Precisely so. An immature poet, again, if the marvellous creation of Oberon and Titania, and Puck, could have entered into such a mind, would have laboured to make the power of the fairies produce some strange and striking events. But the exquisite beauty of Shakspere's conception is, that, under the supernatural influence, "the human mortals" move precisely according to their respective natures and habits. Demetrius and Lysander are impatient and revengeful;-Helena is dignified and affectionate, with a spice of female error; Hermia is somewhat vain and shrewish. And then Bottom! Who but the most skilful artist could have given us such a character ? Of him Malone says, "Shakspeare would naturally copy those manners first with which he was first acquainted. The ambition of a theatrical candidate for applause he has happily ridiculed in Bottom the weaver." A theatrical candidate for applause! Why, Bottom the weaver is the representative of the whole human race. His confidence in his own power is equally profound, whether he exclaims, "Let me play the lion too;" or whether he sings alone, that they shall hear I am not afraid;" or whether, conscious that he is surrounded with spirits, he cries out, with his voice of authority, "Where's Peas-blossom?" In every situation Bottom is the same,—the same personification of that selflove which the simple cannot conceal, and the wise can with difficulty suppress. Malone thus concludes his analysis of the internal evidence of the chronology of 'A

Midsummer-Night's Dream:'. "That a drama, of which the principal personages are thus insignificant, and the fable thus meagre and uninteresting, was one of our author's earliest compositions, does not, therefore seem a very improbable conjecture; nor are the beauties with which it is embellished inconsistent with this supposition." The beauties with which it is embellished include, of course, the whole rhythmical structure of the versification. The poet has here put forth all his strength. We venture to offer an opinion that, if any single composition were required to exhibit the

power of the English language for purposes of poetry, that composition would be the Midsummer-Night's Dream.' This won

derful model, which, at the time it appeared, must have been the commencement of a great poetical revolution, and which has never ceased to influence our higher poetry, from Fletcher to Shelley,-was, according to Malone, the work of "the genius of Shakspeare, even in its minority."

Mr. Hallam has, as might be expected, taken a much more correct view of this question than Malone. He places ‘A Midsummer-Night's Dream' among the early plays; but, having mentioned 'The Comedy of Errors,' 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' 'Love's Labour's Lost,' and 'The Taming of the Shrew,' he adds, " Its superiority to those we have already mentioned affords some presumption that it was written after them."

'A Midsummer-Night's Dream' is mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598. The date of the first publication of the play, therefore, in 1600, does not tend to fix its chronology. Nor is it very material to ascertain whether it preceded 1598 by three, or four, or five years. The state of the weather in 1593 and 1594, when England was visited with peculiarly ungenial seasons, may have suggested Titania's beautiful description in Act II., Scene 2. The allusion of two lines in Act V. is by no means so clear :

"The thrice three Muses mourning for the death

Of learning, late deceased in beggary."

This passage was once thought to allude to the death of Spenser. But the misfortunes and the death of Spenser did not take place till 1599. Even if the allusion were inserted between the first production of the piece and its publication in 1600, it is difficult to understand how an elegy on the great poet could have been called

"Some satire, keen and critical."

T. Warton suggested "that Shakspeare here, perhaps, alluded to Spenser's poem entitled "The Tears of the Muses, on the Neglect and Contempt of Learning.' This piece first

*Literature of Europe,' vol. ii. p. 387.

P

appeared in quarto, with others, 1591." We greatly doubt the propriety of this conjecture, which Malone has adopted. Spenser's poem is certainly a satire in one sense of the word; for it makes the Muses lament that all the glorious productions of men that proceeded from their influence had vanished from the earth. All that

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was wont to work delight Through the divine infusion of their skill, And all that else seemed fair and fresh in sight, So made by nature for to serve their will, Was turned now to dismal heaviness, Was turned now to dreadful ugliness."

Clio complains that mighty peers "only boast of arms and ancestry;" Melpomene, that "all man's life meseems a tragedy;" Thalia is "made the servant of the many;" Euterpe weeps that "now no pastoral is to be heard;" and so on. These laments do not seem to be identical with the

some

Of learning, late deceased in beggary." These expressions are too precise and limited to refer to the tears of the Muses for the decay of knowledge and art. We cannot divest ourselves of the belief that some real person, and some real death, were alluded to. May we hazard a conjecture?-Greene, a man of learning, and one whom Shakspere in the generosity of his nature might wish to point at kindly, died in 1592, in a condition that might truly be called beggary. But how was his death, any more than that of Spenser, to be the occasion of " satire, keen and critical?" Every student of our literary history will remember the famous controversy of Nash and Gabriel Harvey, which was begun by Harvey's publication, in 1592, of 'Four Letters, and certain Sonnets, especially touching Robert Greene, and other parties by him abused.' Robert Greene was dead; but Harvey came forward, in revenge of an incautious attack of the unhappy poet, to satirize him in his graveto hold up his vices and his misfortunes to the public scorn-to be "keen and critical" upon "learning, late deceased in beggary." The conjecture which we offer may have

little weight, and the point is certainly of very small consequence.

"This is the silliest stuff that e'er I heard," says Hippolyta, when Wall has "discharged" his part. The auswer of Theseus is full of instruction:-"The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them." It was in this humble spirit that the great poet judged of his own matchless performances. He felt the utter inadequacy of his art, and indeed of any art, to produce its due effect upon the mind, unless the imagination, to which it addressed itself, was ready to convert the shadows which it presented into living forms of truth and beauty. "I am convinced," says Coleridge, "that Shakspeare availed himself of the title of this play in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout." The poet says so, in express words:"If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, (and all is mended),
That you have but slumber'd here,
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend."

But to understand this dream-to have all its gay, and soft, and harmonious colours impressed upon the vision-to hear all the golden cadences of its poesy-to feel the perfect congruity of all its parts, and thus to receive it as a truth-we must not suppose that it will enter the mind amidst the lethargic slumbers of the imagination. We

must receive it

As youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream." Let no one expect that the beautiful influences of this drama can be truly felt when he is under the subjection of the literal and prosaic parts of our nature: or, if he habitually refuses to believe that there are higher and purer regions of thought than are supplied by the physical realities of the world. In these cases he will have a false standard by which to judge of this, and of all other high poetry-such a standard as that possessed by a critic-acute, learned, in

many respects wise-Dr. Johnson, who lived in a prosaic age, and fostered in this particular the real ignorance by which he was surrounded. He sums up the merits of A Midsummer-Night's Dream,' after this extraordinary fashion :-" Wild and fantastical as this play is, all the parts in their various modes are well written, and give the kind of pleasure which the author designed. Fairies, in his time, were much in fashion: common tradition had made them familiar, and Spenser's poem had made them great." It is perfectly useless to attempt to dissect such criticism let it be a beacon to warn us, and not a "load-star" to guide us. Old Pepys, with his honest hatred of poetry-" To the King's Theatre, where we saw 'MidsummerNight's Dream,' which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life"-is to us more tolerable.

Mr. Hallam accounts 'A MidsummerNight's Dream' poetical, more than dramatic; "yet rather so, because the indescribable profusion of imaginative poetry in this play overpowers our senses, till we can hardly observe anything else, than from any deficiency of dramatic excellence. For, in reality, the structure of the fable, consisting as it does of three, if not four actions, very distinct in their subjects and personages, yet wrought into each other without effort or confusion, displays the skill, or rather instinctive felicity, of Shakspeare, as much as in any play he has written." Yet, certainly, with all its harmony of dramatic arrangement, this play is not for the stageat least not for the modern stage. It may reasonably be doubted whether it was ever eminently successful in performance. The tone of the epilogue is decidedly apologetic, and "the best of this kind are but shadows" is in the same spirit. Hazlitt has admirably described its failure as an acting drama in his own day:

"The Midsummer-Night's Dream,' when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. The spectacle was grand; but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled. Poetry and

| the stage do not agree well together. The attempt to reconcile them in this instance fails not only of effect, but of decorum. The ideal can have no place upon the stage, which is a picture without perspective: everything there is in the foreground. That which was merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately becomes an unmanageable reality. Where all is left to the imagination (as is the case in reading), every circumstance, near or remote, has an equal chance of being kept in mind, and tells accordingly to the mixed impression of all that has been suggested. But the imagination cannot sufficiently qualify the actual impressions of the senses. Any offence given to the eye is not to be got rid of by explanation. Thus Bottom's head in the play is a fantastic illusion, produced by magic spells: on the stage it is an ass's head, and nothing more; certainly a very strange costume for a gentleman to appear in. Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine."

And yet, just and philosophical as are these remarks, they offer no objection to the opinion of Mr. Hallam, that in this play there is no deficiency of dramatic excellence. We can conceive that, with scarcely what can be called a model before him, Shakspere's early dramatic attempts must have been a series of experiments to establish a standard by which he should regulate what he addressed to a mixed audience. The plays of his middle and mature life, with scarcely an exception, are acting plays; and they are so, not from the absence of the higher poetry, but from the predominance of character and passion in association with it. But even in those plays which call for a considerable exercise of the unassisted imaginative faculty in an audience, such as 'The Tempest,' and A Midsummer-Night's Dream,' where the passions are not powerfully roused, and the senses are not held enchained by the interests of a plot, he is still essentially dramatic. What has been called of late years the dramatic poem-that something between the epic and the dramatic which is held to form an apology for whatever of episodical or