there were plenty to be found in the older plays. Gosson, in 1581, thus writes:"Sometimes you shall see nothing but the adventures of an amorous knight, passing from country to country for the love of his lady, encountering many a terrible monster, made of brown paper, and at his return is so wonderfully changed that he cannot be known but by some posy in his tablet, or by a broken ring, or a handkerchief, or a piece of a cockle-shell." Sir Philip Sidney ridicules the appearance of "a hideous monster, with fire and smoke." Much older theatres

than the Globe were furnished with their thunder and lightning. In 1572 John Izarde, according to an entry in the accounts of the revels at court, was paid for a device for "counterfeiting thunder and lightning."* It is as likely that thrones descended in other plays besides 'The Tempest,' as it is certain that in "The Tempest' Juno descended with a classical fitness of which Jonson has given us many similar examples in his own masks. We can see nothing in these circumstances to connect the date of 'The Tempest' with that of Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour.'

The third point upon which Mr. Hunter relies for fixing the date of 'The Tempest,' as of 1596, is deduced from the passage in the third act where Gonzalo laughs at the

stories of "men whose heads stood in their breasts." Raleigh told this story, in his account of his voyage to Guiana, in 1595. Shakspere makes Othello, not in a boasting or lying spirit, but with the confiding belief that belonged to his own high nature, tell Desdemona of

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders." Would Mr. Hunter contend that this second notice of "men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders" fixes the date of 'Othello,' as well as that of 'The Tempest,' in 1596? Such circumstances are, as we believe, of the very slightest value. The argument may be put ingeniously and learnedly, as Mr. Hunter puts it; or it may be rendered ludicrous, as Chalmers renders it. What, for example,

*Collier, Annals of the Stage,' vol. iii. p. 370.

"Me seemeth that what in those nations we see by experience doth not only exceed all the pictures wherewith licentious poesy hath proudly embellished the golden age, and all her quaint inventions to feign a happy condition of man, but also the conception and desire of philosophy. They could not imagine a genuitie so pure and simple as we see it by experience; nor ever believe our society might be maintained with so little art and human combination. It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrates, nor of politic superiority; no use of service, of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no dividences; no occupation, but idle; no respect of

kindred, but common; no apparel, but natural; no manuring of lands; no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon, were never heard amongst them. How dissonant would he find his imaginary commonwealth from this perfection!" This extract establishes beyond all possible doubt that the lines of Gonzalo,

"I' the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things," &c.

were founded upon Montaigne, and upon Florio's translation. That translation was not published before 1603. But portions of it had been seen in manuscript, says Mr. Hunter. Sir William Cornwallis mentions in his 'Essays' that "divers of his pieces I have seen translated," and he describes Florio as the translator. The 'Essays' of Cornwallis were not printed till 1600; but they, also, had been seen in manuscript;

which is scarcely necessary to say is put an end to by the certainty that the play existed in 1611. In such minute inquiries, all assuming that poetry is to be dealt with by the same laws as chronology, or geography, or any other exact branch of knowledge, there can be nothing but perpetual mistake, and contradiction, and false inference. Chalmers, in some respects acute enough, has, through the indulgence of these propensities for making poetry literal, fallen into the mistake of imagining that Bermuda was the scene of "The Tempest.' Mr. Hunter says, "No editor of Shakspeare has ever gone so far as to represent the island of Bermuda as actually the scene of this play;" but he adds, "Chalmers has given some encouragement to this very prevalent mistake." Encouragement? He says, in his 'Apology,' and repeats the passage in his rare tract*, “Our maker | showed great judgment in causing, by enchantment, the king's ship to be wrecked on the still-vex'd Bermoothes." Again, "Stephano became king of the still-vex'd Bermoothes." Lastly, in the Another Account," If it be asked what circumstance it was which induced our dramatist to think of Bermudas, in 1613, as the scene of his comedy, the answer must be that the Bermudas, which had been considered, ever since the publication, in 1596, of Sir Walter Raleigh's description of Guiana, as a 'hellish sea for thunder, lightning, and storms,' was first planted, in 1612, by a ship called the Plough, from the Thames, which carried out a colony of a hundred and sixty persons." The nonsense of this notion is self-evident. If the Bermudas were the scene, Ariel must have outdone himself to convey "the rest of the fleet" over the Atlantic, to place them "upon the Mediterranean flote ;" and, on the contrary, he would have been a mere human carrier if he had been called up from one "deep nook" of the island "to fetch dew" from some other part. This will not quite fit. And so we must resort to another geographical system. Mr. Hunter has discovered "another island," which he thus introduces:-"I must do the old critics the justice to say that, till this discovery (such I

*Another Account of the Incidents,' &c., 1815.

may call it), no island, as far as I know, had a better claim to be regarded as the island of Prospero than Bermuda." That island is Lampedusa. "Did we not know," he continues, "how much still remains to be done in the criticism of these plays, it would be scarcely credible that no one seems to have thought of tracing the line of Alonso's track, or of speculating, with the map before him, on the island on which Prospero and Miranda may be supposed to have been cast." Lampedusa is the island: "It lies midway between Malta and the African coast;" "in its dimensions Lampedusa is what we may imagine Prospero's island to have been ; in circuit thirteen miles and a half ;"—it is "situated in a stormy sea; "—it is " a deserted island;" it has the reputation of "being enchanted." Can anything be more decisive? "What I contend for is the absolute claim of Lampedusa to have been the island in the poet's mind when he drew the scenes of this drama." The matter, according to Mr. Hunter, is beyond all doubt. "In the rocks of Lampedusa there are hollows;"Caliban is stied in the "hard rock;" in Lampedusa there was a hermit's cell-"this cell is surely the origin of the cell of Prospero :" Caliban's employment was collecting firewood;—" Malta is supplied with firewood from Lampedusa." Mr. Hunter asks his friend "whether you would think me presumptuous in requiring that in future editions of these plays there should be, in the accustomed place, at the foot of the dramatis personæ, the words

'SCENE, LAMPEDUSA.'” We have not so determined the scene. We believe that the poet had no locality whatever in his mind, just as he had no notion of any particular storm. Tempests and enchanted islands are of the oldest materials of poetry. Mr. Hunter says Shakspere had Ariosto's description of a storm in his mind. Who, we may ask, suggested to Ariosto his description? Has any one fixed the date of Ariosto's storm? Has not the poet described the poet's office ?

"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.'

There is a very curious story told by Warton, of poor Collins informing him, during his mental aberration, that he had seen a romance which contained the story of The Tempest.'

"I was informed by the late Mr. Collins, of Chichester, that Shakspeare's Tempest,' for which no origin is yet assigned, was founded on a romance called 'Amelia and Isabella,' printed in Italian, Spanish, French, and English, in 1588. But, though this information has not proved true on examination, a useful conclusion may be drawn from it, that Shakspeare's story is somewhere to be found in an Italian novel; at least, that the story preceded Shakspeare. Mr. Collins had searched this subject with no less fidelity than judgment and industry; but, his memory failing in his last calamitous indisposition, he probably gave me the name of one novel for another. I remember he added a circumstance which may lead to a discovery, that the principal character of the romance answering to Shakspere's 'Prospero' was a chemical necromancer, who had bound a spirit like Ariel to obey his call and perform his services."

Mr. Thoms, in a very interesting paper on the Early English and German Dramas,'* has given, from Tieck, an account of certain early productions of English dramatists which were translated into German about the year 1600. We cannot here enter into the very curious question whether an English company performed English plays in Germany at that period; but it is quite certain that some of our earliest dramas were either translated or adapted for the German stage at this early period. Jacob Ayrer, a notary of Nürnburg, was the author of thirty

*New Monthly Magazine,' January 1, 1841.

"The origin of the plot of "The Tempest" is for the present a Shakspearean mystery,' are the words of our friend Mr. Hunter, in his learned and interesting dissertation upon that play. That mystery, however, I consider as solved,--Tieck appears to entertain no doubt upon the subject, and I hope to bring the matter before you in such a manner as will satisfy you of the correctness of Tieck's views in this respect. But to the point. Shakspeare unquestionably derived his idea of "The Tempest' from an earlier drama, now not known to exist, but of which a German version is preserved in Ayrer's play, entitled 'Die Schöne Sidea' (The Beautiful Sidea); and the proof of this fact is to be found in the points of resemblance between the two plays, which are far too striking and peculiar to be the result of accident.

"It is true that the scene in which Ayrer's play is laid, and the names of the personages, differ from those of The Tempest;' but the main incidents of the two plays are all but identically the same. For instance, in the German drama, Prince Ludolph and Prince Leudegast supply the places of Prospero and Alonso. Ludolph, like Prospero, is a magician, and like him has an only daughter, Sidea-the Miranda of The Tempest-and an attendant spirit, Runcifal, who, though not strictly resembling either Ariel or Caliban, may well be considered as the primary type which suggested to the nimble fancy of our great dramatist those strongly yet admirably contrasted beings. Shortly after the commencement of the play, Ludolph, having been vanquished by his rival, and with his daughter Sidea driven into a forest, rebukes her for complaining of their change of fortune, and then summons his spirit Runcifal to learn from him their future destiny, and prospects of revenge. Runcifal, who is, like Ariel, somewhat 'moody,' announces to Ludolph that the son of his enemy will shortly become his prisoner. After a comic episode, most probably introduced by the German, we see Prince

Leudegast, with his son Engelbrecht—the Fer

dinand of 'The Tempest-and the councillors, hunting in the same forest; when Engelbrecht

so successful both in tragedy and comedy, that he could move an Heraclitus to laughter, and a Democritus to tears.' ”*

'I can here disarm thee with this stick,
And make thy weapon drop,'

so Ludolph, with his wand, keeps their swords in their scabbards, paralyses Engelbrecht, and makes him confess his

'Nerves are in their infancy again,

And have no vigour in them,'

So much has been written on 'The Tempest,' and so unnecessary is it for us to analyse the plot or dwell on the charms of the poetry, that we shall here content ourselves with presenting our readers with some brief extracts, having reference to the principal characters, translated from the 'Shaksperes Schauspiele erläutert' of Franz Horn. "In Prospero we have a delineation of

"The resemblance between this scene and the parallel scene in 'The Tempest' is rendered still more striking in a late part of the play, when Sidea, moved by pity for the labours of Engelbrecht, in carrying logs,.declares to him,

'I am your wife, if you will marry me,' an event which, in the end, is happily brought about, and leads to the reconciliation of their parents, the rival princes."

It appears not the least extraordinary circumstance in this extraordinary question of literary history, that Ayrer did not translate some of Shakspere's own works, particularly those which existed in printed copies. Shakspere, according to Eschenburg, was not known in Germany, as far as can be collected from any mention in books, till nearly the close of the 17th century.—

"The first German author who has given a thought to Shakspere is perhaps Morhof, whose 'Instructions in the German Language' was first printed in 1682. Towards the end of the fourth chapter, On the Poetry of the English,' he is merely named, and Morhof acknowledges that he had himself seen nothing of his, or of Beaumont and Fletcher's. Not very long afterwards, Benthem, our poet, mentions him in his State of the English Schools and Churches,' in chap. xix., among the leading literary characters of England. But all he says of him, and that perhaps only for the first time in the second edition, is the following, which is droll enough: 'William Shakspeare was born at Stratford in Warwickshire; his learning was very little, and therefore it is the more a matter of wonder that he should be a very excellent poet. He had an

gether a just prince, not thoroughly a just man; but he had the disposition to be both. His soul thirsted after knowledge; his mind, sincere in itself, after love; and his fancy, after the secrets of nature: but he forgot, what a prince should least of all forget, that, upon this moving earth, superior acquirements, in order to stand firmly, must be exercised carefully; that the world is full of enemies who can only be subdued by a watchful power and prudence, and that in certain situations the armour ought never to be put off. Thus it became easy for his nearest relation, his brother, with the help of a powerful neighbouring king who could not resist the offered but unjustifiable advantage, to depose him from his dukedom. But as the pure morals of the prince, although they were perhaps but lazily exercised in behalf of his subjects, had nevertheless acquired their love, and the usurper not daring to make an attack on the lives of the fallen, Prospero saved himself, his daughter, and a part of his magical books, upon a desert island. Here he becomes, what, in its highest sense, he had not yet been, a father and prince. His knowledge extends. Nature listens to him, perhaps because he learned to know and love her more inwardly. Zephyrlike spirits, full of a tender frolicsome humour, and rude earth-born gnomes, are compelled to serve him. The whole island is full of wonders, but only such as the fancy willingly receives, of sounds and songs, of merry helpers and comical tormentors; and

Johan Joachim Eschenburg, über W. Shakspeare,' new edit., Zürich, 1806, p. 497.