, who after Coleridge is the best among the aesthetical critics of England, does but analyse and illustrate the character of Richard, or speak of its able representation by the great actor Kean. On this point I would merely observe, that a single character, however extraordinary, and however well conceived and ably executed, does not make a dramatic composition. Characterisation is but a single function of dramatic poetry; and that, neither the highest nor the most difficult. It stands in the same relation to the whole that a portrait does to an historical painting. In the latter, while each figure singly ought to be full of individual reality, it must nevertheless derive its full significance from the place it holds in the general composition, and from its reference to the others, and consequently it is the mutual action of the individuals on each other, and their conjoint working in producing the represented action, that first give to the painting an historical character. The case is exactly the same in the drama as indeed in life itself. It is when viewed in this light that "Richard the Third" appears to me defective. The words "I am myself alone," is the magic pass-word that admits us at once into the very secret of his character, and of the whole drama, where, as in actual history, he stands absolutely alone. All the other personages, mostly women and children,-or subordinates, shrinking in weakness before the might of the kingly majesty which en

shrouds Richard,-are no match for him. The crushing power of his tyranny, the energy of an unmitigated selfishness and evil nature richly endowed with intellectual gifts, and with wit and eloquence, have no counterpart in the piece. On the one side are energy and power, on the other weakness and suffering. The principle of action and reaction, so powerful in real life and history, is thrust entirely into the back-ground; and it is not until the fifth act that the tyrant meets a formidable opponent in Richmond. On this account the piece appears to be deficient in true dramatic vividness; as compared with others of Shakspeare's dramas, the action drags on, we cannot say advances, slowly and sluggishly, and all the incidents possess a dull uniform character; they are all alike the results of the same oppressive tyranny which invariably gains its end by the same instruments and the same

means.

But on the one hand it should be remembered, that immobility and sameness, unnatural heaping of all the weights into one scale, want of organic interaction and co-operation between the body and the several parts, and consequently the greatest corruption in the political organisation of society, constitute the very character of that form of tyranny in which an age of sufferings, like that of "Henry the Sixth," necessarily closes. But now the elucidation of the essence of tyranny is the historical' import of the present drama, and the poetical element of the ground-idea is in this, as in all others of Shakspeare's pieces, with singular tact associated with it. On the other hand, therefore, it is not to be denied, that this artistic defect was the price with which the poet was forced to purchase the opportunity of depicting the ground idea of his piece with greater force, depth, and truth. Tyranny is the historical phase of selfishness, and consequently of evil, in its highest possible consummation. A single ego arrogates to himself the power of the collective mind and energy; an individual, in spite of his finiteness, makes himself a whole nation; indeed humanity itself, and its supreme ruling power. This is the interpretation of Richard's words, "I am myself alone," with which the tyrant from his birth announces himself, and which reveals also his perfect consciousness of his true nature. Richard knows himself to be a tyrant; he knows himself and is willing