conduct them elaborately to their catastrophe, when we turn away from them at the first instance with disgust, and cannot have patience to sympathize with them so strongly as is requisite, if we would completely understand them. It was otherwise, no doubt, in the days of yore.-LLOYD, Critical Essays.

THE PITH OF THE PLAY

Clearly, the pith of the play lies in the pleasant exposure of these affectations of Elizabethan culture. It is a "comedy of humors,"-Shakespeare's one experiment in the genre which a decade later Jonson made his own. Shakespeare, like Jonson after him, has his fling at the "vainglorious knight," "the profane jester," "the affected courtier”; but the animus of their satire is not altogether the same. Jonson assails these affectations with the downright scholar's scorn for shams; Shakespeare laughs at the "lost labor" of those who, in one or other of these ways, insist (in Biron's phrase) on "climbing over the house to unlock the little gate." But his laughter is not all in the same key. Holofernes and Armado are purely comic figures, commended to us by no single sympathetic touch, and sent off the stage sadder, but in no degree wiser than they entered it. Armado serves for the "quick creation" of Navarre and his bookmen. But Shakespeare has not a whit more respect for their own projected Academy of study, fasting and seclusion, and mercilessly derides it through the lips of Biron. But when they "of mere necessity" forswear their asceticism, and the "lost labors of love" actually begin, the satiric note becomes more equivocal. In the finest scene of the drama,-one of the finest comic scenes in all the early dramas, where their perjury is discovered (IV, iii), the ridiculous situation of the perjured students contrasts strangely with the lyric beauty of the love-strains put into their mouths. The King's has a burlesque touch or two, but Dumain's is full of charm, and Longaville's is hardly distinguishable in tone

from the most ardent of Shakespeare's sonnets. If Shakespeare was here, as has been said, lashing the "Petrarcan sonneteers" of his time, it was with the mild stroke that became one who was himself to be so great a master in this form of love-labor. And as with the love-lyrics, so it is with the "taffeta phrases and silken terms" which Biron likewise renounces at Rosaline's feet. They were not for him, like Holofernes' Latinisms and Armado's firenew terms, things wholly alien and apart; they were symbols of a phase of culture and refinement through which he was himself passing, of which he recognized the limits, but had not overcome the charm. We may surely recognize something of Shakespeare himself in the curious ambiguities in the fine character of Biron, who, after renouncing his silken terms precise, leaves his sickness by degrees, and has yet a trick of the old rage; and who is by turns a Romeo and a Mercutio in his view of love.-HERFORD, The Eversley Shakespeare.

If we were to part with any of the author's comedies, it should be this. Yet we should be loth to part with Don Adriano de Armado, that mighty potentate of nonsense, or his page, that handful of wit; with Nathaniel the curate, or Holofernes the school-master, and their dispute after dinner on "the golden cadences of poesy"; with Costard the clown, or Dull the constable. Biron is too accomplished a character to be lost to the world, and yet he could not appear without his fellow courtiers and the king: and if we were to leave out the ladies, the gentlemen would have no mistresses. So that we believe we may let the whole play stand as it is, and we shall hardly venture to "set a mark of reprobation on it." Still we have some objections to the style, which we think savors more of the pedantic spirit of Shakespear's time than of his own genius; more of controversial divinity, and the logic of Peter Lombard, than of the inspiration of the Muse. It transports us quite as much to the manners of the court, and the quirks of courts of law, as to the scenes of nature

or the fairy-land of his own imagination. Shakespear has set himself to imitate the tone of polite conversation then prevailing among the fair, the witty, and the learned, and he has imitated it but too faithfully. It is as if the hand of Titian had been employed to give grace to the curls of a full-bottomed periwig, or Raphael had attempted to give expression to the tapestry figures in the House of Lords. Shakespear has put an excellent description of this fashionable jargon into the mouth of the critical Holofernes "as too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it"; and nothing can be more marked than the difference when he breaks loose from the trammels he had imposed on himself, "as light as bird from brake," and speaks in his own person.-HAZLITT, Characters of Shakespear's Plays.

THE LESSON OF THE PLAY

The inner and ideal center upon which this graceful piece turns in the light, playful movement of its humor -is the significant contrast between the fresh reality of life which ever renews its youth, and the abstract, dry and dead, study of philosophy. This contrast, when, in absolute strictness, it completely separates the two sides that belong to one another, at once contains an untruth which equally affects both sides, deprives both of their claim of right, and leads them into folly and into contradiction with themselves. That philosophy which disregards all reality and seeks to bury itself within itself, either succeeds in entombing itself in the barren sand of a shallow, absurd and pedantic learning, or else overcome by the fascinations of youthful life-it becomes untrue to itself, turns into its opposite, and is justly derided as mere affectation and empty pretense. One of these results is exhibited here in the case of the learned Curate Sir Nathaniel, and the Schoolmaster Holofernes, two starched representatives of the retailers of learned trifles, and in the pompous, bombastic Spanish Knight, a very Don

Quixote in high-flown phraseology; the other is exhibited in the fate of the King and his associates. Owing to their capricious endeavor to gain knowledge and to study philosophy by living an entirely secluded life, they at once fall into all the frivolities and follies of love; in spite of their oaths and vows of fraternity, nature and living reality assert themselves and win an easy victory. And yet the victory of false wisdom is in reality nothing more than a victory of folly over folly. For nature and reality, taken by themselves, are only changing pictures, transient phenomena to interpret which correctly is the task of the inquiring mind. When they are not rightly understood, when the ethical relations forming their substance are not recognized, then life itself degenerates into a mere semblance, all the activity and pleasure in life become mere play and frivolity; without the seriousness of this recognition, love is mere tinsel, while talent, intelligence and culture become mere vain wit and an empty play of thoughts. This recognition is not, however, attained by communities for philosophical study and discussions, but by serious self-examination, by the exercise of selfcontrol and the curbing of one's own lusts and desires, by seclusion only in this sense, and for this end. This, therefore, is imposed upon the Prince and his companions by their ladies as a punishment for their arrogance. The fine and ever correct judgment of noble women is here as triumphant as their great talent for social wit and refined intrigue. The moral of the piece may be said to be contained in the speech of the Princess where she condemns the King to a twelvemonth's fast and strict seclusion, in the sense intimated above, and again in the words of Rosaline, in which she makes it a condition to the vain Biron—a man who boasts of the power of his mind and wit in social intercourse-that, to win her love he shall for a twelvemonth from day to day visit "the speechless sick" and "converse with groaning wretches," and, in order to exercise all the powers of his wit, demands of him "to force the pained impotent to smile." The end of the

comedy thus, to a certain extent, returns to where it began: both sides of the contrast out of which it arose prove themselves untenable in their one-sided exclusiveness; the highest delight and pleasure of existence, all wit and all talents are mere vanity without the earnestness and depth of the thoughtful mind which apprehends the essence of life; but study and philosophy, also, are pure folly when kept quite apart from real life. It is the same contrast as that between Spring and Winter (cuckoo and owl): if separate from one another they would lead either to excessive luxuriousness or to a deadly state of torpidity; but they are not separate and are not intended to be separate, their constant change in rising out of and passing over one into the other, in short, their mutual inter-action produces true life. -ULRICI, Shakspeare's Dramatic Art.

THE POET'S METRICAL REPERTOIRE

Love's Labor's Lost has claims to be considered Shakespeare's earliest original play, and it is found to be the one in which his metrical repertoire is most varied. We may erect a metrical scale, at the bottom of which is prose; next in order comes blank verse; rhymed couplets are a degree more elevated; and at the top come measures more lyrical than the couplet, such as alternate rhyming, or even trochaic and anapastic rhythms. The alternation of these metrical styles is well illustrated in the central scene of the play, when the perjured celibates discover one another. Biron is the first on the ground and his soliloquy is in prose. The scene can hardly be said to have commenced until the arrival of another of the band, to be followed at intervals by the rest, each to expose in fancied solitude the perjury which is to be overheard. From this point the scene may be said to be in the medium measure of rhymed couplets, broken by brief drops to prose or irregular verse where the different parts of the scene join on to one another, and rising to climaxes of the elaborate lyrics. Thus three of the lovers read amatory effusions in lyrics; the