has been discovered in the Library at Lambeth Palace, showing that the play was represented, September 27, 11631, at the house of John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln; the same great but by no means faultless man who was so harshly treated by Laud, and gave the King such crooked counsel in the case of Strafford, and spent his last years in mute sorrow at the death of his royal master, and had his life written by the wise, witty, good Bishop Hacket.

Some hints for the part of Theseus and Hippolyta appear to have been taken from The Knightes Tale of Chaucer. Chaucer's Legend of Thisbe of Babilon, and Golding's translation of the same story from Ovid, probably furnished the matter for the Interlude. So much as relates to Bottom and his fellows evidently came fresh from nature as she had passed under the Poet's eye. The linking of these clowns in with the ancient tragic tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, so as to draw the latter within the region of modern farce, thus travestying the classic into the grotesque, is not less original than droll. How far it may have expressed the Poet's judgment touching the theatrical doings of his time, perhaps were a question more curious than profitable. The names of Oberon, Titania, and Robin Goodfellow, were made familiar by the surviving relics of Gothic and Druidical mythology; as were also many particulars in their habits, mode of life, and influence in human affairs. Hints and allusions, scattered through many preceding writers, might be produced, showing that the old superstition had been grafted into the body of Christianity, where it had shaped itself into a regular system so as to mingle in the lore of the nursery, and hold an influential place in the popular belief. Some features, or rather some reports of this ancient Fairydom are thus translated into poetry by Chaucer in The Wif of Bathes Tale:

"In olde dayes of the King Artour,

Of which that Bretons speken gret honour,
All was this lond fulfilled of faerie;
The Elf-quene, with hire joly compagnie,

Danced ful oft in many a grene mede.
This was the old opinion as I rede;
I speke of many hundred yeres ago;
But now can no man see non elves mo,
For now the grete charitee and prayeres
Of limitoures and other holy freres,
That serchen every land and every streme
As thikke as motes in the sonne-beme,
This maketh that ther ben no faeries:
For ther as wont to walken was an elf,
Ther walketh now the limitour himself."

But, though Chaucer and others had spoken about the fairy nation, it was for Shakespeare to let them speak for themselves: until he clothed their substances in apt forms, their thoughts in fitting words, they but floated unseen and unheard in the mental atmosphere of his father-land. But for him, we might indeed have heard of them, but not have known them. So that Mr. Hallam is quite right in regarding A Midsummer-Night's Dream as "altogether original in one of the most beautiful conceptions that ever visited the mind of a poet-the fairy machinery. A few before him," he adds, "had dealt, in a vulgar and clumsy manner, with popular superstitions; but the sportive, beneficent, invisible population of air and earth, long since established in the creed of childhood, and of those simple as children, had never for a moment been blended with 'human mortals,' among the personages of the drama." How much Shakespeare did as the friend and savior of those sweet airy frolickers of the past, from the relentless mowings of Time, has been charmingly set forth by a poet of our own day. We allude to Thomas Hood's delightful poem, The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies.

Coleridge says he is "convinced that Shakespeare availed himself of the title of this play in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout." And elsewhere he remarks that "the whole of A Midsummer-Night's Dream is one continued specimen of the dramatized lyrical." These observations, both of which spring out of one and the same idea, undoubtedly hit the true center and

life of the performance; and on no other ground can its merits be rightly estimated. This it is that explains and justifies the distinctive features of the work, such as the constant subordination of the dramatic elements, and the free playing of the action unchecked by the laws and conditions of outward fact and reality. A sort of lawlessness is indeed the very law of the piece: the actual order of things giving place to the spontaneous issues and capricious turnings of the mind; the lofty and the low, the beautiful and the grotesque, the worlds of fancy and of fact, all the strange diversities that enter into "such stuff as dreams are made of," every where running and frisking together, and interchanging their functions and properties: so that the whole seems confused, flitting, shadowy, and indistinct, as fading away in the remoteness and fascination of moonlight. The very scene is laid in a sort of dream-land, called Athens indeed, but only because Athens was the greatest beehive of beautiful visions then known; or rather, it lies in an ideal forest near an ideal Athens,a forest peopled with sportive elves, and sprites, and fairies, feeding on moonlight, and music, and fragrance: a place where nature herself is supernatural; where every thing is idealized, even to the sunbeams and the soil; where the vegetation proceeds by enchantment; and where there is magic in the germination of the seed and secretion of the sap.

Great strength of passion or of volition would obviously be out of place in such a performance: it has room but for love, and beauty, and delight, for whatsoever is most poetical in nature and fancy; and therefore for none but such tranquil stirrings of thought and feeling as may flow out in musical expression: any tuggings of mind or heart, that should ruffle and discompose the smoothnesses of lyrical division, would be quite out of keeping with a dream, especially a midsummer-night's dream, and would be very apt to turn it into something else. The characters, therefore, are appropriately drawn with light, delicate, vanishing ter touches; some of them being dreamy and sentimental, some

gay and frolicsome, and others replete with amusing absurdities, while all are alike dipped in fancy or sprinkled with humor. And for the same reason the tender distresses of unrequited or forsaken love here touch not the moral sense at all, but only at most our human sympathies; for love is represented as but the effect of some visual enchantment, which the king of fairies can undo or suspend, reverse or inspire, at pleasure. The lovers all seem creatures of another mould than ourselves, with barely enough of the fragrance of humanity about them to interest our human feelings, and whose deepest sorrow wears upon its face a flush and play of inward happiness. Even the heroic personages are fitly represented with unheroic aspect: we see them but in their unbendings, when they have doffed their martial robes aside, to lead the train of day-dreamers, and have a nuptial jubilee. In their case great care and art were required, to make the play what it has been censured for being,—that is, to keep the dramatic sufficiently under, and lest the law of a part should override the law of the whole. So, likewise, in the transformation of Bottom and the dotage of Titania, all the resources of fancy were needed, to prevent the unpoetical from getting the upper hand, and thus swamping the genius of the piece. As it is, what words can fitly express the effect with which the extremes of the grotesque and the beautiful are here brought together; and how, in their meeting, each passes into the other without leaving to be itself? What an inward quiet laughing springs up and lubricates the fancy at Bottom's droll confusion of his two natures, when he talks, now as an ass, now as a man, and anon as a mixture of both, his thoughts running at the same time upon honey-bags and thistles, the charms of music and of good dry oats! Who but another nature could have so interfused the lyrical spirit, not only with, but into and through a series or cluster of the most irregular and fantastical drolleries? But indeed this embracing and kissing of the most ludicrous and the most poetical, the enchantment under which they meet, and the airy, dream-like grace that

hovers over their union, are altogether inimitable and indescribable. In this unparalleled wedlock the very diversity of the elements seems to link them the closer, while this linking in turn heightens that diversity; Titania being thereby drawn on to finer issues of soul, and Bottom to larger expressions of stomach. The union is so very improbable as to seem quite natural: we cannot conceive how any thing but a dream could possibly have married things so contrary; and that they could not have come together save in a dream, is a sort of proof that they were dreamed together.

And so, thoughout, the execution is in strict accordance with the plan: the play, from beginning to end, is a perfect festival of whatsoever dainties and delicacies poetry may command,—a continued revelry and jollification of soul, where the understanding is put asleep that fancy may run riot, and wanton in unrestrained carousal. The bringing together of four parts so dissimilar as those of the Duke and his warrior Bride, of the Athenian ladies and their lovers, of the amateur players and their woodland rehearsal, and of the fairy bickerings and overreaching; and the carrying of them severally to a point where they all meet and blend in lyrical respondence;—all this is done in the same freedom from the rules that govern the drama of character and life. Each Each group of persons is made to parody itself into concert with the others, while the frequent intershootings of fairy influence lift the whole into the softest regions of fancy. At last the Interlude comes in as an amusing burlesque on all that has gone before, as in our troubled dreams we sometimes end with a dream that we have been dreaming, and our perturbations sink to rest in the sweet assurance that they were but the phantoms and unrealities of a busy sleep. Ulrici, -whose criticisms generally appear too something, perhaps too profound, to be of much use,-rightly considers this reciprocal parody the basis and center where the several parts coalesce and round themselves into an organic whole. Yet, as if this vital coherence of all the parts were