meaning of the author's delineation, will earnestly desire to see more portraits for the same gallery. Those who regard the book as a mere pleasant serial to suit the public taste, will perhaps prefer a new field for the selection of the principal character of the play, on a future occasion. We confess to have implicit confidence in both the head and heart of Mr. Thackeray. The notions of the first are liable to change with public or private opinion; the second has its fixed laws and sentiments. We have, moreover, sufficient interest in the theme touched with so successful a hand, to hope that Colonel Newcome may be followed by a series of equally prominent types of Anglo-Indian social life, albeit confined to the home limits. We have had the cavalry officer, a type of gallantry nobly confirmed by recent events on Persian soil; there still remain three military branches from which to select. Then we have every variety of staff officer, also politicals, magistrates, collectors, and governors, from both civil and military services; and why should omission be made of the uncovenanted? The material for selection is abundant, and let us beg that the ladies may not be forgotten.

ART. VII.-KING LEAR.

The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare. The Text carefully revised, with Notes, by S. W. SINGER. 10 Vols. London; 1856.

THE story of King Lear, although probably familiar to few, save in the play of Shakespeare, was a very popular one with our early writers; it is found in ballads, dramas, romances, and chronicles. Whether we are indebted for it to fable or history, must ever remain a doubt; the very general acceptation of the tale strongly favours the supposition that, however altered and embellished by successive narrators, the main incident was a well known and received historical fact.* The episode of Gloster

"The deepest and the sublimest tragic composition, King Lear, was a story which already existed in tradition as a matter of popular belief and interest, before Shakespeare made it familiar to the sympathy of all succeeding generations of mankind."-P. B. Shelley's Preface to the Cenci.

and his sons is more modern, and in all likelihood was borrowed from Sir P. Sidney; but as our inquiry is limited to the elucidation of the character of the king in Shakespeare's tragedy, it is unnecessary to investigate the sources whence he derived his subordinate dramatis personce. Certain it is that far less material than was ready to his hand, would have sufficed our dramatist from which to construct his play; for it is somewhat remarkable that prodigal as he was with the treasures of his imagination, he seldom entirely invented a plot, and never when he could find a suitable one already existing.*

To justly characterise this wonderful creation, and yet avoid the beaten path of eulogy, would require a new language, and an apprehension of the beautiful scarcely inferior to that of the poet himself. Indefinite praise merely serves to prove a disproportion betwixt the feeling and the capacity for expressing it. The nearer a work of art attains to ideal perfection, the more difficult does it become to discriminate in what peculiar features it surpasses other productions. How imperceptible are the gradations from mere cleverness to high genius, yet how vast the abyss that divides them!

We have no adequate standard by which to estimate the plays of Shakespeare, he is so far above all others; and if what Montaigne says be true," that it is easier to write a poem than to understand one," we are not likely very soon to supply the want. Despite popular editions and "splendid revivals," Shakespeare still is caviare to the million, and but for scenic effects and dazzling trappings would scarcely hold the stage. He is not familiar in their mouths as household words, at once to charm the refined, and please the uncultivated mind, has been the lot of few

*The only plot invented by Shakespeare is that of the Tempest; Midsummer's Night's Dream may perhaps be added.

† In Pope's time the same state of things prevailed; in describing the Coronation in Henry VIII. he writes :

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Pageants on pageants, in long order drawn,

Peers, heralds, bishops, ermine, gold, and lawn ;

The champion too! and to complete the jest,
Old Edward's armour beams on Cibber's breast."

Nor at all times with the House of Lords, since on one occasion Lord Brougham had to explain that

"Caroused

Potations pottle deep,"

was an innocent quotation from Shakespeare.

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Shakespeare and Cervantes appear popular, only because they satisfy the many with strong emotions and gay images, and delude them with a superficial intelligibility, while the deeper sense, and an infinity of delicate allusions, remain hidden from vulgar readers or spectators.”—A. W. V. Schlegel.

False criticism of Shakespeare.

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authors, and is perhaps, in any considerable degree, unattainable. Modern times have witnessed no example of this universal fame, nor probably have past ages left us records of any closer approach to it than that reached by Tasso and Ariosto.* Yet Lord Byron tells us,

"In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more."

The critics and commentators on Shakespeare are seldom content to take his plays as they are-his characters for what they profess themselves, and to judge of both by their poetic and dramatic excellence alone; they must drag his heroes and heroines before a conventional tribunal of morals and manners, and acquit or condemn them by laws to which they are not amenable. Even Coleridge has not escaped this tendency, and devotes his longest note on our play to reprobate Gloster's want of delicacy in his frank avowal of Edmund's parentage; to which levity and its attendant ill-effects he would, in a great measure, ascribe the subsequent villany of the base-born! Schlegel, whose admirable lectures have done so much in England as well as in Germany for the more comprehensive appreciation of Shakespeare, falls into a similar error. He remarks, in reference to the characters of this play, their faint belief in Providence, as heathens may be supposed to have." We do not think the play warrants this, but if it does, how unconsciously he elevates the virtue of the virtuous! He acknowledges "the heavenly beauty of soul of Cordelia"would it be heightened by a belief in future rewards? In verity no other writer could successfully have hazarded so many characters so dangerously approaching on moral excellence;-for, however beautiful perfection may appear, as viewed in the reveries of lovers, or in the dreams of philosophers, it is a very unmarketable commodity with the poet and the novelist. The instant that we abstract all human frailty, we forfeit all human sympathy; a dash of sin, error, or weakness, is the mildest alloy of humanity; and if we would paint mortals, our colours must be toned down with one or more of these ingredients.†

In the first scene, the key-note of the play is struck; the impetuosity of the king, untempered by reason or experience,

* A contemporary of Ariosto writes: "There is no man of learning, no mechanic, no lad, no girl, no old man, who are satisfied to read the Orlando Furioso once."

†The interest of that excellent novel, "Ten Thousand a Year," is impaired by the disregard of this. The violent contrast of character between the Aubreys and Titmouse, is almost fatal to the former; we feel that such immaculate beings can very well sustain misfortune, and we reserve our sympathies for their less deserving adversaries.

ominously breaks forth; yet how exquisitely, even here, with cruelty and injustice in his conduct, peer out the finer qualities of his mind! Our sympathies are at once enlisted no less for the king than for his victims; we feel that it is no vulgar tyrant indiscriminately inflicting suffering, but a noble and generous nature, the dupe alike of his own headstrong passion and the studied deceit of his eldest daughters. Lear, incapable of falsehood, never till too late suspects its existence in others. Like Othello he believes all men honest that but seem to be so. Except for this trait of character it would be equally difficult to understand his ready credence in the overwrought protestations of Regan and Goneril, and indignant rejection of the studied reticence of Cordelia. How full of tenderness is his first reply to

The anger of the king remains, but it is dashed with sadness; the curtain is scarcely lifted, yet his interest in this drama of life is already much abated.

We

Have no such daughter, nor shall ever see
That face of her's again."

The ruling passion of his nature, "the intense desire of being intensely loved," has received its first rude shock; but no misgiving of his extravagant folly, no mistrust of those in whom. his whole remaining affections are centred, has yet reached him. The scene, however, is soon to be changed; and the mask of simulated affection being thrown off by his eldest daughters, the rapid torrent of rage, grief, and misery, swelled by each freshet of cruelty and ingratitude, sweeps with irresistible desolation over the heart and brain of the unhappy Lear.

Consummate skill is displayed by Shakespeare in the early development of the ingratitude of Goneril. Whether the reasoning in which she indulges was intended to show the facility with which we may delude ourselves into reconciling to our consciences the basest actions, by investing them with an appearance of necessity where there already exists a conviction of their expediency, it is impossible to determine; but certain it is, that he seemed to think it due to humanity, that in the commission of so great and unnatural a crime, a great and sufficient reason-or that which appears such-should be present in the mind of

Development of Goneril's character.

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Goneril. Wicked as she is represented to be, without affection, pity, or remorse, she seeks a plausible motive for her conduct.*

"By day and night! he wrongs me; every hour.

He flashes into one gross crime or other,

That sets us all at odds: I'll not endure it:

His knights grow riotous, and himself
Upbraids us on every trifle.

* * * Idle old man,

That still would manage those authorities
That he hath given away! Now by my life,

Old fools are babes again."

Her first reply to Lear's remonstrance is cold and unfeeling, but not without a colouring of respect; more is implied than directly expressed. His rejoinder is that of one whose mind is suddenly stunned-the iron has entered into his soul. If there be joy so great that language is unequal to its expression, there is also sorrow too deep for the heart's utterance; there is an eloquence of thought and feeling that for ever must be mute; the ore is too rich to take the impression of words, and is currency in the mind only.†

"Are you our daughter?"

And then, as reason slowly returns, and with it the conviction of his folly and misery, he breaks out into the wild apostrophe, ending with

"Who is that can tell me who I am?"

To which we have the fool's significant reply

"Lear's shadow."

Goneril now throws off all disguise, and to coldness adds contempt :

"As you are old and reverend, you should be wise."

The entrance of Albany for a moment diverts the swelling grief of the king; his brief appeal to the duke, and immediate resumption of his address to Goneril, are very finely conceived.—

"Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend,

More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child,

Than the sea monster!"

This is followed by the fearful imprecation upon Goneril and her

* Charles IX., writing on the subject of the massacre of St. Bartholomew to La Motte Fénélon, his Ambassador at London, says :-" I had no time to arraign and try in open justice as much as I wished, but was constrained, to my very great regret, to strike the blow (lascher le main) in what has been done in this city."

"Many things are too delicate to be thought, many more to be spoken." -Novalis.

VOL. V.-NO. II.

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