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"I was not much afeard: for once, or twice,
I was about to speak; and tell him plainly,
The self-same sun that shines upon his court
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but
Looks on alike.-Will 't please you, sir, be gone?
[to FLORIZEL.
I told you what would come of this: 'Beseech you,
Of your own state take care: this dream of mine,
Being now awake, I 'll queen it no inch farther,
But milk my ewes, and weep."

This is something higher than the sentiment of a "queen of curds and cream."

In the novel we have no trace of the interruption by the father of the princely lover in the disguise of a guest at the shepherd's cottage. Dorastus and Fawnia flee from the country without the knowledge of the king. The ship in which they embark is thrown by a storm upon the coast of Bohemia. Messengers are despatched in search of the lovers; and they arrive in Bohemia with the request of Egistus that the companions in the flight of Dorastus shall be put to death. The secret of Fawnia's birth is discovered by the shepherd; and her father recognises her. But the previous circumstances exhibit as much grossness of conception on the part of. the novelist, as the different management of the catastrophe shows the matchless skill and taste of the dramatist. We forgive Leontes for his early folly and wickedness; for during sixteen years has his remorse been bitter and his affection constant. The pathos of the following passage is truly Shaksperian:

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The appropriateness of the title of the Winter's Tale' has been prettily illustrated by Ulrici:—

"From the point of view taken in this drama, life appears like a singular and serene, even while terrifying, winter's tale, related by the flickering light of the fire in a rough boisterous night, in still and homelike trustiness, by an old grandmother to a listening circle of children and grandchildren, while the warm, secure, and happy feeling of the assembly mixes itself with a sense of the fear and the dread of the related adventures and the cold wretched night without. But this arises only through the secret veil which lies over the power of chance, and which is here spread over the whole. It appears serene, because everywhere glimmers through this veil the bright joyful light of a futurity leading all to good; because we continually feel that the unhealthy darkness of the present will be again thrown off even through an equally obscure inward necessity."

COSTUME.

THIS Comedy is so thoroughly taken out of the region of the literal that it would be worse than idle to talk of its costume. When the stage-manager shall be able to reconcile the contradictions, chronological and geographical, with which it abounds, he may decide whether the characters should wear the dress of the ancient or the modern world, and whether the architectural scenes should partake most of the Grecian style of the times of the Delphic oracle, or of the Italian in the more familiar days of Julio Romano. We cannot assist him in this difficulty. It may be sufficient for the reader of this delicious play to know that he is purposely taken out of the empire of the real;-to wander in some poetical sphere where Bohemia is but a name for a wild country upon the sea, and the oracular voices of the pagan world are heard amidst the merriment of "Whitsun pastorals" and the solemnities of "Christian burial;" where the " Emperor of Russia" represents some dim conception of a mighty monarch of far-off lands; and " that rare Italian master, Julio Romano," stands as the abstract personification of excellence in art. It is quite impossible to imagine that he who, when it was necessary to be precise, as in the Roman plays, has painted manners with a truth and exactness which have left at an immeasurable distance such imitations of ancient manners as the learned Ben Jonson has produced, that he should have perplexed this play with such anomalies through ignorance or even carelessness. There can be no doubt that the most accomplished scholars amongst our early dramatists, when dealing with the legendary and the romantic, purposely committed these anachronisms. Greene, as we have shown, of whose scholarship his friends boasted, makes a ship sail from Bohemia in the way that Shakspere makes a ship wrecked upon a Bohemian coast. When Jonson, therefore, in his celebrated

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conversation with Drummond of Hawthornden, said, "Shakspere wanted art, and sometimes sense, for in one of his plays he brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where is no sea near by a hundred miles," he committed the unfairness of imputing to Shakspere the fault, if fault it be, which he knew to be the common property of the romantic drama. Gifford, in a note this upon "No one in his Life of Jonson,' says, passage ever read the play without noticing the absurdity,' as Dr. Johnson calls it; yet for this simple truism, for this casual remark in the freedom of conversation, Jonson is held up to the indignation of the world, as if the blunder was invisible to all but himself." We take no part in the stupid attempt of Shakspere's commentators to show that Jonson treated his great contemporary with a paltry jealousy; but we object to Jonson, in the instance before us, talking of Shakspere wanting "sense," as we object to Gifford speaking of the anachronism as a "blunder." It is absurd to imagine that Shakspere did not know better. Mr. Collier has quoted a passage from Taylor, the water-poet, who published his 'Journey to Prague,' in which the honest waterman laughs at an alderman who "catches me by the goll, demanding if Bohemia be a great town, whether there be any meat in it, and whether the last fleet of ships be arrived there." Mr. Collier infers that Taylor "ridicules a vulgar error of the kind" committed by Shakspere. We rather think that he meant to ridicule very gross ignorance generally; and we leave our readers to take their choice of placing Greene and Shakspere in the same class with Taylor's" Gregory Gandergoose, an Alderman of Gotham," or of believing that a confusion of time and place was considered (whether justly is not here the question) a proper characteristic of the legendary drama-such as 'A Winter's Tale.'

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SCENE I.-Sicilia. An Antechamber in Leontes' Palace.

Enter CAMILLO and ARCHIDAMUS.

Arch. If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia, on the like occasion whereon my services are now on foot, you shall see, as I have said, great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia.

Cam. I think, this coming summer, the king of Sicilia means to pay Bohemia the visitation which he justly owes him.

Arch. Wherein our entertainment shall shame us we will be justified in our loves: for, indeed,—

Cam. 'Beseech you,

Arch. Verily, I speak it in the freedom of my knowledge: we cannot with such magnificence-in so rare-I know not what to say. We will give you sleepy drinks, that your senses, unintelligent of our insufficience, may, though they cannot praise us, as little accuse us.

Cam. You pay a great deal too dear for what's given freely.

Arch. Believe me, I speak as my understanding instructs. me, and as mine honesty puts it to utterance.

Cam. Sicilia cannot show himself over-kind to Bohemia. They were trained together in their childhoods; and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection which cannot choose but branch now. Since their more mature dignities, and royal necessities, made separation of their society, their encounters, though not personal, have been royally attorneyed, with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies; that they have seemed to be together, though absent; shook hands, as over a vast; a and embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed winds. The heavens continue their loves!

Arch. I think there is not in the world either malice, or matter, to alter it. You have an unspeakable comfort of your young prince Mamillius; it is a gentleman of the greatest promise that ever came into my note.

Cam. I very well agree with you in the hopes of him: It is a gallant child; one that, indeed, physics the subject, makes old hearts fresh; they that went on crutches ere he was born, desire yet their life to see him a man.

Arch. Would they else be content to die?

Cam. Yes; if there were no other excuse why they should desire to live.

Arch. If the king had no son they would desire to live on crutches till he had one. [Exeunt.

a Vast. So the folio of 1623. That of 1632 reads vast sea. In Pericles we have the line,

"Thou God of this great vast, rebuke the surges." In the text vast probably has the meaning of great space.

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