Ah, sir, there's many a Greek and Trojan dead, Ulyss. Sir, I foretold you then what would ensue: For I'll not kill thee there, nor there, nor there; Ajax. Hect. Achil. I am Achilles. Is this Achilles? Hect. Stand fair, I pray thee: let me look on thee. Achil. Behold thy fill. Nay, I have done already. Achil. Thou art too brief; I will the second time, As I would buy thee, view thee limb by limb. Hect. O, like a book of sport thou'lt read me o'er; But there's more in me than thou understand'st. Why dost thou so oppress me with thine eye? Achil. Tell me, you heavens, in which part of his body Shall I destroy him? whether there, or there, or That I may give the local wound a name; Hect. Thy hand upon that match. Agam. First, all you peers of Greece, go to my tent; There in the full convive you: afterwards, [Exeunt all but TROILUS, and ULYSSES. Tro. My lord Ulysses, tell me, I beseech you, In what place of the field doth Calchas keep? Ulyss. At Menelaus' tent, most princely Troilus: Tro. Shall I, sweet lord, be bound to thee so After we part from Agamemnon's tent, Ulyss. You shall command me, sir. Tro. O, sir, to such as boasting show their scars, A mock is due. Will you walk on, my lord? [Exeunt. Achil. From whence, fragment? Ther. Why, thou full dish of fool, from Troy. Patr. Who keeps the tent now? Ther. The surgeon's box, or the patient's wound. Patr. Well said, Adversity! and what need these tricks? Ther. Prithee be silent, boy; I profit not by thy talk: thou art thought to be Achilles' male varlet. Patr. Male varlet, you rogue! what's that? Ther. Why, his masculine whore. Now the rotten diseases of the south, guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs, loads o' gravel i' the back, lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, wheezing lungs, bladders full of imposthume, sciaticas, lime-kilns i' the palm, incurable bone-ache, and the rivelled feesimple of the tetter, take and take again such preposterous discoveries! Patr. Why, thou damnable box of envy, thou, what meanest thou to curse thus? Ther. Do I curse thee? Patr. Why, no, you ruinous butt; you whoreson indistinguishable cur, no. Ther. No? why art thou then exasperate, thou idle immaterial skein of sley'd silk, thou green sarcenet flap for a sore eye, thou tassel of a prodigal's purse, thou? Ah, how the poor world is pester'd with such water-flies; diminutives of nature! Patr. Out, gall! Ther. Finch egg! Achil. My sweet Patroclus, I am thwarted quite From my great purpose in to-morrow's battle." Here is a letter from queen Hecuba; A token from her daughter, my fair love; An oath that I have sworn. I will not break it: Ther. With too much blood and too little brain, these two may run mad; but if with too much brain and too little blood they do, I'll be a curer of madmen. Here's Agamemnon,-an honest fellow enough, and one that loves quails; but he has not so much brain as ear-wax: And the goodly transformation of Jupiter there, his brother, the bull,— the primitive statue and oblique memorial of cuckolds; a thrifty shoeing-horn in a chain, hanging at his brother's leg,-to what form, but that he is, should wit larded with malice, and malice forced with wit, turn him to? To an ass were nothing; he is both ass and ox: to an ox were nothing; he is both ox and ass. To be a dog, a mule, a cat, a fitchew, a toad, a lizard, an owl, a puttock, or a herring without a roe, I would not care: but to be Menelaus, I would conspire against destiny. Ask me not what I would be if I were not Thersites; for I care not to be the louse of a lazar, so I were not Menelaus.-Hey-day! spirits and fires! Enter HECTOR, TROILUS, AJAX, AGAMEMNON, ULYSSES, NESTOR, MENELAUS, and DIOMED, with lights. Agam. We go wrong, we go wrong. Ajax. No, yonder 'tis ; There, where we see the lights. - break the parle"-i. e. Begin the parley; in the sense that we still say, "He breaks his mind"-to "break a matter to one." "Was it well done of rash Virginius," etc. Here is again one of those errors which a well-read scholar was not likely to fall into. Virginius did not slay his daughter because she was stained, etc., but to save her from pollution. "Lucius, all hail, Rome's royal emperor," etc. "This line, and the concluding line of Marcus's speech, are given to the people-Romans'-by the modern editors, against the authority of the original copies. Marcus is the tribune of the people, and speaks authoritatively what the common voice' has required.”— KNIGHT. "give me AIM awhile"-To" cry aim," as has been elsewhere observed in this edition, was a popular phrase, introduced from the ancient universal practice of archery, and has become obsolete as that has gone out of use. It meant to encourage; so to "give aim" was to direct; neither of which senses seem in the least appropriate here. Unless there was some other colloquial use of the phrase, now forgotten, equivalent to " give me leave," "aim" may here be a typographical error for room; as Lucius says, in the next line but one, "stand all aloof." "Her life was BEASTLIKE"-So in the folios; the quartos, beastly. The former is most in the quaint taste of the times. Although TITUS ANDRONICUS is a play which, had it come down to us under the name of some secondary dramatist of the age of Elizabeth, would have taken its place quietly with the dramatic literature of that date, by the side of Peele, Middleton, etc., its extravagances all forgotten, and its beauties now and then selected or quoted; as it is, it is rarely mentioned by a critic, but in terms of unqualified disgust. But, great as its faults are, it certainly had once the merit of pleasing the public taste, even after Shakespeare had habituated it to nobler food. It is, therefore, at least worth transient inquiry, what the prevailing sentiment or feeling in it may be to which it owed its interest and power. We cannot, therefore, refrain from selecting a part of Franz Horn's imaginative and somewhat mystical criticism, which, if it "finds in Shakespeare more than Shakespeare meant," yet rightly indicates the real pervading feeling of the piece, and the effect it leaves on the mind. The reader will observe that Horn's argument rests upon the as 42 sumption that the piece is throughout the entire com position of the "youth Shakespeare." The translation is from one of the contributors to the "Pictorial" SHAKESPEARE. The work from which it is extracted is Horn's" Shakespeare's Dramas Illustrated," (5 vols., Leipsic, 1831;)-a series of essays minutely analyzing the several characters, and summing up the governing characteristics of each play : Its "A mediocre, poor, and tame nature finds itself easily. It soon arrives, when it endeavours earnestly, at a knowledge of what it can accomplish, and what it cannot. poetical tones are single and gentle spring-breathings; with which we are well pleased, but which pass over us almost trackless. A very different combat has the higher and richer nature to maintain with itself; and the more splendid the peace, and the brighter the clearness, which it reaches through this combat, the more monstrous the fight which must have been incessantly maintained. "Let us consider the richest and most powerful poetic nature that the world has ever yet seen; let us consider Shakespeare, as boy and youth, in his circumscribed external situation,-without one discriminating friend, without a patron, without a teacher,-without the pos session of ancient or modern languages,-in his loneliness at Stratford, following an uncongenial employment; and then, in the strange whirl of the so-called great world of London, contending for long years with unfavourable circumstances,-in wearisome intercourse with this great world, which is, however, often found to be little-but also with nature, with himself, and with God:-What materials for the deepest contemplation! This rich nature, thus circumstanced, desires to explain the enigma of the human being and the surrounding world. But it is not yet disclosed to himself. Ought he to wait for this ripe time before he ventures to dramatise? Let us not demand anything superhuman: for, through the expression of error in song, will he find what accelerates the truth; and well for him that he has no other sins to answer for than poetical ones, which later in life he has atoned for by the most glorious excellences! "The elegiac tone of his juvenile poems allows us to imagine very deep passions in the youthful Shakespeare. But this single tone was not long sufficient for him. He soon desired, from that stage which signifies the world,' (an expression that Schiller might properly have invented for Shakespeare,) to speak aloud what the world seemed to him,-to him, the youth who was not yet able thoroughly to penetrate this seeming. Can there be here a want of colossal errors? Not merely single errors. No: we should have a whole drama which is diseased at its very root,-which rests upon one single monstrous error. Such a drama is this TITUS. The Poet had here nothing less in his mind than to give us a grand Doomsday-drama. But what, as a man, was possible to him in LEAR, the youth could not accomplish. He gives us a torn-to-pieces world, about which Fate wanders like a bloodthirsty lion,-or as a more refined and more cruel tiger, tearing mankind, good and evil alike, and blindly treading down every flower of joy. Nevertheless a better feeling reminds him that some repose must be given; but he is not sufficiently confident of this, and what he does in this regard is of little power. The personages of the piece are not merely heathens, but most of them embittered and blind in their heathenism; and only some single aspirations of something better can arise from a few of the best among them;-aspirations which are breathed so gently as scarcely to be heard amidst the cries of despe ration from the bloody waves that roar almost deafen ingly." Ay, that. Dio. Cres. O, all you gods!-O pretty pretty pledge! Thy master now lies thinking in his bed Of thee, and me; and sighs, and takes my glove, And gives memorial dainty kisses to it, As I kiss thee.-Nay, do not snatch it from me; Dio. I had your heart before, this follows it. Cres. You shall not have it, Diomed; 'faith you shall not; I'll give you something else. Dio. I will have this: Whose was it? 'Tis no matter. Why then, farewell; Thou never shalt mock Diomed again. Cres. You shall not go :-One cannot speak a word, But it straight starts you. I do not like this fooling. Dio. Ther. Nor I, by Pluto: but that that likes not you pleases me best. Dio. What, shall I come? the hour? Cres. Ay, come :-O Jove! Do come :-I shall be plagued. Dio. Farewell till then. Cres. Good night. I prithee, come.— [Exit DIOMEDES. Troilus, farewell! one eye yet looks on thee; But with my heart the other eye doth see. Ah! poor our sex! this fault in us I find, The error of our eye directs our mind: What error leads must err; O then conclude, Mine sway'd by eyes are full of turpitude. [Exit CRESSIDA. Ther. A proof of strength she could not publish Ulyss. Nor mine, my lord: Cressid was here but now. Tro. Let it not be believ'd for womanhood! Think, we had mothers; do not give advantage To stubborn critics, apt, without a theme, For depravation, to square the general sex By Cressid's rule: rather think this not Cressid. Ulyss. What hath she done, prince, that can soil our mothers? Tro. Nothing at all, unless that this were she. This is not she. O madness of discourse, And with another knot, five-finger-tied, Tro. Ay, Greek; and that shall be divulged well Hark, Greek: As much as I do Cressida love, Ther. He'll tickle it for his concupy. Tro. O Cressid! O false Cressid! false, false, Let all untruths stand by thy stained name, Ulyss. Enter ENEAS. SCENE III.-Troy. Before PRIAM's Palace. Enter HECTOR, and ANDROMACHE. And. When was my lord so much ungen temper'd, To stop his ears against admonishment? Ene. I have been seeking you this hour, my By the everlasting gods, I'll go. lord: Hector, by this, is arming him in Troy; Ajax, your guard, stays to conduct you home. Tro. Have with you, prince :-My courteous Farewell, revolted fair!-and, Diomed, [Exeunt TROILUS, ENEAS, and ULYSSES. Ther. 'Would I could meet that rogue Diomed! I would croak like a raven; I would bode, I would bode. Patroclus will give me anything for the intelligence of this whore: the parrot will not do more for an almond than he for a commodious drab. Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion: A burning devil take them! And. My dreams will, sure, prove ominous t the day. Hect. No more, I say. [Exit. Cas. The gods are deaf to hot and peevish vows: |