important notice of Shakespeare by Francis Meres, a contemporary author. "As Plautus and Seneca," he says, "are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare, among the English, is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love's Labor Lost, his Love's Labor Won (or All's Well that Ends Well), his Midsummer Night's Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet."

This was indeed a brilliant contribution to the English drama, far transcending all the previous productions of the English stage. The harvest, however, was not yet half reaped: the glorious intellect of Shakespeare was still forming, and his imagination nursing those magnificent conceptions which were afterwards embodied in the Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet of his tragic muse.

In the mean time by his labors as actor and playwright he had become prosperous, and even wealthy. He became a stockholder in the Blackfriars Theater a few years after his first appearance in London, and later he was part owner of the Globe Theater. Thus acting, writing, and managing, he lived his London life of twenty-five years, honored with the special notice of his Queen, and associating every day with the noblest and wittiest Englishmen of that brilliant time, yet never snapping the link which bound him to the sweet banks of Avon. Every year he ran down to Stratford, where his family continued to reside;

and there he bought a house and land for the rest and solace of his waning life.

The year 1612 is given as the date of the poet's final retirement from London life. He was then only fortyeight, and might reasonably hope for a full score of years in which to grow his flowers, his mulberries, and his apple-trees, to treat his friends to sack and claret under the hospitable roof of New Place,― perhaps to add to that marvelous series of dramas of which The Tempest was the last. But four years more brought this great life to an untimely close. He died on the 23d of April, 1616, of what disease we have no certain knowledge. On the same day died Cervantes, the illustrious author of Don Quixote.

Seven years after the poet's death, a volume, known to students of Shakespeare as the "First Folio," was published. This book contained thirty-six plays: seven more were afterwards added, but of these only one is received as genuine. The plays of Shakespeare, therefore, so far as the battling of critics has agreed upon their number, are thirty-seven. And these have been corrected and re-corrected, altered and revised, mended and re-mended, until we must have a very true and pure text of the poet.

The thirty-seven plays are classed as tragedies, comedies, and histories. The great tragedies are five, Macbeth, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Hamlet. The Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and the Merchant of Venice are, perhaps, the finest comedies; while Julius Cæsar, Henry IV., and King John stand out prominently among the noble series of histories.

Of Shakespeare's person we have but scanty notice. A contemporary speaks of him as "a handsome, wellshaped man, of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit." Many portraits have been engraved as likenesses of him, but there is no authority attached to any one of them. The monumental bust in Stratford Church is deemed the most authentic image: it was executed soon after his death, and, according to good evidence, was copied from a cast after nature.

To the character and disposition of Shakespeare, to the felicity of his temper, and the charm of his manners, tradition bears the most uniform testimony; and, indeed, had tradition been silent on the subject, his own works would bear ample evidence of the sweetness and goodness of his heart. "Sweet Will" was the name by which he was known to all his friends. loved the man," says Ben Jonson, a great contemporary dramatist," and do honor his memory on this side idolatry. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature."

The subject of Shakespeare's dramatic and poetical genius is so vast that it would be idle here to attempt any analysis. The student, however, may read with pleasure and profit the following tributes.

HAZLITT'S TRIBUTE.

THE genius of Shakespeare shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and on the foolish, on the monarch and on the beggar. He turned the globe around for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals, as they passed,

with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives, as well those that they knew as those which they did not know or acknowledge to themselves. The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his fancy. Airy beings waited at his call, and came at his bidding. The world of spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and women; and there is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other; for, if the preternatural characters he describes could be supposed to exist, they would speak and feel and act as he makes them. He had only to think of any thing, in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it. Shakespeare's language and versification are like the rest of him. He has a magic power over words: they come winged at his bidding, and seem to know their places. They are struck out at a heat, and have all the truth and vividness which arise from an actual impression of the objects. His language translates thoughts into visible images.

No man of whom we have any knowledge in literature ever had like Shakespeare the faculty of pouring out on all occasions such a flood of the richest and deepest language; no other man ever said such splendid things on all subjects universally. He was the greatest master of expression that literature has known. Indeed, by his power of expression he has beggared and forestalled posterity. Such lightness and ease in the manner, and such prodigious wealth and depth in the matter, are combined in no other writer.

MILTON'S TRIBUTE.

WHAT needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones
The labor of an age in piléd stones,

Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-ypointing1 pyramid?

Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,

What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name? Thou in our wonder and astonishment

Hast built thyself a livelong monument:

For whilst to th' shame of slow-endeavoring art
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued 2 book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,

Dost make us marble with too much conceiving;
And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie

That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

1 Star-ypointing, star-pointing. The y (= Anglo-Saxon ge, the prefix of the past participle) is here wrongly used in combination with a present participle.

2 Unvalued, invaluable.