"GLOSTER. The trick of that voice I do well remember; Is't not the king?

LEAR. Ay, every inch a king?" &c.

Lear, it must be confessed, dwells strongly on the point of his being a king. When he first enters in this scene he says, "I am the king himself;" but it appears to me to be the part of a childish old man, and more especially a madman, to lay hold of things like this to boast of. Perhaps the meaning of the word "trick" here may be difficult to define. I think it is used in this way by Shakspere, to express that peculiarity by which one of the kind may be distinguished from another;-" trick of the voice," is that striking characteristic by which one man's voice may be told from another's. So, in Winter's Tale, Act I. Sc. 3, Paulina, speaking of the child of Hermione, which Leontes disowns, lays great stress upon the "trick of his frown," as a proof that the child is his. This of itself gives us the correct meaning of the word.

I know no passage which gave me such trouble to understand, as the following in the same scene :—

"LEAR.

Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air

We wawl and cry-I will preach to thee-mark me!

GLOSTER. Alack! alack the day!

LEAR. When we are born, we cry, that we are come :
To this great stage of fools-This a good block!

It were a delicate stratagem to shoe

A troop of horse with felt," &c.

The sudden exclamation, "This a good block!" struck me as very difficult to explain; but the meaning has been discovered. When Lear begins to preach, he takes off his hat, and, seeing it, his attention is diverted from his sermon to its shape. "A block" was used to express "a shape," because, of course, the shape depended upon the block on which it was made. He then goes on to speak of the "delicate stratagem" of shoeing a troop with felt, so that they might steal noiselessly upon their enemies.

The last passage on which I shall observe is one which I have more than once heard ridiculed, but which contains the finest idea in the whole play. Lear, when he is dying, says,

"Pray you undo this button-thank you, sir."

Now to a person who does not see the drift of the author, the

It

request must appear trivial; but what button was this which he asked to have undone? Reader, it was the button which drew his robe so tightly on his heart. Almost bursting in agony, he cries to have this pressure relaxed; and who cannot imagine the halfsaid, half-sighed "Thank you, sir," of the old monarch? was the last sigh of the broken-heart, upon which his robe pressed so heavily; and masterly done was it on the part of our poet to introduce this wonderful piece of nature. Let none dare to tell me it is ridiculous: it is the very height of the sublime.

Lastly, I must speak of Mr. Nahum Tate's alteration of this play. Nothing can be more utterly tasteless. I will only speak of the catastrophe; one would have thought that when Shakspere had written,

"Vex not his ghost-O let him pass-he hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer,"

none would have ventured on prolonging his life. Alas! it has proved otherwise. Mr. Tate felt that the termination of this play appealed to the heart. As he himself had never ventured on so bold a scheme as this, he determined to defend the audience from the infliction, which was powerful enough to agitate the feelings even of the great. Dr. Johnson. He, therefore, cut the last scene to pieces, and substituted one from his own more innocent and unoffending pen, by which the catastrophe is entirely altered, and the whole ends like a fashionable novel. Cordelia recovers; Lear appears before the astonished audience in robust health; and gives away his daughter, who (to borrow the phraseology of the abovementioned fashionable novel) having recovered from her late serious accident (remember, reader, that of being nearly hanged), is led to the hymencal altar by Edgar, who, we are happy to state, has rallied considerably. I wonder Mr. Tate did not conclude with that most appropriate passage, which we have no doubt the author would have lent him for so excellent a purpose :—

"LEAR. Dance, Regan, dance with Cordelia and Goneril,

Down the middle, up again, poussett and cross;

Stop, Cordelia, do not tread upon her heel," &c.*

So ends, or should have ended, the tragedy ("risum teneatis amici,")

* See the Rejected Addresses. Punch's Apotheosi.

J

as altered by Mr. Tate, who has gained the reputation of having put a hook, as Charles Lamb excellently remarks, into the nose of this leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily.

But I must take my leave of Mr. Tate, and it shall be in the words of Jaques :-" God be with you, let's meet as little as we

can."

I have now concluded the first series of these papers: when or where they will be continued, or, indeed, whether they will be continued at all, I cannot with certainty state. It will, however, be an ample compensation to me for my trouble, if I have drawn the careless reader into the habit of perusing the great poet's works with attention, or removed any obstacle from the way of the student.

C. H. H.

EARLY SORROWS.

THE golden sunset had faded into darkness before the coming night, when on a rosebud, which had that morning first opened its petals to the bright sunlight, the first dewdrop of evening fell; and it seemed as though that young flower was weeping because the brightness of its early life had so soon passed away. But when the morning light dawned again in the heaven, not only did the rose look fairer for the tears that glistened upon its beauty, but those drops from heaven sank into its root, and refreshed and strengthened it to bear the heat of another day.

It is well when the sweet flowers of thought that spring up in the young heart are watered early by the tears of gentle sorrow. For those tears, springing from a fountain yet unpoisoned by the blight of sin, are like the drops of dew that fall from heaven upon the flowers of earth, brightening their colours, refreshing their odours, and so softening the soil around them, that their roots strike deeper, and their stems grow stronger, and they wither not before the scorching heats, nor are beaten down by the rude storms of later life.

* As You like it. ACT III. Scene 2.

PUCK.

THE

CREATION OF THE TURTLE-DOVES.

(From the German of Herder.)

Two lovers sat together in the first fair dream of their wishes; but, alas! their wishes must remain a dream. The implacable Fates envied them, and their souls departed in one sigh, undivided from each other.

The first that they saw when separated from their bodies, was the Goddess of Love hovering round them. Mournful and lamenting they flew into her bosom-"Thou didst not stand by us, good Goddess; thou sawest our wishes, and didst not suffer us to enjoy them in human life. But we will yet love as shadows undivided."

"The love of shadows," said the moved Goddess, " is a mournful love. It is not indeed in my power to give ye again the life of men; but fate permits me to change ye into some form of my kingdom. Will ye be the doves who, triumphing, draw my chariot, and, in the choir of gallantry and wit, live on ambrosial food? Your faith, your love, deserveth this reward."

"Pardon, O good mother," said the lovers with one voice, "pardon us the too dangerous, too glittering reward. In the choir of wit and gallantry, in the eternal noise and brilliancy of thy conquering court, who would be surety for our faith, for our love? Should we be doves, let us go into loneliness, that in our poor nest we may be all, and remain all to one another."

The Goddess spake the word of transformation; see, there flew the first pair of cooing turtle-doves. They cooed their thanks to the Goddess, and flew to their grave, where they, with their truth, with their touching lament, would move the old Fates that they should give them back their unenjoyed human life.

But their mutual lament is even their comfort; the gentle, true love that they enjoy in their desolation, is more to them than all the joys at the throne of Venus.

Is it envy or goodness that the Fates yet ever leave to them their dove's form, and guard them from the dangerous destiny of a changeful human heart?

PUCK.

OLD PLAYS.

JOHNSON. But, Mr. Bayes, might not we have a little fighting? for I love those plays where they cut and slash one another upon the stage for a whole hour together.-The Rehearsal.

THE reader who studies with attention the works of the old dramatists, cannot fail to observe a peculiarity, not only in the construction of their plays, but also in their language. What was in the old days in which they wrote considered sublime, would be laughed at and considered ridiculous in our own times; and what we now admire would, in those times, have been considered weak and puerile. The greatest admirer of the dramatic writers of the old school must allow that, if they are superior in point of language, and I think there can be no doubt entertained upon this point, we have the advantage over them with regard to our plots. Most of them, in the works of the old dramatists, are very faulty, often hanging upon the grossest improbabilities, and not a few on apparent impossibilities;-but let us take an example.

I know of no play containing so fine language in parts as the play of Jeronimo, and the continuation of this play called the Spanish Tragedy, by Kyd. As it contains some of the finest passages I remember to have read in any of the old dramatists, I cannot forbear bringing some of these before the notice of the reader, to the somewhat neglect of enlarging on the other point, namely, the faults of the plot. It is ever more pleasing to contemplate beauties than defects, and I am sure the reader will find greater delight in perusing a few of the many splendid passages of these plays, than in having pointed out the absurd and ridiculous plots; and the more so, as these plays are remarkably scarce, and therefore not likely to fall into the hands of many our readers. The following is quaint and worthy of citation:

"Now I remember too: O, sweet remembrance!
This day my years strike fifty, and in Rome
They call the fifty year the year of jubily,
The merry year, the peaceful year, jocund year,
A year of joy, of pleasure, and delight.

This shall be my year of jubily, for 'tis my fifty."

:

of

In this passage we have an extraordinary character of the old writers in the expression "strike fifty." Ideas of this quaint and original description, are the grand marks of the old dramatists.