mishap, and to play the attorney in a cause that made so much against herself? But Silla, altogether desirous to please her master, cared nothing at all to offend herself, followed his business with so good a will as if it had been in her own preferment.

66

Julina, now having many times taken the gaze of this young youth Silvio, perceiving him to be of such excellent perfect grace, was so entangled with the often sight of this sweet temptation, that she fell into as great a liking with the man as the master was with herself: and on a time, Silvio being sent from his master with a message to the lady Julina, as he began very earnestly to solicit in his master's behalf, Julina interrupting him in his tale, said, 'Silvio, it is enough that you have said for your master; from henceforth either speak for yourself, or say nothing at all.'

*

*

*

*

"And now for a time leaving matters depending as you have heard, it fell out that the right Silvio indeed (whom you have heard spoken of before, the brother of Silla) was come to his father's court, into the isle of Cypres, where, understanding that his sister was departed in manner as you have heard, conjectured that the very occasion did proceed of some liking had between Pedro, her man (that was missing with her), and herself; but Silvio, who loved his sister as dearly as his own life, and the rather for that she was his natural sister both by father and mother; so the one of them was so like the other in countenance and favour that there was no man able to discern the one from the other by their faces, saving by their apparel, the one being a man, the other a woman.

"Silvio therefore vowed to his father not only to seek out his sister Silla, but also to revenge the villany which he conceived in Pedro for the carrying away of his sister; and thus departing, having travelled through many cities and towns without hearing any manner of news of those he went to seek for, at the last he arrived at Constantinople, where, as he was walking in an evening for his own recreation on a pleasant green parade without the walls of the city, he fortuned to meet with the lady Julina, who likewise had been abroad to take the air; and as she suddenly cast her eyes upon Silvio, thinking him to be her old acquaintance, by reason they were so like one another, as you have heard before, said unto him, 'I pray you let me have a little talk with you, seeing I have so luckily met you in this place.'

"Silvio, wondering to hear himself so rightly named, being but a stranger not of above two days' continuance in the city, very courteously came towards her, desirous to hear what she would say."

The rest may be imagined.

Mr. Collier informs us, in his 'Farther Particulars,' that, after vainly searching for eight years, he in 1839 met with the Italian play of the Inganni,' mentioned in the barrister's Diary. This play, as Mr. Collier thinks, was known to Shakspere; and certainly there is some resemblance between its plot and that of 'Twelfth Night.' The differences, however, are so considerable, that the parallel would scarcely be worth following out. We have to add that Mr. Hunter mentions that he has traced, in an Italian play called the 'Ingannati' (not the 'Inganni' of Manningham), the foundation of the serious part of 'Twelfth Night.'

There is something to our minds very precious in that memorial of Shakspere which is preserved in the little Table-book of the Student of the Middle Temple: "Feb. 2, 1601 [2]. At our feast we had a play called 'Twelve night or what What a you will. scene do these few plain words call up before us! The Christmas festivities have lingered on till Candlemas. The Lord of Misrule has resigned his sceptre; the Fox and the Cat have been hunted round the hall; the Masters of the Revels have sung their songs; the drums are silent which lent their noisy chorus to the Marshal's proclamations; and Sir Francis Flatterer and Sir Randle Rackabite have passed into the ranks of ordinary men*. But there is still a feast; and after the dinner a play; and that play Shakspere's Twelfth Night.' And the actual roof under which the happy company of benchers, and barristers, and students first listened to that joyous and exhilarating play, full of the truest and most beautiful humanities, especially fitted for a season of cordial mirthfulness, is still standing; and we may walk into that stately hall and think,-Here Shakspere's 'Twelfth Night' was acted in the Christmas of 1601; and *Consult Dugdale's Origines Juridiciales.'

here its exquisite poetry first fell upon the ear of some secluded scholar, and was to him as a fragrant flower blooming amidst the arid sands of his Bracton and his Fleta; and here its gentle satire upon the vain and the foolish penetrated into the natural heart of some grave and formal dispenser of justice, and made him look with tolerance, if not with sympathy, upon the mistakes of less grave and formal fellow-men; and here its evergushing spirit of enjoyment,-of fun without malice, of wit without grossness, of humour without extravagance,-taught the swaggering, roaring, overgrown boy, miscalled student, that there were higher sources of mirth than affrays in Fleet Street, or drunkenness in Whitefriars. Venerable Hall of the Middle Temple, thou art to our eyes more stately and more to be admired since we looked upon that entry in the Table-book of John Manningham! The Globe has perished, and so has the Blackfriars. The works of the poet who made the names of these frail buildings immortal need no associations to recommend them; but it is yet pleasant to know that there is one locality remaining where a play of Shakspere was listened to by his contemporaries; and that play, 'Twelfth Night.'

Accepting, though somewhat doubtingly, the statement of the commentators that 'Twelfth Night' was produced as late as 1614, Schlegel says, "If this was really the last work of Shakspere, as is affirmed, he must have enjoyed to the last the same youthfulness of mind, and have carried with him to the grave the whole fulness of his talents." ""* There is something very agreeable in this theory; but we can hardly lament that the foundation upon which it rests has been utterly destroyed. Shakspere did, indeed, carry "with him to the grave the whole fulness of his talents," but they were talents, perhaps not of a higher order, but certainly employed upon loftier subjects, than those which were called out by the delicious comedies of the Shakspere of forty. His "youthfulness of mind" too, even at this middle period of his life, is something

* Lectures on Dramatic Literature,' Black's translation, vol. ii. p. 175.

very different from the honeyed luxuriance of his spring-time-more subjected to his intellectual penetration into the hidden springs of human action-more regulated by the artistical skill of blending the poetical with the comic, so that in fact they are not presented as opposite principles constrained to appear in a patchwork union, but are essentially one and the same creation of the highest imaginative power. We are told that of 'Twelfth Night' the scenes in which Malvolio, and Sir Toby, and Sir Andrew appear are Shakspere's own. The Duke, and Olivia, and Viola, and Sebastian, belong to some one else, it is said, because they existed, before he evoked them from their hiding-places, in the rude outlines of storybooks without poetry, and comedies without wit. Honoured be the memories of Bandello and Barnaby Rich, not so much for their own work as for the happy accident by which they saved some popular tradition from oblivion, for a Shakspere to make his own for all ages! Honoured be the learned or unlearned authors of the 'Inganni' and the Ingannati,' if they suggested to him that their shadowy representations of a wandering brother and sister, coming through mistakes and crosses to love and happiness, had in them dramatic capabilities such as he could deal with!, Honoured be they, as we would honour the man, were his name recorded, who set the palette of Raphael or made Paganini's violin! Whether a writer invents, in the commonly received meaning of invention, that is, whether his incidents and characters be spick-and-span new ;—or whether he borrows, using the same ordinary phraseology, his incidents and characters from tradition, or history, or written legends, -he is not a poet unless his materials are I worked up into a perfect and consiste whole: and if the poetry be not in him, it matters little whether he raises his fabric "all out of his own head," as children say, or adopts a bit here and a bit there, and pieces them together with a bit of his own,

for his house will not stand; it is built upon the sands. Now it is this penetration of his own imaginative power in and through all his materials which renders it of little

vanity of the character in reference to his situation. But if we laugh at Malvolio we are not to laugh ill-naturedly, for the poet has conducted all the mischief against him in a spirit in which there is no real malice at the bottom of the fun. Sir Toby is a most genuine character,-one given to strong potations and boisterous merriment; but with a humour about him perfectly irresistible. His abandon to the instant opportunity of laughing at and with others is something so thoroughly English, that we are not surprised the poet gave him an English name. And like all genuine humorists Sir Toby must have his butt. What a trio is presented in that glorious scene of the second act, where the two Knights and the Clown

"make the welkin dance;"-the humorist, the fool, and the philosopher!-for Sir Andrew is the fool, and the Clown is the philosopher. We hold the Clown's epilogue song to be the most philosophical Clown's song upon record; and a treatise might be written upon its wisdom. It is the history of a life, from the condition of "a little tiny boy," through "man's estate," to decaying age-" when I came unto my bed;" and the conclusion is, that what is true of the individual is true of the species, and what was of yesterday was of generations long past away-for

THIS comedy was first printed in the folio collection of 1623, and there had been no previous claim to the right of printing it made by any entry in the registers of the Stationers' Company. We are very much inclined to think, from the state of the original text, that the editors of the first folio possessed no copy but that from which they printed. Some of the sentences throughout the play are so involved that they have very little the appearance of being taken from a copy which had been used by the actors; and in two cases a word is found in the text (prenzie) which could never have been given upon the stage, and appears to have been inserted by the printer in despair of deciphering the author's manuscript. On the other hand, the metrical arrangement, which has been called "rough, redundant, and irregular,” was strictly copied, we have no doubt, from the author's original; for a printer does not mistake the beginnings and ends of blank-verse lines, although little attention might be paid to such matters in a prompter's book. The peculiar structure

of the versification in this comedy was, we are satisfied, the result of the author's system; and, from the integrity with which it has been preserved in the first edition, we believe that the original manuscript passed directly through the hands of the printer, who made the best of it without any reference to other copies.

We cannot trace that any allusion to 'Measure for Measure' is to be found in the works of Shakspere's contemporaries. There is, indeed, a passage in a poem published in 1607 which conveys the same idea as a passage in ‘Measure for Measure :'— "And like as when some sudden extasy

Seizeth the nature of a sickly man; When he's discern'd to swoon, straight by and by

Folk to his help confusedly have ran, And seeking with their art to fetch him back, So many throng, that he the air doth lack." (Myrrha, the Mother of Adonis,' by William Barksted.) The following is the parallel passage in the comedy :

So play the foolish throngs with one that swoons; Come all to help him, and so stop the air By which he should revive." Malone says of this coincidence, "That 'Measure for Measure' was written before 1607 may be fairly concluded from the following passage in a poem published in that year, which we have good ground to believe was copied from a similar thought in this play, as the author, at the end of his piece, professes a personal regard for Shakspeare, and highly praises his 'Venus and Adonis.'"* The other arguments of Malone as to the date of this play, which he assigns to 1603, have reference to public circumstances. Chalmers contends for the date of 1604.

Conjectures such as these are too often laborious trifling. But, for once, they are pretty nearly borne out by incontrovertible testimony. The perseverance of Mr. Peter Cunningham has been rewarded by discovering in the Audit Office certain passages in the original Office Books of the Masters and Yeomen of the Revels, which fix the date of the representation at Court of some of Shakspere's plays. The Office Book shows that 'Measure for Measure' was presented at Court by the King's Players in 1604.

The Promos and Cassandra' of George Whetstone, printed in 1578, but not acted, was, there can be no doubt, the foundation upon which Shakspere built his 'Measure for Measure.' Whetstone tells us in a subsequent work that he constructed his play upon a novel of Giraldi Cinthio, of which he gives us a translation; observing, "This history, for rareness thereof, is livelily set out in a comedy by the reporter of the work, but yet never presented upon stage."+

The performance of Whetstone, as might be expected in a drama of that date, is feeble and monotonous, not informed with any real dramatic power, drawling or bombastic in its tragic parts, extravagant in its comic. It is scarcely necessary to offer to our readers any parallel examples of the modes in which Whetstone and Shakspere have treated the same incidents.

“Look, the unfolding star calls up the shepherd." In the midst of the most business-like and familiar directions occur these eight words of the highest poetry. By a touch almost magical Shakspere takes us in an instant out of that dark prison, where we have been surrounded with crime and suffering, to make us see the morning star bright over the hills, and hear the tinkle of the sheep-bell in the folds, and picture the shepherd bidding the flock go forth to pasture, before the sun has lighted up the dewy lawns. In the same way, throughout this very extraordinary drama, in which the whole world is represented as one great prison-house, full of passion, and ignorance, and sorrow, we have glimpses every now and then of something beyond, where there shall be no alternations of mildness and severity, but a condition of equal justice, serene as the valley under "the unfolding star," and about to rejoice in the dayspring.

The little passage which we have quoted is one amongst the numberless poetical gems which are scattered up and down this comedy with a profusion such as only belongs to one poet. It has been said of Shakspere, "He is the text for the moralist and the philosopher. His bright wit is cut out into little stars ;' his solid masses of knowledge are meted out in morsels and proverbs; and, thus distributed, there is scarcely a corner which he does not illuminate, or a cottage which he does not enrich."* This is by no means his highest praise, and his 'Beauties' give a very imperfect idea of his attributes; but certainly no other man ever wrote single sentences that to such an extent have now become mixed up with the habits of thought of millions of human beings. This play appears to us especially glittering with these "little stars." We cannot open a scene in which we do not encounter some passage that has set us thinking at some moment of our lives. Of such distinct passages, which the memory never parts from, the following will be recognised by all as familiar friends:"Heaven doth with us as we with torches do; Not light them for themselves: for if our virtues

*Retrospective Review,' vol. vii. p. 381.