must confess, for my own pleasure, I would prove him to have been the wisest man, as well as the greatest poet; otherwise I should stop short, and repeat those two lines from Milton's epitaph on him

"Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,

What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name ?”

In addition to what I have said of the great study requisite to the formation of Shakespeare's works, the probability that, when a lad, he attempted to adapt Seneca's tragedies, or that he imitated them in some way; the certainty we have, that, among his first dramatic efforts, he altered the plays of his fellow poets; together with what I have endeavoured to make evident the continual cultivation of his mind afterwards; I bring forward a remarkable passage from Ben Jonson's poem on his memory. Assuredly he spoke from an intimate acquaintance with his "beloved" friend's persevering energies in arriving at excellence in art :

"Yet must I not give nature all: thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion. And, that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muse's anvil; turn the same,
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel, he may gain a scorn;

For a good poet's made, as well as born;

And such wert thou. Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue ; even so the race

Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned and true-filed lines;

In each of which he seems to shake a lance,

As brandished at the eyes of ignorance."

This is real praise, from one who well knew him personally. Nothing has been more injurious to the character of our poet than the repeated assertions, in spite of common sense, that he owed every thing to nature. Mediocrity and idleness may be consoled by such a doctrine, but at the wasting expense of the object of their affected admiration. By slow gradations, by practice, and by laborious study, he arrived at perfection. Let no human being imagine there is a shorter road to excellence, however astonishing may be his natural powers. Genius may be combined with idleness, and indeed with folly.

The same argument applies to his knowledge of the human heart. This knowledge, at once general and particular, is such, that, if we examine into any one of his characters, and attend not only to the broad effect of colour, but to the minutest touches, we shall be surprised to discover that we become, in our investigation, more and more intimately acquainted with the individual. Whether we turn to Lear or his court-fool, to Juliet or her nurse, to Othello or Falstaff, to Lady Macbeth or Beatrice, men or women, old or young, of whatever degree, influenced by whatever situation, mood, or purpose, each is discriminatingly and accurately delineated, each gives utterance to thoughts, feelings, and passions, precisely in the manner he or she must do under the circumstances of the scene, yet all speaking in the poet's own golden

language, and giving us, as it were, unconsciously to themselves, the highest delight and instruction. Many authors have described characters in an admirable manner; but who, Shakespeare excepted, has made them describe themselves, without apparent effort, and to perfection? How he could identify himself with hundreds of human beings, each distinct from the rest; how he could utterly possess their hearts and minds, and be entire master of the hidden springs of their actions, and of their varied mode of expression, is unimaginable to us his inferiors. This This power is the Gordian knot which some would fain cut asunder by saying, that his knowledge of human nature was intuitive, and that his genius was essentially dramatic, beyond his own control. But many, with me, having no faith in intuition beyond our mere instincts, no faith in continual, fortuitous, self-impelled excellence, are forced to ascribe that power to a far simpler cause,—an immense acquired knowledge of mankind, together with a profound study of his art, assisted and strengthened by his capacious, retentive, and clear-reasoning mind, or, if you will, his genius.

We are told by Dr. Johnson," He that will understand Shakespeare, must not be content to study him in the closet; he must look for his meaning sometimes among the sports of the field, and sometimes among the manufactures of the shop." True, he was unwilling to omit any thing interesting to humanity; and had science existed in his days as in our's, instead of the very word being scarcely known in its modern sense, he might have still more puzzled the Doctor by his scientific allusions. We find that,

far as his observation reached, he was a good naturalist; from "the shard-borne beetle, with his drowsy hums," and the "guest of summer, the temple-haunting martlett," down to

"The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun, And with him rises weeping;

*

daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's

eyes,

Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength."

A hunting squire would by no means despise the conversation about hounds in the Induction to the Taming of the Shrew, nor the description which Theseus gives of his pack in Midsummer Night's Dream; a Newmarket jockey of his day, for since then the breeding of horses has been changed, would have listened with applause to the exact portraiture of a fine-bred horse in the poem of Venus and Adonis ; and a sailor, whatever Dr. Johnson's informant might have said to the contrary, can find no fault with the Boatswain's orders throughout the opening scene of the Tempest. To lay to, in a main-sail, under a heavy gale,-if that was the objection,-has been often practised, though not of late years, in the British navy. Nay, men of science might discover more hints than I can in his works relating to their pursuits. A professor of anatomy has noticed to his students that Shakespeare must inevitably have been acquainted with the peculiar mechanism, the ginglimoid structure,

of the human knee, or he could not have written this line,

"And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee."

But, however that assertion may be received, I perceive he was certainly indebted to a scientific discovery of his time, not known to have then existed, or to his own practical researches into the laws of nature, in Perdita's account of "streaked gilliflowers;" plainly implying that he was fully aware of the art, said to be discovered only within these few years, which is called manipulation or caprification by botanists. From this art we may obtain countless varieties of flowers and fruits. Stevens has a blind, sneering

note on the passage; but had it been earlier understood, the vegetable world might have been, by this time, wonderfully enriched