In mournful measures let the music wail—
The pride of Italy is gone! For him
This trying day of joy was all too much:
His race is run. Not to the Capitol
The knolling bell invites him now; his God
Has call'd the glorious spirit to himself—
Be ours to give his body to the tomb.
He had not reach'd those lofty halls, wherein
The laurel should his temples have encircled—
He sank o'erwearied at the Temple door.
Thus then I place the wreath, with which so gladly
I would have deck'd the living poet's head,
In silence on departed Tasso's brow.
Leon. With rich reward the poet lays him down!
In life a Prison, and in death—a Crown!
[The curtain falls.
ON THE FEIGNED MADNESS OF HAMLET.
If it be allowable to entertain towards any writer that partial and affectionate admiration, which, if it does not altogether deny, yet refuses to take cognisance, of any blemish or defect that writer is Shakspeare. From verbal criticism he seems to enjoy an immunity. His faults of style are so obvious, and of a kind so little likely to obtain imitators in the present age, that there appears to be no necessity for dwelling on them. Having once admitted that he has a hasty, headstrong way of entangling a plain meaning in abstruse and elliptical expressions, of huddling and crushing together all kinds of metaphors, with no sort of respect for their delicate fabric; and that he has an obstinate habit of sporting in the strongest conjunctures with riddling conceits—having once settled and allowed all this, which dulness itself could discover, and dulness is least likely to forgive—we care not to have it repeated, but pass on to that endless fund of every species of poetic enjoyment which his works afford. Criticism, moreover, is disarmed by the intimate persuasion we feel, that, in the dramas of Shakspeare, there are many things not his, and which never came there by any legitimate process of authorship. His plays, unpublished and imprinted, were lying for some time amidst others, the property of a theatre; and from this agitated mass they seem to have acquired a certain alluvial deposit, which the detergent care of the critic can never entirely remove. The players and the playwright have made sad commixtures and confusion amongst them. Who can read the play of Julius Cæsar without a conviction that the character of Caesar has received damage at the hands of these gentry? It is out of nature that the same man who drew Cassius and Brutus, and gave to Mark Antony an eloquence surpassing any the Roman forum ever echoed with, should have set down in the same play that pompous and starched puppet, that rodomontade figure, which stalks through it under the name of Julius Cæsar. This portrait of the Dictator, if it were at all like the original, would decide for ever the famous question of the propriety of his assassination. Such a Cæsar assuredly deserved extermination, but hardly by the hand of the noble Brutus. Besides which, some few of Shakspeare's plays were themselves adaptations of old pieces, belonging, like its wardrobe to the theatre for which he was engaged to write, and which, by additions of his own, and touches throughout of his pencil, he seems to have fitted for reproduction. Such is the conjectural account given of Pericles, Titus Andronicus, and some others; and this account, we think, might be extended to some plays of a still higher order than these. There is one which abounds in passages of poetic beauty, which nevertheless, if we might venture to deal in such conjectures, we should pronounce to have been fashioned on the stock or framework of some older piece. In Troilus and Cressida we see remnants, if we are not mistaken, of some previous work.
