to believe that she is faithful; and then Cressida kills herself; and Troilus kills Diomede; and Achilles kills Troilus; and all the Trojans are killed: and the Greeks who remain upon the field are very happy; and Ulysses tells us,

"Now peaceful Order has resumed the reins,

Old Time looks young, and Nature seems renew'd."

Here is a tragedy for you, which "is an imitation of one entire, great, and probable action, not told, but represented; which, by moving us to fear and pity, is conducive to the purging of those two passions in our minds." So Dryden quotes Aristotle; and so, not understanding Aristotle, he takes upon himself to mend Shakspere, (" incom- | parable," as he calls him,) according to the notions of "my friend Mr. Rymer," and of "Bossu, the best of modern critics."

The feeling which the study of Shakspere's 'Troilus and Cressida' slowly but certainly calls forth is that of almost prostration before the marvellous intellect which has produced it. But this is the result of study, as we have said. The play cannot be understood upon a superficial reading: it is full of the most subtle art. We may set aside particular passages, and admire their surpassing eloquence, their profound wisdom; but it is long before the play, as a whole, obtains its proper mastery over the understanding. It is very difficult to define what is the great charm and wonder of its entirety. To us it appears as if the poet, without the slightest particle of presumption, had proposed to himself to look down upon the Homeric heroes from an Olympus of his own. He opens the 'Iliad,' and there he reads of "Achilles' baneful wrath." A little onward he is told of the "high threatening" of "the great cloud-gatherer." The gods of Homer are made up of human passions. But he appears throned upon an eminence, from which he can not only command a perfect view of the game which men play, but, seeing all, become a partisan of none,-perfectly cognizant of all motives, but himself motiveless. And yet the whole representation is true, and it is therefore

genial. He does not stand above men by lowering men. Social life is not made worse than it is, that he who describes it may appear above its ordinary standard. It is not a travestie of Homer or of Nature. The heroic is not lowered by association with the ridiculous. Shakspere's heroes of the 'Iliad' show us very little of the vulgar side of human life, not much even of the familiar; but the result is, that they cease to be heroic. How this is attained is the wonder. It is something to have got rid of the machinery of the gods,-something to have a Thersites eternally despising and despised. But this is not all. The whole tendency of the play,

its incidents, its characterization,-is to lower what the Germans call herodom. Ulrici maintains that "the far-sighted Shakspere most certainly did not mistake as to the beneficial effect which a nearer intimacy with the high culture of antiquity had produced, and would produce, upon the Christian European mind. But he saw the danger of an indiscriminate admiration of this classical antiquity; for he who thus accepted it must necessarily fall to the very lowest station in religion and morality:-as, indeed, if we closely observe the character of the eighteenth century, we see has happened. Out of this prophetic spirit, which penetrated with equal clearness through the darkness of coming centuries and the clouds of a far-distant past, Shakspere wrote this deeply significant satire upon the Homeric herodom. He had no desire to debase the elevated, to deteriorate or make little the great, and still less to attack the poetical worth of Homer, or of heroic poetry in general. But he wished to warn thoroughly against the over-valuation and idolatry of them, to which man so willingly abandons himself. He endeavoured, at the same time, to bring strikingly to view the universal truth, that everything that is merely human, even when it is glorified with the nimbus of a poetic ideality and a mythical past, yet, seen in the bird's-eye perspective of a pure moral ideality, appears very small." All this may seem as super-refinement, in which the critic pretends to see farther than the poet ever saw. But to such an objection

there is a very plain answer. A certain result is produced :—is the result correctly described? If it be so, is that result an effect of principle or an effect of chance? As a proof that it was the effect of principle, we may say that Dryden did not see the principle; and that, not seeing it, he entirely changed the character of the play as a work of art. For example, there is no scene in the drama so entirely in accordance with the principle as that in which Ulysses stirs up the slothful and dogged Achilles into a rivalry with Ajax. It is altogether so Shaksperean in its profundity, it presents such a key to the whole Shaksperean conduct of this wonderful drama,—that we cannot be content merely to refer to it.

Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection;
As when his virtues shining upon others
Heat them, and they retort that heat again
To the first giver.

A chil.
This is not strange, Ulysses.
The beauty that is born here in the face
The bearer knows not, but commends itself
To others' eyes: nor doth the eye itself
(That most pure spirit of sense) 'behold itself,
Not going from itself; but eye to eye op-
posed

Salutes each other with each other's form.
For speculation turns not to itself,

Till it hath travell'd, and is married there Where it may see itself: this is not strange at all.

Ulyss. I do not strain at the position, It is familiar; but at the author's drift: Who, in his circumstance, expressly proves, That no man is the lord of anything (Though in and of him there is much consisting),

Till he communicate his parts to others:
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught
Till he behold them form'd in the applause
Where they are extended; which, like an arch,
reverberates

The voice again; or like a gate of steel,

Fronting the sun, receives and renders back His figure and his heat. I was much rapt in this,

And apprehended here immediately
The unknown Ajax.

Heavens, what a man is there! a very horse; That has he knows not what. Nature, what things there are,

Most abject in regard, and dear in use!
What things again most dear in the esteem,
And poor in worth! Now shall we see to-

morrow

An act that very chance doth throw upon him, Ajax renown'd. O heavens, what some men do, While some men leave to do!

How some men creep in skittish fortune's hall,

Whiles others play the idiots in her eyes!
How one man eats into another's pride,
While pride is feasting in his wantonness!
To see these Grecian lords!-why, even al-
ready

They clap the lubber Ajax on the shoulder,
As if his foot were on brave Hector's breast,
And great Troy shrinking.

Achil. I do believe it; for they pass'd by me As misers do by beggars; neither gave to me Good word, nor look: What, are my deeds forgot?

Ulyss. Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,

A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are
devour'd

As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done: Perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright: To have done, is to
hang

Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. Take the instant

way;

For honour travels in a strait so narrow, Where one but goes abreast: keep then the path;

For emulation hath a thousand sons,
That one by one pursue: If you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by,
And leave you hindmost;-

Or, like a gallant horse fallen in first rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O'errun and trampled on: Then what they do
in present,

For time is like a fashionable host,

And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would

Ay,

Grasps-in the comer: Welcome ever smiles, And farewell goes out sighing. Oh, let not virtue seek

Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,

High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,—

That all, with one consent, praise new-born gawds,

Though they are made and moulded of things past;

And give to dust, that is a little gilt,
More laud than gilt o'er-dusted.

The present eye praises the present object: Then marvel not, thou great and complete man,

That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax;
Since things in motion sooner catch the eye,
Than what not stirs. The cry went once on
thee,

And still it might; and yet it may again,
If thou wouldst not entomb thyself alive,
And case thy reputation in thy tent;
Whose glorious deeds, but in these fields of
late,

Made emulous missions 'mongst the gods themselves,

And drave great Mars to faction.

Now, of this scene Dryden has not a word. This was a part of the "rubbish" which he discarded. But in the place of it he gives us an entirely new scene between Hector and Troilus-" almost half the act." He says, "the occasion of raising it was hinted to me by Mr. Betterton; the contrivance and working of it was my own." The scene, he admits, was an imitation of the famous scene in Julius Caesar' between Brutus and Cassius. And so Dryden transposes the principle of one play into another; destroys the grave irony of 'Troilus and Cressida' by the introduction of the heroic seriousness

heroic to truth and reason. And yet, with all his labour, Dryden could not make the thing consistent. He is compelled to take Shakspere's representation of Ajax, for example. One parallel passage will be sufficient to show how Dryden and Shakspere managed these things:

Famed be thy tutor, and thy parts of nature
Thrice-famed, beyond all erudition:
But he that disciplined thy arms to fight,
Let Mars divide eternity in twain,
And give him half: and, for thy vigour,
Bull-bearing Milo his addition yield
To sinewy Ajax. I will not praise thy wisdom,
Which, like a bourn, a pale, a shore, confines
Thy spacious and dilated parts: Here's Nes-
tor,-

Instructed by the antiquary times,

He must, he is, he cannot but be wise;-
But pardon, father Nestor, were your days
As green as Ajax, and your brain so temper'd,
You should not have the eminence of him,
But be as Ajax."

One of the most extraordinary subtleties of Shakspere's 'Troilus and Cressida' arises out of the circumstance that the real heroic tragedy is found side by side with the ironical heroic. Cassandra, short as the

senting some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII.;" and further, the passage of Shakspere's play in which the "chambers are discharged, being the "entry of the king to the "mask at the cardinal's house," is the same to the letter. But the title which Sir Henry Wotton gives the new play is All is True.' Gifford thinks this sufficient to show that the play represented at the Globe in June, 1613, was not Shakspere's. But other persons call the play so represented Henry VIII.' Howes, in his continuation of Stow's 'Chronicle,' so calls it. He writes some time after the destruction of the Globe, for he adds to his account of the fire, “And the next spring it was new builded in far fairer manner than before." He speaks of the title of the play as a familiar thing:

66

"Such as give

Their money out of hope they may believe,
May here find truth too."

"Gentle hearers, know,

To rank our chosen truth with such a show
As foot and fight is," &c.

To make that only true we now intend."

Boswell has a very ingenious theory that this Prologue had especial reference to another play on the same historical subject, 'When You See Me You Know Me, or the Famous Chronicle History of King Henry the Eighth, &c., by Samuel Rowley,' in which "the incidents in Henry's reign are thrown together in the most confused manner." But, upon the whole, the probability is that the Henry VIII.' of Shakspere, and the 'All is True' described by Wotton, are one and the same play. The next question is, then, whether Wotton was correct in describing the 'Henry VIII.' as a new play. Chalmers, who almost stands alone in his

opinion, maintains that the fact of a play on the subject of Henry VIII. being termed new in 1613 is decisive as to the date of its original production at that time. Malone, on the contrary, conjectures that the 'Henry VIII.' was written in 1601, and revived in 1613, with a new title and prologue, “having lain by some years unacted." This conjecture rests upon no external evidence. We proceed, therefore, to the other division of the subject the evidence of its date which is furnished by the play itself.

In the prophecy of Cranmer in the last scene, the glories of the reign of Elizabeth are carried on to that of her successor, in the following lines:—

"Nor shall this peace sleep with her: But as when

The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir,
As great in admiration as herself;
So shall she leave her blessedness to one,
(When Heaven shall call her from this cloud

of darkness,)

Who, from the sacred ashes of her honour, Shall star-like rise, as great in fame as she was, And so stand fix'd: Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror,

That were the servants to this chosen infant, Shall then be his, and like a vine grow to him; Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, His honour, and the greatness of his name, Shall be, and make new nations: He shall flourish,

And, like a mountain cedar, reach his branches To all the plains about him :-Qur children's children

Shall see this, and bless Heaven."

This passage would appear to be decisive as to the date of the play, by the introduction of these lines:

"Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, His honour, and the greatness of his name, Shall be, and make new nations."

That the colonization of Virginia is here distinctly alluded to is without doubt. The first charter was granted in 1606; the colony was planted in 1607, in which year James Town was built; another charter was given to the colonists in 1612, and a lottery