Criticism of the play. 383 Cordelia dead in his arms, (must we confess it?) somewhat disappoints us. It may be that our compassion is exhausted, our minds incapable of receiving any deeper impressions. We feel that we have played out the play and that nothing remains but to dismiss the actors from the stage. Very beautiful is Lear's reminiscence of Cordelia "Her voice was ever soft, Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman." Her death loosens Lear's last hold of life; his longer retention. here would be a cruel mockery "Vex not his ghost: O let him pass; he hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world The most charming of essayists and genial of critics, has left us some remarks on Lear as an acting play, and also, some admirable strictures upon the alterations (now happily no longer tolerated) made by playwrights and managers, in the denouement of this tragedy. "The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery with which they mimic the storm he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimensions, but in intellectual; the explosions of his passions are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that rich sea, his mind, with all its vast riches: it is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on, even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of age; while we read it we see not Lear, but we are Lear; we are in his mind; we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of his daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, unmethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will on the abuses and corruptions of mankind. What have looks or tones to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that they themselves are old? What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show it is too hard and strong; it must have love-scenes, and VOL. V.-NO II. 49 a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Fate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw it about more easily. A happy ending as if the living martyrdom that Lear has gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and preparation, why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station; as if at his years and with his experience anything was left but to die." In these truthful and beautiful passages, however, the writer seems to have overlooked a very powerful argument against his objection to the acting of King Lear-that it was written for the stage. Doubtless, all theatrical paraphernalia are contemptible, as imitations of nature in her grandest moods; and all that the most consummate skill of the actor can effect in gesture and expression, fall far short of real passion and feeling. It is impossible that it could be otherwise; but were it possible to counterfeit nature so closely as to produce a sense of reality great enough to abuse the mind into a belief of the actual, the very purpose of the drama, would be defeated, and the mind, in tragic representation, be possessed only by unmitigated pain and horror. If the objection le tenable in the case of Lear, surely it is equally so against the acting of tragedy altogether. The stage adjuncts to the storm in Lear are not more contemptible than must ever be those of the Witch Scene in Macbeth, or the Graveyard in Hamlet. It must be remembered that Shakespeare wrote for the stage, lived by the stage, and enjoying his triumphs in the tumultuous applause of the spectators, cared probably little for that of the solitary reader. It was his felicity to live in an age of creation, it is our misfortune to have been cast upon one of criticism. ART. VIII. PROJECTS FOR IMPROVED SHIPPING ACCOMMODATION IN BOMBAY HARBOUR. I. Papers relative to a Project for Wet and Dry Docks in the Harbour of Bombay. Printed for Government at the Bombay Education Society's Press; 1856. Pages 74, with Maps. 2. On Docks and Wharfs for Bombay. Proceedings of the Bombay Mechanics' Institution: Session 1857. GOOD roads are among essentials in the civilisation of every people; good docks and good harbours are among the essential means of every commercial people. The wealth of every nation is now-a-day to be measured by the range of its commerce, by its powers of export and of import; and as the hermit cynic differs in manners from the complaisant man of the world, does the land-bound people differ in riches from the people whose territory boasts a sea frontage. The history of all ages tells us this.. In very olden time the ports were at once the inlets and the outlets for wealth, and the prosperity of the inland country swelled or shrank as these ports were active or idle. Man very soon learnt that alone, he was poor and powerless, without food for thought, or opportunity of action. Wisdom might he gather, but how shallow and false a wisdom!-the work only of his own senses and his own thoughts upon the glorious but inanimate world around him. His own hands might gather for him the means of life, but how joyless and how bare a life that counted not companionship in the sowing and in the reaping! He would go to his fellow-men; he would find them, and his feet should tread a path in which theirs should also tread; with his fellows he would work, he would eat, he would think; from them he would learn as they should from him, and the wisdom of all should be the harvest of the thinkings of each. The foot-track grew into the road, and anon, the teachings of the compass led our forefathers from their own to other shores, and up sprung all the arts, rude indeed in their infancy, that maritime intercourse showed to be necessary. Needless, indeed, would it be, to refer here to individual instances in testimony to the historical fact that good roads and good ports formed the principal engineering works of our ancestors, -the veins, arteries, and external features for sustaining and refreshing the industrial organism within. But the chronology of the past teaches us more than this. It shows that the work preceded rather than followed the want; that the child could not become the man while with the lungs of a child, and that the power of greater breathing must be given in order to the growth of the system. The forethought of man, in its humble imitation of a higher Intelligence, provided the means for the purpose of attaining the end cities rose as the consequences of good highways, and commerce multiplied as the reward of improved resources. And the experience of our own lives may have added many and wonder-moving examples to the series of the former past. The railways of Europe and of America have made towns, have dug out channels for human industry, have irrigated broad and sterile lands with the riches of the plough and of the loom, while the steam-marine of Great Britain has grown a giant, because her ports have been made wide enough for its traffic. Even in India, in this hot land of a million and half of square miles, and a hundred and sixty millions of people,-the dazzling and coveted toy of successive conquerors,-India, that now stands but on the threshold of civilisation, a giant in size, a dotard in hoary superstition, yet a swathed infant in its ignorance, even here may we cull another proof that the appliances we have referred to have a generative as well as a sustaining virtue, and that railways can create traffic as well as subserve it. And why should not India's ports keep pace with India's railways? A third fact that the records of our race impart is, that in all thriving commercial communities the internal ways and the external inlets and outlets have grown together, and maintained a correspondence of extent and importance. This, indeed, common sense and mere analogy would teach us. To resume the simile of the territorial with the human system, the limbs must grow with the lungs and the heart, else the creature becomes a cripple, dwarfed and stunted in some of its needed proportions. The railways of India are now rapidly advancing, and will ere long furnish arterial channels for her industry, that must force the question of her shipping appliances upon the attention of those whose duty it is to develope and to economise the resources of the country. Let us inquire what has yet been done or proposed for the principal port of Western India, and let us attempt to estimate Railways and Docks. 387 the practical value of such propositions as the public exigencies have as yet succeeded in evoking. In the first place, the fact that the Government has recognised the necessity of docks, or some tantamount conveniences, being provided for Bombay, may be admitted as a tolerably strong proof, prima facie, that such necessity does exist. Without joining in any general depreciation of the improving tendencies of our Indian rulers, we are constrained to allow that they seldom exhibit any extreme haste in forestalling the public demands, or in providing for the public necessities. They dare not, indeed, delay social reforms, like judges' decrees, until precedents can be found among the books; but such are always postponed until potent reasons be discovered, or mayhap, discover themselves, as the growl of the tiger from his lair, in tones of unmistakeable and impatient demand. We therefore assume the governmental proceedings recorded in the publication of which we have quoted the title at the head of this article, as "confirmation strong" that the shipping service of Bombay is as yet but very inadequately provided for; although the slightest observation of the daily doings in the neighbourhood of the Colaba causeway and the cotton grounds, might furnish most indubitable testimony to a similar effect. The number of square-rigged vessels that entered Bombay port during the year 1855, is recorded as 311, besides 218 steamers; or together 529; making an aggregate of 279,805 tons. The mode or modes in which this tonnage is now landed, may be understood from the evidence of the Officiating Commissioner of Customs, Salt, and Opium, who, being requested to report on the cost of loading and unloading vessels in the port of Bombay, stated, "On making inquiries from the several merchants, I still experienced great difficulty in procuring the required information, as there is no uniform system or practice adopted by them. One firm, perhaps, contracts for boat-hire alone; another contracts for the goods being discharged from the ship, and landed on the wharf; while another, perhaps, contracts for the removal of the goods from a ship to the depositing of them in the merchants' warehouses, including the cost of guarding them, &c. &c." "Petty pilferage" and "damage from wet" during the monsoon, are among the casualties to which goods thus treated are said to be exposed. The "petty pilferage" is stated to have been proved, a few years since, to amount to Rupees 1,600,000. The trade of the port is shown to be increasing, having amount |