dispatch of his base companions to sudden and unshriven death. in England, and never so strong in his own strength of arm as when he reflects that the news must shortly reach the king of the issue of the business in his tributary state "It will be short: the interim is mine." Macbeth reserves no pity in his heart for the partner of his great crime, when, tortured by the memory of it, she dies of remorse, and it adds one more anticipatory pang to the humiliation of possible overthrow, that he may have to kiss the dust before the feet of young Malcolm (who has never given proof of active power), while before the resolute Macduff the relentless monarch quails.

Let us look at Othello. The Moor of Venice was a figure in Cinthio's "Hecatomithi" before Shakespeare began to deal with him; but he was, as the facetious Rymer so playfully puts it, a mere jealous blackamoor. The black generals having beautiful wives liable to be courted by their husbands' officers are necessarily few. One in a century would be a liberal estimate, probably, and perhaps one in a cycle would be enough. Therefore the interest attaching to such unions must be slight. A passion must touch a large part of humanity before it can be universally appreciated. Now see what marvelous re-creation the story undergoes in Shakespeare, and what a magnificent type the poet makes of Othello. Lifting him entirely out of the originally vulgar character of the black man with a fair wife, he makes him a perfect gentleman. It has been well said that Othello is, perhaps, the most faultless gentleman in Shakespeare, for not Hamlet himself is so peerless a gentleman. What is Shakespeare's aim in this? He is going to do far greater business than to show us the power of jealousy. Cinthio's original blackamoor would have done for that. He intends to show us what it is to have our ideals shattered, our gods overthrown, our hopes withered, our aims blasted. Othello shall have no touch of jealousy; he shall have a greatness of soul with which jealousy cannot live. Othello at first adores his wife, worships her beyond all limit or control of reason. Then comes up the spirit of envy. Iago whispers that his fair idol is not so flawless as he thinks. He laughs at the imputation. Presently, that old relentless enemy, Circumstance (the vis matrix of Shakespearean tragedy, as a critic most aptly terms her) steps in and mars everything, as she so often does. When Circumstance frowns on Desdemona, Othello is trapped. Can it be that she whom he thought so pure is yet

so guilty? "But yet the pity of 't! O Iago, the pity of 't!" Of what now is Othello thinking? Of killing his supposed rival! Never at all; that way jealousy lies. He thinks of killing her slanderer. Holding Iago by the throat, he tells him to prove what he has said, or he had better have been born a dog than answer his awakened wrath. But fate is against Othello, and the proof seems to be forthcoming. Then, indeed, the joys of life are gone; his advancements had been the sweeter, because she had shared them; his hairbreadth 'scapes had been no longer terrible memories, because she had pitied them. Desdemona must die, and he, too, with her; for surely we must believe that Othello projected his own death at the moment that he conceived the idea of compassing his wife's. Here, then, is another magnificent type, representative of an enormous section of the human family. Othello has all the weaknesses of the man who builds his ideals too high: distrustful of himself and of the passion he generates; too quick to suspect treachery for one who has none of the little vices that verify it; as apt to clutch at straws as he is swift to raise an idol out of slender virtues. If Othello had been a jealous man he would not have killed his wife; for he would never have contented himself with the evidence of a lost handkerchief. But he was at once superior to the mean, prying suspiciousness of Leontes, in the "Winter's Tale," and rendered, by his frantic. idolatry, so destitute of a rational idea of female frailty as to accept the most innocent intercourse as conclusive evidence of guilt.

The character of Iago is of a type the exact contrary of this. Iago represents the men who take a low view of humanity, believing there is no friendship but self-interest, no affection but self-love, no honesty but personal gain. He begins with the meanest estimate of woman, from whom he expects neither chastity nor constancy, and whose love, in his eyes, is lust. There is not to be seen so bitter an enemy of woman in any other character in Shakespeare, where the hardest things ever, perhaps, said against the sex are to be found. Iago has a stubborn pride of intellectuality, too, that makes him believe he can use all men as his tools. His envy is not limited to Michael Cassio, who stands between him and a lieutenancy, but is even more active in the sight of Othello's domestic happiness than in view of his own military retrogression. With the consciousness of villainy in every scheme he concocts, he is constantly hugging to his bosom the idea that what he does is less than the just revenge of his honor,

which he reminds himself has been outraged. In no man whatever, and of course in no woman, can he perceive positive virtues; in Othello alone he recognizes a certain absence of vice. Such a man must needs have injured his associates by suspicion, calumny, or some of the other and secret machinations of envy; and if Shakespeare meant anything (beyond furnishing a dramatic contrast to Othello) by the realization of the type which Iago represents, it was surely to point to the inevitable pitfalls that lie in the path of the born skeptic.

Lear, again, is of a great and familiar type; he furnishes an admirable generalization on the impotence of those who, in their anxiety to govern others, have neglected to master themselves. It is significant that, both in Holinshed and in "The True Chronicle History of King Leir," the army of Lear is victorious, and the king is reinstated in his kingdom. After Lear's death, too, Cordelia succeeds to his sovereignty, and dies by her own hand during a war waged against her by her sisters' sons. Now, the mere necessities of tragic drama made demand of radical change in certain of these particulars; but the most material deviation from the story, as Shakespeare found it, was entailed upon the dramatist by the necessity under which he lay to purge the old king of his pride and willfulness, by leading him forward to some great catastrophe of suffering and death. Gloucester and his sons are foreign to the chronicle on which this play is founded, and come, no doubt, from Sidney's "Arcadia," probably being introduced for precisely similar purposes of typical portraiture. Indeed, it may, I think, safely be said that wherever Shakespeare departs from tradition in his plots he does so to perfect his types.

Glance further at the boy-woman characters in Shakespeare: I mean, of course, the women who assume the disguise of pages. This is a class of character of which the Elizabethans were especially fond. Nearly every popular dramatist of Shakespeare's age introduces us to one or more of these charming creations. Perhaps it may be objected that the class, if it ever existed, is extinct. And this being so, it may be said that Shakespeare here reversed his usual methods of portraiture and presented us in his Rosalinds and Violas, not with a type of female character, but merely with a picture of a class that was, at the most, peculiar to his own and earlier times. Not so, however. Shakespeare created in his girl-page characters a type of womanhood which for purity and strength, for modesty and self-sacrifice, must always stand highest in fiction, and can never, one may trust, be

extinct in life.

Herein he introduces into literature the type of girl who unites the tenderness of a woman to the strength of a man; and this is, perhaps, the most fascinating type of female character ever conceived. Yet Shakespeare never unsexes his boy-women. Viola is not a whit less womanly because she dons the doublet and hose, and plays page to the Duke. Nay, for her very disguise she seems almost the more womanly, because the more under restraint in the expression of those emotions which belong to woman only.

It is necessary to leave such readers as feel an interest in this theory of Shakespeare's method as a dramatist to work it out in fuller detail. It would be interesting to pursue investigations further, and see how Shakespeare came by such characters as Polonius, Benedick, Beatrice, Mercutio, Dogberry, Verges, Justice Shallow, Prospero, Leonatus, and among historical personages, Henry V., Richards II. and III. What has here been said has been intended to show, with somewhat more fullness of illustration than Coleridge employs, that Shakespeare's method of projecting character was to generalize on character: not to reproduce individuals, but to create types. That the poet never paints a character direct from some single example in life can hardly be maintained. It has been said that Pistol is a portrait, and perhaps the same may be affirmed, with reason, of Justice Shallow and Dogberry. The opposite was, however, his natural method, and the exceptions to his adoption of it are rare. It would be interesting to tabulate his types in groups, and so note their similitudes and differences. Lear, Timon, and Coriolanus might be taken together in a first group; Hamlet, Richard II., and Prospero in a second; Richard III. and Macbeth in a third; and perhaps Leontes and Leonatus would have to go with Iago rather than with Othello. To study Shakespeare in such groups of types might perhaps be more profitable, because more systematical and philosophical, than to study him merely chronologically. At least it would afford an agreeable and valuable change. It can hardly be possible to overstate the importance of the poet's love of the type in all human portraiture. To gratify it he sacrificed legend and history, and sometimes probability also. It is quite the highest factor in his art, for it has given permanence to what must have been as ephemeral as the forgotten chronicles. without it.

THOMAS CAMPBELL

(1777-1844)

HE poet Campbell was the editor of the New Monthly Magazine and of the Metropolitan, but it is to his work as editor of "Specimens of the British Poets" that we owe his essay on Chatterton,― almost the only one of his shorter prose pieces which has not dropped out of circulation. His work as a poet was

of the highest importance to English literature in helping to renew the lyrical impulse which in the eighteenth century it had almost lost. An Englishman in his diction, Campbell was Scotch in his ear for melody. His longer poems are under the influence of the formalism of the Queen Anne school, but in his lyrics and ballads he is thoroughly natural, and, except in diction, almost as Scotch as Burns himself. His lyrics are based on the ear for music which is more potent than the best tradition of any school of art, and it is almost impossible for any one who has once learned them to forget them. He was born at Glasgow, July 27th, 1777. At Edinburgh where he went to attend the university, he made the acquaintance of Scott, Brougham, and Francis Jeffrey, who were valuable friends to him in his literary career. "The Pleasures of Hope," published in 1799, was an instantaneous success, as it deserved to be from the beauty and delicacy which characterize its conceptions. It lacks the artistic simplicity of expression which gives his lyrics their remarkable power, but is still accepted as his masterpiece and one of the masterpieces of English poetry. He died at Boulogne, June 15th, 1844.

THO

CHATTERTON'S LIFE TRAGEDY

HOMAS CHATTERTON was the posthumous child of the master of a free school in Bristol. At five years of age he was sent to the same school which his father had taught, but he made so little improvement that his mother took him back; nor could he be induced to learn his letters till his attention had been accidentally struck by the illuminated capitals of a French musical manuscript. His mother afterwards taught him to read