acquainted with Plutarch when he wrote his Hamlet, this supposition can no longer be tenable.

We have fixed on the year 1602 rather than 1601, for the era of the composition of our author's play, as it is equally susceptible of the illustration adduced by Mr. Chalmers, allows more scope for the production of the elder drama, and, at the same time, more opportunity to our poet to have become familiar with a comedy which, there is reason to think, from its pedantic style, was never popular, and certainly never was printed.

Timon of Athens is an admirable satire on the folly and ingratitude of mankind; the former exemplified in the thoughtless profusion of Timon, the latter in the conduct of his pretended friends; it is, as Dr. Johnson observes, "a very powerful warning against that ostentatious liberality, which scatters bounty, but confers no benefits, and buys flattery, but not friendship."

But the mighty reach of Shakspeare's mind is in this play more particularly distinguishable in his delineation of the species and causes of misanthropy, and in the management of the delicate shades which diversify its effects on the heart of man. Timon and Apemantus are both misanthropes; but from very different causes, and with very different consequences, and yet they mutually illustrate each other.

The misanthropy of Timon arises from the perversion of what would otherwise have been the foundation of his happiness. He possesses great goodness and benevolence of heart, an ardent love of mankind, a spirit noble, enthusiastic, and confiding, but these are unfortunately directed into wrong channels by the influence of vanity, and the thirst of distinction. Rich in the amplest means of dispensing bounty, he receives, in return, such abundant praise, especially from the least deserving and the most designing, that he becomes intoxicated with adulation, craving it, at length, with the avidity of an appetite, and preferring the applause of the world to the silent approval of his own conscience.

The immediate consequence of this delusion is, that he seeks to bestow only where celebrity is to follow; he does not fly to succour poverty, misfortune, and disease, in their sequestered haunts, but he showers his gifts on poets, painters, warriors, and statesmen, on men of talents or of rank, whose flattery, either from genius or from station, will find an echo in the world. The next result of beneficence thus abused, is that Timon possesses numerous nominal but no real friends, and, when the hour of trial comes, he is, to a man, deserted in his utmost need. It is then, that having no estimate of friendship but what reposed on the characters who have left him bare to the storm, and concluding that the rest of mankind, compared with those whom he had selected, are rather worse than better, he gives loose to all the invective which deceived affection and wounded vanity can suggest; feeling, as it were, an abhorrence of, and an aversion to his species, in proportion to the keenness of his original sensibility, and the agony of his present disappointment..

The inherent goodness of Timon on the one hand, and his avarice of praise and flattery on the other, are vividly brought out through the medium of his servants, and of the Cynic Apemantus. The true criterion, indeed, of the worth of any individual, is best found in the estimation of his household, and we entertain a high sense of the value of Timon's character, from the attachment and fidelity of his dependants. They, in their humble intercourse with their master, have intimately felt the native benevolence of his disposition, and, to the disgrace of those who have revelled in his bounty, are the only sympathizers in his fate. They call to mind his generous virtues :

"Poor honest lord, brought low by his own heart;
Undone by goodness!

is the exclamation of his faithful steward; nor are the inferior domestics less sensible of his worth :

When Flavius visits his master in his seclusion, and with the most disinterested views and the most heart-felt commiseration offers him his wealth and his attendance, Timon starts back with amazement bordering on distraction, afflicted and aghast at the recognition, when too late, of genuine friendship, and selfconvicted of injustice towards his fellow-creatures :

"Had I a steward so true, so just, and now

So comfortable? It almost turns,
My dangerous nature wild." * &c.

Act iv. sc. 3.

If the constitutional goodness of Timon is to be inferred from the conduct of his domestics, the errors which overshadowed it are most distinctly laid open by the unsparing invective of Apemantus. The misanthropy of this character is not based, like Timon's, on the wreck of the noblest feelings of our nature, on the milk of human kindness turned to gall, but springs from the vilest of our passions, from envy, hatred, and malice. He is born a beggar, and his pride is to continue such, while his sole occupation, his pleasure and his choice, is to drag forth the vices, and calumniate the virtues of humanity. For this task he possesses, in the powers of his intellect, the utmost efficiency, and seems, indeed, to have been introduced by the poet for the express purpose of unfolding the conduct of Timon. The two characters, in fact, reciprocally anatomise each other, and with a depth and minuteness which leaves nothing undetected.

The lust of flattery and distinction which burns in the bosom of Timon, finds, even in the height of his prosperity, a sharp, and therefore a wholesome reprover in Apemantus, who tells the Athenian to his face, that he that loves to be flattered, is worthy of the flatterer, at the same time exposing his limitless and illbestowed bounty in the strongest terms; but no good man would choose the hour of adversity and overwhelming distress for a still bitterer torrent of taunts and reproaches, at a period when nothing but additional misery could accrue from the experiment. Such, however, is the object of Apemantus, in his visit to the cave of Timon, and accordingly he experiences the reception which his motives so richly deserve:

"Tim. Why dost thou seek me out?
Apem.
To vex thee.

Tim. Always a villain's office, or a fool's.
Dost please thyself in't?

Apem.
Tim.

Ay.

What! a knave too?"

Act iv. sc. 3.

immediately after which, the unhappy Timon proceeds, with admirable discrimination, to constrast himself and his persecutor; a description which, for strength and severity, as well as truth of censure, has never been exceeded :

"Tim. Thou art a slave, whom Fortune's tender arm With favour never clasp'd; but bred a dog," &c.

Act iv. sc. 3.

In revenge for this correct, but tremendous picture of himself, Apemantus, shortly afterwards, presents Timon with a miniature of his own character, so faithfully condensed, that it comprises, in about a dozen words, the entire history of his life; the indiscriminate generosity of his early, and the extravagant misanthropy, of his latter days:

"The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends."

I conceive that by "dangerous nature" in this passage, is meant a nature, from acute sensibiliy and sudden misfortune, liable to be overpowered, to be thrown off its poize, and to suffer from mental derangement.

The widely different fate of these two characters, is, likewise, decisive of the opposite origin and nature of their misanthropical conduct. Timon that

"monument,

And wonder of good deeds evilly bestow'd,"

dies broken-hearted, a martyr to self-delusion, and to the ingratitude of mankind; whilst Apemantus, wrapped up in constitutional apathy, travels on unscathed, a general and unfeeling railer on the frailty of his species.

25. MEASURE FOR MEASURE: 1603. Mr. Malone's reasons for placing the composition of this play towards the close of 1603, appear to us perfectly unshaken by the arguments which Mr. Chalmers has brought forward for the purpose of referring it to the subsequent year. The validity of the alteration which this gentleman wishes to establish, turns almost altogether on the cogency of the following statement:

"Claudio," he says, "complains of the neglected act being enforced against him.' Isabella laments her being the sister of one Claudio, condemned, on the act of fornication, to lose his head. Now, the act which was thus alluded to, though not with the precision of an Old Bailey solicitor, 'was the statute to restrain all persons from marriage, until their former wives and former husbands be dead,' for which such persons, so offending, were to suffer death, as in cases of felony. It was against this act, then, which did not operate till after the end of the session, on the 7th of July, 1604, that Shakspeare's satire was levelled.'

But this very act, it seems from Mr. Chalmers's reference, was passed in the second year of James the First, and how, therefore, could Claudio's complaint of a "neglected act being enforced against him," apply to a statute thus recently issued, and whose operation had only just commenced? The objection is insurmountable, and Claudio's allusion was most assuredly to the act formerly passed on this subject in the first year of Edward the Sixth.

The primary source of the fable of Measure for Measure, is to be traced to the fifth novel of the eighth decade of the Ecatommithi of Giraldi Cinthio, which was repeated in the tragic histories of Belle Forest; but Shakspeare's immediate original was the play of "Promos and Cassandra" of George Whetstone, published in 1578, and of which the argument, as given by the author, has been annexed by Mr. Steevens to Shakspeare's production. On this elder drama, and on Shakspeare's improvements on its plot, the following pertinent remarks have been lately made by Mr. Dunlop:

"The crime of the brother," he observes, speaking of Whetstone's comedy, "is softened into seduction nor is he actually executed for his transgression, as a felon's head is presented in place of the one required by the magistrate. The king being complained to, orders the magistrate's head to be struck off, and the sister begs his life, even before she knows that her brother is safe. Shakspeare has adopted the alteration in the brother's crime, and the substitution of the felon's head. The preservation of the brother's life by this device might have been turned to advantage, as affording a ground for the intercession of his sister; but Isabella pleads for the life of Angelo before she knows her brother is safe, and when she is bound to him by no tie, as the Duke does not order him to marry Isabella. From his own imagination Shakspeare bad added the character of Mariana, Angelo's forsaken mistress, who saves the honour of the heroine by being substituted in her place. Isabella, indeed, had refused, even at her brother's intercession, to give up her virtue to preserve his life. This is an improvement on the incidents of the novel, as it impercep. tibly diminishes our sense of the atrocity of Angelo, and adds dignity to the character of the heroine. The secret superintendence, too, of the Duke over the whole transaction, has a good effect, and increases our pleasure in the detection of the villain. In the fear of Angelo, lest the brother should take revenge for so receiving a dishonoured life, with ransom of such shame,' Shakspeare has given a motive to conduct which, in his prototypes, is attributed to wanton cruelty.”

Of Measure for Measure, independent of the comic characters which afford a rich fund of entertainment, the great charm springs from the lovely example of female excellence in the person of Isabella. Piety, spotless purity, tenderness