love was not misspent. Lear expires in an agony of grief; but he has been delivered from his pride and passionate wilfulness: he has found that instead of being a master, at whose nod all things must bow, he is weak and helpless, a sport even of the wind and the rain; his ignorance of true love, and pleasure in false professions of love, have given place to an agonised clinging to the love which is real, deep, and tranquil because of its fulness. Lear is the greatest sufferer in Shakspere's plays; though so old, he has strength which makes him a subject for prolonged and vast agony; and patience is unknown to him. The elements seem to have conspired against him with his unnatural daughters; the upheaval of the moral world, and the rage of tempest in the air seem to be parts of the same gigantic convulsion. In the midst of this tempest wanders unhoused the white-haired Lear; while his fool-most pathetic of all the minor characters of Shakspere-jests half-wildly, half-coherently, half-bitterly, half-tenderly, and always with a sad remembrance of the happier past. The poor boy's heart has been sore ever since his "6 young mistress went to France."

If Cordelia is pure love, tender and faithful, and Kent is unmingled loyalty, the monsters Goneril and Regan are gorgons rather than women, such as Shakspere has nowhere else conceived. The aspect of

Goneril can almost turn to stone; in Regan's tongue there is a viperous hiss. Goneril is the more formidable, because the more incapable of any hatred which is not solid and four-square. Regan acts under her sister's influence, but has an eager venomousness of her own. The story of Gloucester enlarges the basis of the tragedy. Lear's affliction is no mere private incident; there is a breaking of the bonds of nature and society all around us. But Gloucester is suffering for a former sin of self-indulgence, Lear is " more sinned against than sinning." Yet Gloucester is granted a death which is half joyful. His affliction serves as a measure of the huger affliction of the king.

Edgar and Edmund are a contrasted pair-both are men of penetration, energy, and skill, on: on the side of evil, the other on the side of good. Edgar's virtue is active, enduring, and full of device; he rises at last to be the justiciary who brings his evil brother sternly to punishment. Everywhere throughout the play Shakspere's imaginative daring impresses us. Nothing in poetry is bolder or more wonderful than the scene on the night of the tempest in the hovel where the king, whose intellect has now given way, is in company with Edgar, assuming madness, the Fool, with his forced pathetic mirth, and Kent.

The text of the quarto differs considerably from that of the folio; but the opinion that the later textthat of the folio--exhibits a revision of his own work by Shakspere is not supported by sufficient evidence. "The folio was printed from an independent manuscript, and its text is on the whole much superior to that of the quartos. Each, however, supplies passages which are wanting in the other." Scene iii. of Act IV. is not found in the folio.

32. Macbeth was seen acted at the Globe by Dr. Forman-who gives a detailed sketch of the playon April 20, 1610. But the characteristics of versification forbid us to place it after Pericles and Antony and Cleopatra, or very near The Tempest. Light endings begin to appear in considerable number in Macbeth (twenty-one is the precise number), but of weak endings it contains only two. Upon the whole, the internal evidence supports the opinion of Malone, that the play was written about 1606. The words in Macbeth's vision of the kings (Act IV. Sc. i. L. 120), Some I see

That twofold balls and treble sceptres carry,

refer to the union of the two kingdoms under James I. James had revived the practice of touching for the king's evil, described Act IV. Sc. iii. L. 140-159. "Here's a farmer that hang'd himself on the expectation of plenty" (Act II. Sc. iii. L. 5) may have

reference to the unusually low price of wheat in the summer and autumn of 1606. "Here's an equivocator that could swear in both scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake; yet could not equivocate to heaven" (Act II. Sc. iii. L. 9) has been supposed to allude to the doctrine of equivocation, avowed by Henry Garnet, Superior of the order of Jesuits in England, on his trial for the Gunpowder Treason, March 28, 1606, and to his perjury on that occasion. In 1611 the ghost of Banquo was jestingly alluded to in Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle.

The materials for his play Shakspere found in Holinshed's Chronicle, connecting the portion which treats of Duncan and Macbeth with Holinshed's account of the murder of King Duffe by Donwald. The appearance of Banquo's ghost and the sleepwalking of Lady Macbeth appear to be inventions of the dramatist.

Thomas Middleton's play of The Witch, discovered in MS. in 1779, contains many points of resemblance to Macbeth. The Cambridge editors, Messrs. Clark and Wright, are of opinion that Macbeth was interpolated with passages by a second author-not improbably by Middleton-after Shakspere's death, or after he had ceased to be connected with the theatre; the interpolator expanded the parts assigned to the weird sisters and introduced a new character, Hecate. The following passages are pointed out as the supposed interpolations: Act I. Sc. ii., iii. L. 1-37; Act II. Sc. i. L. 61, iii. (Porter's part) Act III. Sc. v. ; Act IV. Sc. i. L. 39-47 and 125–132, iii. L. 140-159; Act V. (?) ii., v. L. 47–50, viii. L. 32-33 ("Before my body I throw my warlike shield") and 35-75. This theory of interpolation must be considered as in a high degree doubtful, and in particular the Porter's part shows the hand of Shakspere. As to Middleton's The Witch, it was probably of later date than Shakspere's play.

While in Romeo and Juliet and in Hamlet we feel

that Shakspere now began and now left off, and refined upon or brooded over his thoughts, Macbeth seems as if struck out at a heat, and imagined from first to last with unabated fervour. It is like a sketch by a great master in which everything is executed with rapidity and power, and a subtlety of workmanship which has become instinctive. The theme of the drama is the gradual ruin through yielding to evil within and evil without, of a man, who though from the first tainted by base and ambitious thoughts, yet possessed elements in his nature of possible honour and loyalty. The contrast between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, united by their affections, their fortunes, and their crime, is made to illustrate and light up the character of each. Macbeth has physical courage, but moral weakness, and is subject to excited imaginative fears. His faint and intermittent loyalty embarrasses him-he would have the gains of crime without its pains. But when once his hands are dyed in blood, he hardly cares to withdraw them, and the same fears which had tended to hold him back from murder, now urge him on to double and treble murders, until slaughter, almost reckless, becomes the habit of his reign. At last the gallant soldier of the opening of the play fights for his life with a wild and brute-like force. His whole existence has become joyless and loveless, and yet he clings to existence. Lady Macbeth is of a finer and more delicate nature. Having fixed her eye upon an endthe attainment for her husband of Duncan's crownshe accepts the inevitable means; she nerves herself for the terrible night's work by artificial stimulants; yet she cannot strike the sleeping king who resembles her father. Having sustained her weaker husband, her own strength gives way; and in sleep, when her will cannot control her thoughts, she is piteously afflicted by the memory of one stain of blood upon her little hand. At last her thread of life snaps suddenly. Macbeth, whose affection for her was real, has sunk too far into the apathy of joyless crime to feel deeply her loss. Banquo, the loyal soldier, praying

for restraint of evil thoughts which enter his mind as they had entered that of Macbeth, but which work no evil there, is set over against Macbeth, as virtue is set over against disloyalty. The witches are the supernatural beings of terror, in harmony with Shakspere's tragic period, as the fairies of the Midsummer Night's Dream are the supernatural beings of his days of fancy and frolic, and as Ariel is the supernatural genius of his latest period. There is at once a grossness, a horrible reality about the witches, and a mystery and grandeur of evil influence.

33. Antony and Cleopatra, though by the person of Antony it connects itself with Julius Cæsar, is a striking contrast to that play in subject and in style, and is separated from it in the chronological order by a wide interval. In May of the year 1608, Blount (afterwards one of the publishers of the First Folio) entered in the Stationers' register A Book called Antony and Cleopatra. This was, not improbably, Shakspere's tragedy. The source of the play is the life of Antonius in North's Plutarch. Shakspere had found in Plutarch his Brutus almost ready made to his hand; he deemed it necessary to transform and transfigure the Antony of history, stained as he is by crimes not only of voluptuousness but of cruelty. "Of all Shakspere's historical plays," wrote Coleridge, " Antony and Cleopatra is by far the most wonderful," and he calls attention to what he terms its "happy valiancy" of style. Shakspere, indeed, nowhere seems a greater master of a great dramatic theme. The moral ideals, the doctrines, the stoical habits and stoical philosophy of Brutus and Portia, are as remote as possible from the sensuous splendours of the life in Egypt, from Antony's careless magnificence of strength, and the beauty, the arts, and endless variety of Cleopatra. Yet, though the tragedy has all the glow and colour of oriental magnificence, it remains true at heart to the moral laws which govern human life. The worship of pleasure by the Egyptian Queen and her paramour is, after all, a failure, even from the first. There is no