act whereby he thinks to avenge his own and his brethren's wrongs, the national curse overtakes him: in standing up for the law he has but strengthened his enemies' hands, and sharpened their weapons against himself; and the terrible Jew sinks at last into the poor, pitiable, heart-broken Shylock.

The Merchant of Venice is justly distinguished among Shakespeare's dramas for the beauty of particular scenes and passages. For descriptive power, the opening scene between the Merchant and his friends is not easily rivaled, and can hardly fail to live in the memory of any one that has an eye for such things. Equally fine in its way is the scene between Tubal and Shylock, where the latter is so torn with the struggle of conflicting passions, his heart now sinking with grief at the account of his fugitive daughter's expenses, now leaping with malignant joy at the report of Antonio's losses at sea. The trial scene, with its tugging vicissitudes of passion and its hush of terrible expectation, now ringing with the Jew's sharp, spiteful snaps of malice, now made musical with Portia's strains of eloquence, now holy with Antonio's noble gushes of friendship, is hardly surpassed in tragic power any where; and as it forms the catastrophe, so it concentrates the interest of the whole play. Scarce inferior in its kind is the night scene of Lorenzo and Jessica, bathed as it is in love, moonlight, "touches of sweet harmony," and soullifting discourse, followed by the grave moral reflections of Portia, as she approaches her home, and sees its lights, and hears its music. The bringing in this passage of ravishing lyrical sweetness, so replete with the most soothing and tranquilizing effect, close upon the intense dramatic excitement of the preceding scene, is such a transition as we may find nowhere but in Shakespeare, and shows his unequaled mastery over the mind's capacities of delight. The affair of the rings, with the harmless perplexities growing out of it, is a well-managed device for letting the mind down from the tragic height, whereon it lately stood, to the merry conclusion which the play requires. Critics,

indeed, may easily quarrel with this merry after-piece; but it stands justified by the tribunal to which criticism itself must bow, the spontaneous feelings of all such as are willing to be made happier and wiser, without beating their brains about the how and wherefore.

Before leaving this fruitful theme, it may be worth the while to consider, for a moment, what a wide diversity of materials are here drawn up and moulded into unity of life and impression. Ben Jonson, in his preface to The Alchemist, sets it down as "the disease of the unskilful to think rude things greater than polished, or scattered more numerous than composed." A principle very well illustrated in the play before us. One can hardly realize how many things are there brought together, they are ordered in such perfect concert and harmony; the greatness of the work being thus hidden in its fine proportions. In many of the Poet's dramas we are surprised at the great variety of character: here, besides this, we have also a remarkable variety of plot; and, admirable as may be the skill displayed in the characters, severally considered, the interweaving of so many several plots, without the least confusion or embarrassment, evinces a still higher mastership. For many and various as are the forms and aspects of life, they all emphatically live together, as though they had but one circulation. So that the play is like a large, full-grown, fair-spreading tree, which we know is made up of divers smaller trees, all developed from and cohering in one common life.

Now, admitting the excellence of workmanship shown in the several plots and characters, there is a further question, namely: What business have they here? by what law or principle are they thus brought together? A question that has been handled with so much of ingenuity, or of something better, by Ulrici the German critic, as may well entitle his view to a place in this connection. He regards the whole play as a manifold working out of the principle, that all forms of right and justice, if pushed beyond a

certain point, pass over into their opposites, so that extreme right becomes extreme wrong, thus verifying the old maxim, summum jus summa injuria. Which is best exemplified in Shylock, who has formal right on his side, in that he claims no more than Antonio has freely bound himself to pay; but in the strict rigid exacting of this claim he runs into the foulest wrong, because in his case justice is not justice unless it be tempered with mercy: that is, to keep its own nature, it must be an offshoot from the higher principle of charity. So, also, the tying up of Portia's hand to the disposal of chance, and robbing her of all share in the choice of a husband, rests ultimately on paternal right; yet this extreme right is an extreme wrong, because it might involve her in misery for life, but that chance, a lucky thought of the moment, leads to a happy result. Likewise in case of Jessica; her conduct were exceedingly wrong, but that she has good cause for it in the approved malignity of her father's temper; for justice cannot blame her for forsaking both the person and the religion of one, even though her father, whose character is so steeped in cruelty. Again, in the matter of the rings, the same principle is reflected, right and wrong being here driven to that extreme point where they pass over into each other: only Portia understands or feels this truth, because her mind lives in the harmonies of things, and is not poisoned with any self-willed abstraction. Which yields a further justification of the fifth act: "it effaces the tragic impression which still lingers on the mind from the fourth act; the last vibrations of the harsh tones which were there struck here die away; in the gay and amusing trifling of love the sharp contrarieties of right and wrong are playfully reconciled." Thus while the several parts are disposed with clearness and precision, each proceeding so naturally of itself, and alongside the others, that we never lose the thread, at the same time a free living principle pervades them all, rounding them off into a perfect organic whole. And the several parts and persons not

only cohere with one another, but with the general circumstances wherein they occur. Thus in the character of Portia, for example, the splendor of Italian skies, and scenery, and art, is reproduced; their spirit lives in her imagination, and is complicated with all she does and says.

COMMENTS

By SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLARS

ANTONIO

In Antonio, the royal merchant, who, amid all his fortune and splendor, is a victim to melancholy and spleen induced by forebodings of coming disaster, Shakespeare has certainly expressed something of his own nature. Antonio's melancholy is closely related to that which, in the years immediately following, we shall find in Jaques in As You Like It, in the Duke in Twelfth Night, and in Hamlet. It forms a sort of mournful undercurrent to the joy of life which at this period is still dominant in Shakespeare's soul. It leads, after a certain time, to the substitution of dreaming and brooding heroes for those men of action and resolution who, in the poet's brighter youth, had played the leading parts in his dramas. For the rest, despite the princely elevation of his nature, Antonio is by no means faultless. He has insulted and baited Shylock in the most brutal fashion on account of his faith and his blood. We realize the ferocity and violence of the mediæval prejudice against the Jews when we find a man of Antonio's magnanimity so entirely a slave to it. And when, with a little more show of justice, he parades his loathing and contempt for Shylock's money-dealings, he strangely (as it seems to us) overlooks the fact that the Jews have been carefully excluded from all other means of livelihood, and have been systematically allowed to scrape together gold in order that their hoards may always be at hand when circumstances render it convenient to plunder them. Antonio's attitude towards Shylock cannot possibly be Shakespeare's own. Shylock cannot under