marvellous conclusion which thus stands up like a precipice without a mountain-range to back it. This want of judgment in our early dramatists is often a moral even more than an intellectual deficiency. It proceeds from too great a love of the startling, and too slight a sense of the becoming, the fitting, and the orderly. these, while the whole of his contemporaries | In Ford's work we see little of the Prinand immediate successors constitute the cess, and care little for her; nor is there other. The rest, with all their differences anything in her character to suggest the of species, are still generically one, while Shakspeare is a genus in himself. Each of Shakspeare's greater plays is, in the highest sense of the word, a poem as well as a play. It possesses an interior unity (little as Shakspeare thought of what are technically called the unities), a unity proceeding from the one great idea that created the whole, the predominant sentiment that inspired it, and the exquisite subordination of the details to the general effect. This unity, piercing at once and comprehensive, belongs alone to great creative genius, and Shakspeare's contemporaries were without it. Ben Jonson, with all his learning and classical predilections, lacked it as much as Marlow or Webster. Shakspeare worked "from within;" the process was one of growth, and the unity latent in the parent germ manifested itself in every leaf and spray of the developed plant. This is the secret of that marvellous judgment which equalled his imagination itself. Starting with a genuine idea, he shrank instinctively from whatever obscured it, whether by disproportion or by incongruity. The other dramatists worked "from without," and mechanically. They found their materials in life and books, and with great ability, but without a true inspiration, they combined them. In multitudes of cases the result is a painful discord; in few is it a complete harmony. Another difference between Shakspeare and his contemporaries is the amount of extravagance and rant in the latter. Strength was the great quality our early dramatists valued. When it came to them in the form of real passion, they knew how to exhibit it in perfection, intermixing the most delicate with the most vigorous touches. In the absence of real passion they were often content with its coarse imitation. Giovanni, in a too celebrated play, makes his appearance at the revel with the heart of Annabella, whom he has just slain, on the point of his dagger! Yet this outrage against all genuine passion, as well as against decency, almost immediately follows a scene of the truest pathos. The same exaggerated love, either of strength itself, or of bombast mimicking strength, prevented Shakspeare's contemporaries from even aiming at his profound conception of character. Their own characters were formed on a different principle, and one for their coarser purposes more ef fective. To a great extent they are but The reader who turns to their Plays in a abstractions, vividly described as are the complete edition, after reading the splendid circumstances among which they are placed. fragments detached from them in Lamb's In The Broken Heart, Bassanes is not a Specimens, will often think the finished jealous man so much as jealousy itself emwork more fragmentary than the fragments. bodied, while Shirley's Traitor is not an exAgain and again, the finest scenes in our ample of fearless perfidy, but its impersoearly drama lose half their value from the nation. In the comedies the characters are inappropriateness of their position. Take, often not even representations of qualities; for instance, Ford's best play, The Broken they are but the embodiment of some perHeart: nothing can exceed in suppressed sonal whim or transient folly of society. passion the concluding scene, in which the Thus, in Ben Jonson's Epicone, the chief Princess, receiving secretly and successive character, Morose, might be defined as a ly the tidings of the death of her father, nervous gentleman's dislike to noise in the of her friend, and of her lover with a Spar-street.' How different is this from Shaktan's fortitude, replies indifferently, keep-speare! Before his mighty mind there ever ing up the court pageant almost to the mo- stood the great idea of humanity; and each ment of her death. Shakspeare would have of his characters is worked out of that one cast the whole play so as to have foreshadowed the dreadful catastrophe; and in approaching it we should have felt as men do when their boat is swept towards the rapids. *The reader who refers to Coleridge's Lectures on the English Drama, and to those by Schlegel, will find the most philosophic comparative estimate of Shakspeare and his contemporaries. manifold type. In shaping it, as much is withdrawn from the universal as is necessary to mould the particular, but the universal remains. This is the cause of the infinite light and shadow of Shakspeare's characters; in them the passions are influences working in conjunction with all else that belongs to the moral being, not tempests blowing on them from without. Characters or a second and foul plot is joined to a thus delineated are so softened and rounded sound one, like a dead body bound to a livoff by imperceptible gradations, that they can only be effective in the hand of a genius who combines with the force of nature her variety, grace, and subtlety. Those only can appreciate the strength shown by Shakspeare, who appreciate also the profundity, the completeness, the many-sidedness, and the refinement, which he never condescended to sacrifice in order to gain the appearance of strength. The most important point of diversity remains to be noticed -the moral sense. The true greatness of Shakspeare is by nothing so proved as by his superiority to his contemporaries in this respect. Shakspeare does not bring out his moral in didactic vein; but the great moral that always belongs to Nature herself belongs to him who best knew how to exhibit her. In him there are no moral confusions, no substitution of rhetorical sentiment for just feeling, no palliation of vice, no simulations of virtue. The dramatic form of composition by necessity gives a great prominence to the passions, and must also keep in the background that region of the supernatural and the infinite in the immediate presence of which the passions are cowed. But from that remote and awful background no doubtful flashes are sent to bear witness that this life, with all its tumults, is circled by a vaster one. There are occasionally moral blemishes in Shakspeare's plots, and there is not seldom a license of language to be seriously regretted; but this last is far less than in the other writers of his time, nor do we know how much of it is owing to the interpolations of those players whom he commands to deliver "no more than is set down for them." ing one. Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess is rich in poetry from which Milton borrowed in his Comus: yet it is disgraced by whole scenes of ribaldry; and in the Maid's Tragedy the grief of the forsaken Aspatia is similarly dishonoured. Massinger offends less than most of the other dramatists, yet in his Fatal Dowry vice almost rejects the plea of temptation; and even his Virgin Martyr is deformed by the excrescence of scenes which were reverently omitted in a recent and separate edition of that play. Such offences have commonly, when not condoned by the false charity of indifference, been regarded only from the moral point of view. The boundless injury inflicted by them on literature has hardly been adverted to. The Greeks were so well aware of the relations between virtue and the liberal arts, that even when the morals of Paganism were at the lowest, a high moral standard was maintained in serious literature. The indirect losses sustained by our early dramatists, in consequence of their defects in this matter, were even worse than the direct ones. They found in coarseness and license so easy a means of amusing the audience, that they were rarely forced to elicit their own deeper powers. Strength to excite, and ribaldry to amuse, sufficed, and they too often spared themselves the trouble of addressing the finer affectious, the reason, or the moral sense of their audience. Their works consequently, in spite of some splendid exceptions, lacked those passages of quiet beauty, of pathos, of philosophy, of imaginative grace, and of moral power, which are our principal inducements to return to a book when the interest of story is It is far otherwise with almost all Shak-exhausted. The same fault blunted the best speare's contemporaries. When, some halfcentury ago, our earlier dramatic writers emerged once more from obscurity, the public thought that all their offences ought to be condoned to make up for the neglect under which they had long lain. But the interests of literature itself require that in such cases justice should be done. The sins of our dramatists in the reign of Elizabeth and James the First were not exceptional, nor were they but superficial blemishes. The plays of Charles the Second's time were so far worse, that they possessed no compensating merits; but their positive offences could hardly prove more fatal both to the interests of poetry and of society. In multitudes of our early plays the whole plot turns upon vice in its grossest forms, faculties of the early dramatists, and allowed many others to lie fallow. The moral sense thus obscured, man was known to them in his animal relations chiefly. To them the passions were but appetites intellectualized and directed to exclusive objects. They knew little of the connection of the passions with the affections and the moral sense; in other words, all in them that is ennobling, and all that subjects itself to law they ignored. Hence those causeless changes from evil to good, or from passion to passion, which evince so superficial a knowledge of human nature. Hence that lack of gradation, and those movements, fierce and lawless as the movements of beasts. They knew man socially, but did not also know him in his personality, and therefore their knowledge was empirical. The inner scope of man's faculties had escaped them. In man, for example, the faculty of Observation does not act separately, but in subordination to that interior wisdom which alone teaches him how to observe; - they, on the other hand, frequently delineate it as though the observing eye were that of a dog, not that of a man. The faculty of Reflection, similarly, as they delineate it, works apart from that mens melior which alone sustains it with the true food of reason, and inspires its nobler aims. In the absence of spiritual insight, society as delineated by them was often a thing gregarious rather than human. Imagination emptied her urns to bathe and irradiate the wastes of the senses; the Understanding directed those actions the root of which was in the appetites; but the inmost spirit of the spectator starved amid abundance, for the same hand which pampered the body had "sent leanness into the soul." That these early dramatists were men of great intellects and great energies cannot be denied. They possessed all gifts, had they but known how to use them aright; and their genius could have failed in no attempt, had it cared to subject itself to the true and the good. But the magination which works for the senses loses its spiritual heritage, and sells its birthright for a mess of pottage. a thing not merely superficialy described, To return to some of our earlier remarks: the speciality of Mr. Taylor's genius appears to us to consist in its uniting the masculine strength of our early drama with the richer variety, the thoughtfulness, and the purer sentiment of our later poetry. Others among our modern poets have carried farther, some one, some another merit of that poetry. His characteristic consists in his being a connecting link between the two periods. It would be curious to compare the different modes in which the poets of different periods have gone through their poetic education. In our own time it has been the fashion to say that Nature is the only true instructress, and that the mountains and forests are the colleges in which her sons must graduate. Our earlier dramatists generally began with the universities, and then precipitated themselves upon the society of the metropolis, as exhibited at the theatres, where they often combined a great deal of undigested learning with not a little of debauchery. In such a career there was more to develop the intelligence than to discipline that part of our being in which the intellect and the moral sense blend; that part of it from which the most permanent poetry proceeds. We can imagine that, at least for some departments of poetry, the training of professional, public, or official life, may be as auspicious as either of the other modes. It occupies the mind with persons at once and with things, and thus disciplines at the same time the faculties of observation and reflection. For dramatic poetry, which at heart is ever a serious thing, we suspect it to be, in its place, the best school; and it has the advantage also of being a safe, in proportion as it is an arduous one. Imagination cannot be created even by mountains and forests; and where it exists, its products will be great and healthy in proportion to the vigor of the whole moral being to which it is Their offences were those of their age, for they did not rise superior to it. Our age has offences of a different kind, and our literature reflects them. Their offences would not be tolerated in our day; but, while acknowledging the moral improvement evinced by modern literature, we have yet almost always to lament an inferiority, on the part of our recent poets, as regards intellectual keenness and energy. That interiority of itself has disqualified them for the higher drama. Ben Jonson said of a young competitor, My son Cartwright writes all like a man." Among our modern dramatic aspirants some have written like women, and some like philosophers, but few like men. Mr. Taylor is an exception. His genius is characterized by robust strength, and the drama is plainly its native region. We know of nothing in our earlier dramatists more manly and vigorous than many passages in his writings, such as, to refer to the plays not included in our criticism, the last scene in Edwin the Fair, or that in which the dying Van den Bosch addresses the downcast Burghers after his defeat. His characters are real characters. In ideality they seem to us sometimes deficient, but never in reality; and they are THIRD SERIES LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXII. 1462. wedded; for high poetry is the offspring, not of the imagination only, but of the whole moral being. The relation in which Mr. Taylor stands to our other modern poets must be very imperfectly understood without an acquaintance with his minor poems, in which his resemblance to them is chiefly to be found. With the exception of the exquisite lyrics scattered through their plays, the minor poems of our early dramatists are less known than they deserve to be. As might have been expected, they are for the most part narrative. In Mr. Taylor's, the meditative vein predominates. He has given us fewer than we could wish for; but these have a character of selectness, as if they had been drawn from a larger store. The longest is called the Eve of the Conquest. The night before the battle of Hastings, Harold sends to a neighbouring convent for his daughter Edith; and, while the army slumbers around them, relates to her the chief incidents in his life, commanding her to record them, and thus vindicate his fame : "His eye was cold and cruel, yet at times Yet was he not devoid of courtly arts, Was fire which, whether by cold ashes screen'd, Or lambent flames that lick'd whom at a word They might devour, was unextinguish'd still."- Vol. iii. p. 214. His rightful tribute, not his end, or aim, Where pride is the poet affirms that freedom cannot be, except in name:— Of rank heroic, 'tis to bear unmoved, But worse, darts Launch'd by the country he had served This with a free unclouded spirit pure, nown: This is the hero's compliment and crown; This miss'd, one struggle had been wanting still, One glorious triumph of the heroic will, The predominant characteristic, however, of Mr. Taylor's minor poems is a certain meditative pathos. They have something in them of Wordsworth; but the thoughts are less discursive and less philosophical; something also of Southey, but the texture is finer and firmer. In the conciseness of their diction lies chiefly the difference between them and such of our modern poetry as they most resemble. In some pieces, as in Lago Varese, descriptive poetry is blended with personal interest; the lovely scene there described seems to be impersonated in the youthful "native of the clime," who forms the centre of the picture, and mitigates its pensiveness, though she cannot remove it. The Lago Lugano, written in a stanza wholly original, is likewise a descriptive poem; but it gradually rises into a strain of statesmanlike thought, in which the "moral liberty" of light and humble hearts is contrasted with the civil liberty" of For Independence walks Whilst Pride in tremor stalks." Two Ways of Life is a dramatic scene, in which the descriptive and the meditative vein are blended with the personal; and the comlife monastic are discussed—with as much parative merits of the life domestic and the impartiality as can be expected from two lovers. Ernesto is a love poem replete with power and pathos. It has no events, but the two characters it describes are finely discriminated :— Thoughtfully by the side Ernesto sate Of her whom, in his earlier youth, with heart |