confirm his good opinion of himself, as is often the case with Marlowe and Byron; but his mind is calm, fixed, and invincible in its self-esteem. The citadel of self cannot be conquered, can hardly be attacked, though the universe marshals all its pomp and circumstance to shame him from his complacency.

"I am a nobler substance than the stars:
And shall the baser overrule the better?
Or are they better since they are the bigger?

I have a will, and faculties of choice,

To do or not to do; and reason why

I do or not do this: the stars have none.

They know not why they shine, more than this taper,
Nor how they work, nor what. I'll change my course:

I'll piecemeal pull the frame of all my thoughts:

And where are all your Caput Algols then?

Your planets all being underneath the earth
At my nativity: what can they do?"

And again, hear the brave old heathen discourse of the invulnerability of a true master spirit who has trust in himself:

"The Master Spirit.

"Give me a spirit that on life's rough sea

Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind,
Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low,
That she drinks water, and her keel ploughs air.
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is: there's not any law
Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful

That he should stoop to any other law;

He goes before them and commands them all,
That to himself is a law rational."

The lines in Italics furnished Shelley a fit motto for his Revolt of Islam.

Chapman is supposed by Dr. Drake to be the author of those lines On Worthy Master Shakspeare and his Poems, signed J. M. S., and commencing,

"A mind reflecting ages past,”.

the noblest and justest of the poetical tributes to Shakspeare's supreme genius. We think the conjecture a shrewd one, and borne out by the internal testimony which the lines themselves offer. They are in Chapman's labored and "enormous " manner, - the images huge and intellectual, and shown through the dusky light of his peculiar imagination. Here is a specimen :

"To outrun hasty time, retrieve the fates,

-

Roll back the heavens, blow ope the iron gates
Of death and Lethe, where confused lie

Great heaps of ruinous mortality."

The reputation of THOMAS MIDDLETON, with modern readers, is chiefly based on his Witch, several often quoted scenes of which have been supposed to have suggested to Shakspeare the supernatural machinery of Macbeth. If this be true, it only proves Coleridge's remark, that a great genius pays usurious interest on what he borrows. The play itself is tedious, and not particularly poetical, and the witches are introduced to effect an object very far from sublime. Lamb, after extracting copiously from the play, adds the following eloquent and discriminative remarks:

"Though some resemblance may be traced between the charms in Macbeth and the incantations in this play, which is supposed to have preceded it, this coincidence will not detract much from the originality of Shakspeare. His witches are distinguished

from the witches of Middleton by essential differences. These are creatures to whom man or woman plotting some dire mischief might resort for occasional consultation. Those originate deeds of blood, and begin bad impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first meet with Macbeth's, he is spell-bound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination. These witches can hurt the body: those have power over the soul. Hecate, in Middleton, has a son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakspeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul Anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so they seem to be without human relations. They come with thunder and lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all we know of them. Except Hecate, they have no names; which heightens their mysteriousness. Their names, and some of the properties which Middleton has given to his hags, excite smiles. The weird sisters are serious things. Their presence cannot coëxist with mirth. But, in a lesser degree, the witches of Middleton are fine creations. Their power, too, is, in some measure, over the mind. They raise jars, jealousies, strifes, like a thick scurf o'er life." — Lamb, Vol. 1., p. 163.

The plays of Middleton are not, in general, up to the level of the time. He rambles loosely through his work, and taxes the patience of his readers without adequately rewarding it. Numerous passages in his dramas, however, show that he had that sway over the passions, and that fertility of fancy, which seemed native to all the dramatists of the period. Hazlitt concedes to his Women beware Women "a rich, marrowy vein of internal sentiment, with fine occasional insight into human nature, and cool, cutting irony of expression." In this play occurs the noted rhapsody on marriage, spoken by one who was returning, as he supposed, to a faithful wife,

but who finds her a vixen and adulteress. It reminds us of an early chapter in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister.

"The treasures of the deep are not so precious
As are the concealed comforts of a man
Locked up in woman's love. I scent the air
Of blessings when I come but near the house:
What a delicious breath marriage sends forth!
The violet bed 's not sweeter. Honest wedlock
Is like a banqueting-house built in a garden,
On which the spring's chaste flowers take delight
To cast their modest odors.

55

"Now for a welcome

Able to draw men's envies upon man:

A kiss now, that will hang upon my lip,
As sweet as morning dew upon a rose,
And full as long."

CYRIL TOURNEUR is a prominent name among the dramatists of the period. His two plays, The Atheist's Tragedy and The Revenger's Tragedy, are copiously quoted by Lamb. He has touches of the finest and highest genius. There runs through him a vein of the deepest philosophy. His tragedies evince a mind that has brooded long over its own thoughts, and sent searching glances into the unsounded depths of the soul. In his delineation of the stronger passions, he often startles and thrills the mind by terrible and unexpected flashes of truth. His diction is free, fearless, familiar, and direct, pervaded by fancy and imagination, and rarely bald and prosaic. There is one passage in The Revenger's Tragedy which is almost unequalled for tragic grandeur. Castiza is urged by her mother and her dis guised brother to accept the dishonorable proposals of a duke. Vindici, the brother, whose object is simply to test the virtue of his sister, eloquently sets forth the

advantages she will gain by sacrificing her honor. The mother adds:- "Troth, he says true:" and then Castiza vehemently exclaims:

I have endured you with an ear of fire;

Your tongues have struck hot irons on my face.
Mother, come from that poisonous woman there!

"Moth. Where?

"Cast. Do you not see her? she's too inward, then."

At the close of this scene, there is one of those beautiful touches of nature, conveyed by allusion, in which the old dramatists excel. Vindici says:

"Forgive me, Heaven, to call my mother wicked!

O, lessen not my days upon the earth!

I cannot honor her."

Lamb says, that the scene in which the brothers threaten their mother with death for consenting to the dishonor of their sister surpasses, in reality and life, any scenical illusion he ever felt. "I never read it," he says, "but my ears tingle, and I feel a hot blush spread my cheeks, as if I were presently about to 'proclaim' some such 'malefactions' of myself, as the brothers here rebuke in their unnatural parent, in words more keen and dagger-like than those which Hamlet speaks to his mother."

We extract one passage from this tragedy. Vindici addresses the skull of his dead lady:

"Here's an eye,

Able to tempt a great man, -to serve God;

A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble.
Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble,
A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo 'em,
To suffer wet damnation to run through 'em.

Here's a cheek keeps her color, let the wind go whistle :