impaled upon the wing, in their perpetual gold; its microscopic insects, "spacious in the possession of land and dirt," transfixed in all the swell and flutter of the moment; its fantastic apes, unrobed for inextinguishable mortal laughter and celestial tears, still playing, all unconsciously, their solemn pageants through; how could the showman explain all this to us-how could the player tell us what it meant?

How could the player's mercenary motive and the player's range of learning and experiment give us the key to this new application of the human reason to the human life, from the new vantage ground of thought, but just then rescued from the past, and built up painfully from all its wreck? How

could we understand, from such a source, this new, and strange, and persevering application of thought to life, not merely to society and to her laws, but to nature, too; pursuing her to her last retreats, and holding everywhere its mirror up to her, reflecting the whole boundary of her limitations; laying bare, in its cold, clear, pure depths, in all their unpolite, undraped scientific reality, the actualities which society, as it is, can only veil, and the evils which society, as it is, can only hide and palliate?

In vain the shrieking queen remonstrates, for, it is the impersonated reason whose clutch is on her, and it says, you go not hence till you have seen the inmost part of you. But does all this tell on the thousand pounds? Is the ghost's word good for that?

No wonder that Hamlet refused to speak, or to be commanded to any utterance of harmony, let the critics listen, and entreat as they would, while this illiterate performer, who knew no touch of all that divine music of his, from its lowest note to the top of his key, was still sounding him and fretting him. We shall take another key and another interpreter with us when we begin to understand a work which comprehends, in its design, all our human aims and activities, and tracks them to their beginnings and ends; which demands the ultimate, scientific perpetual reason in all our life—a work which dares to defer the punishment of the crime that society visits with her most dreaded penalties, till all the principles of the human activity have been collected; till all the human conditions have been explored; till the only uni

versal rational human principle is found -a work which dares to defer the pun. ishment of the crime that society con demns, till its principle has been tracked through the crime which she tolerates; through the crime which she sanctions; through the crime which she crowns with all her honors.

We are, indeed, by no means insensible to the difference between this Shakespeare drama, and that on which it is based, and that which surrounds it. We do, indeed, already pronounce that difference, and not faintly, in our word Shakespeare; for that is what the word now means with us, though we received it with no such significance. Its historical development is but the next step in our progress.

Yes, there were men in England then, who had heard somewhat of those masters of the olden time, hight Eschylus and Sophocles-men who had heard of Euripides, too, and next, Aristophanes-men who had heard of Terence, and not of Terence only, but of his patrons-men who had heard of Plato, too, and of his master. There were men in England, in those days, who knew well enough what kind of an instrumentality the drama had been in its original institution, and with what voices it had then spoken; who knew, also, its permanent relations to the popular mind, and its capability for adaptation to new social exigencies; men, quick enough to perceive, and ready enough to appreciate to the utmost, the facilities which this great organ of the wisdom of antiquity offered for effectual communication between the loftiest mind, at the height of its culture, and that mind of the world in which this, impelled by no law of its own ordaining, seeks ever its own self-completion and perpetuity.

And where had this mighty instrument of popular sway, this mechanism for moving and moulding the multitude, its first origin, but among men initiated in the profoundest religious and philosophic mysteries of their time, among men exercised in the control and administration of public affairs; men clothed even with imperial sway, the joint administrators of the government of Athens, when Athens sat on the summit of her power, the crowned mistress of the seas, the imperial ruler of "a thousand cities."

Yes, Theseus, and Solon, and Cleis

thenes and Pythagoras, must be its antecedents there; it could not be produced there, till all Athena had been for ages in Athens, till Athena had been for ages in all; till three centuries of Olympiads had poured the Grecian lifeblood through it, from Byzantium to Sicily; it could not be produced there, till the life of the state was in each true Athenian nerve, till each true Athenian's nerve was in the growing state; it could not begin to be produced there, till new religious inspirations from the east had reached, with their foreign stimulus, the deeper sources of the national life, till the secret philosophic tenet of the inner temple, had overflowed, with new gold, the ancient myth, and kindled, with new fires, the hearts of the nation's leaders. The gay summits of Homer's "ever-young" Olympus, must be reached and overlaid anew from the earth's central mysteries; the Dyonisian procession must enter the temple; the road to it must cross Egaleos; the Pnyx must empty its benches into it; Piræus must crowd its stranger's seat with her many costumes, before Eschylus or Sophocles could find an audience to command all their genius. Nay, Zeno and Anaxagoras must send their pupils thither, and Socrates must come in, and the most illustrious scholars of the Olympian cities, from Abdera to Leontium, must be found there, before all the latent resources of the Grecian drama could be unfolded.

And there were men in England, in the age of Elizabeth, who had mastered the Greek and Roman history, and not only that, but the history of their own institutions-men who knew precisely what kind of crisis in human history that was which they were born to occupy. And they had seen the indigenous English drama struggling up, through the earnest, but childish, exhibitions of the cathedral-through "Miracles," and "Mysteries," and "Moralities," to be arrested, in its yet undeve oped vigor, with the unfit and unyielding forms of the finished Grecian art; and when, too, by the combined effect of institutions otherwise at variance, all that had, till then, made its life, was suddenly abstracted from it. The royal ordinances which excluded it, henceforth, from all that vital range of topics which the censorship of a capricious and timorous despotism might include among the inter

dicted questions of church and state, found it already expelled from the religious sanctuaries-in which not the drama only, but all that which we call art, par excellence, has its birth and nurture. And that was the crisis in which the pulpit began to open its new drain upon it, having only a vicious play-house, where once the indefinite priestly authority had summoned all the soul to its spectacles, and the longdrawn aisle, and fretted vault, had lent to them their sheltering sanctities; where once, as of old, the Athenian temple had pressed its scene into the heart of the Athenian hill-the holy hill-and opened its subterranean communication with Eleusis, while its centre was the altar on which the gods themselves threw incense.

And yet, there was a moment in the history of the national genius, when, roused to its utmost-stimulated to its best capability of ingenuity and invention-it found itself constrained to stoop at its height, even to the threshold of this same degraded play-house. There were men in England, who knew what latent capacities that debased instrument of genius yet contained within it-who knew that in the master's hand it might yet be made to yield, even then, and under those conditions, better music than any which those old Greek sons of song had known how to wake in it.

These men knew well enough the proper relation between the essence of the drama and its form. "Considering poetry in respect to the verse, and not to the argument," says one, “ though men in learned languages may tie themselves to ancient measures; yet, in modern languages, it seems to me as free to make new measures as to make new dances; and, in these things, the sense is a better judge than the art." Surely, a Schlegel himself could not give us a truer Shakespearean rule than that. Indeed, if we can but catch them when the wind is south-south-west-these grave and oracular Elizabethan witswe shall find them putting two and two together, now and then, and drawing. inferences, and making distinctions which would have much surprised their "uncle-fathers" and "aunt-mothers" at the time, if they had but noted them. But, as they themselves tell us, "in regard to the rawness and unskillfulness of the hands through which they pass, the greatest matters are sometimes car

granting of a thousand pounds at a time, if that were needed to complete his purchase-if this good man, sufficiently perplexed already with the developments which the modern criticism has by degrees already laid at his door, does here positively refuse to go any further with us on this road, why e'en let us shake hands with him and part, he as his business and desire shall point him, "for every man hath business and desire, such as it is," and not without a grateful recollection of the good service he has rendered us.

The publisher of these plays let his name go down still and to all posterity on the cover of it. They were his plays. He brought them out, -he and his firm. They took the scholar's text, that dull black and white, that mere ink and paper, and made of it a living, speaking, many-colored, glittering reality, which even the groundlings of that time could appreciate, in some sort. What was Hamlet to them, without his "inky cloak" and his "forest of feathers" and his "razed shoes" and "the roses" on them? And they came out of this man's bag—he was the owner of the "wardrobe" and of the other "stage properties." He was the owner of the manuscripts; and if he came honestly by them, whose business was it to inquire any further, then? If there was no one who chose, just then, to claim the authorship of them, whose else should they be? Was not the actor himself a poet, and a very facetious one, too? Witness the remains of him, the incontestible poetical remains of him, which have come down to us. What if his illnatured cotemporaries, whose poetic glories he was eclipsing forever with those new plays of his, did assail him on his weak points, and call him, in the face of his time, "a Johannes Factotum," and held up to public ridicule his particular style of acting, plainly intimating that it was chargeable with that very fault which the prince of Denmark directs his tragedians to omit -did not the blundering editor of that piece of offensive criticism get a decisive hint from some quarter, that he might better have withheld it; and was it not humbly retracted and hushed up directly? Some of the earlier anonymous plays, which were included in the collection published, after this player's decease, as the plays of William Shakespeare, are. indeed, known to have been

produced anonymously at other theatres, and by companies with which this actor had never any connection; but the poet's company and the player's were, as it seems, two different things; and that is a fact which the criticism and history of these plays, as it stands at present, already exhibits. Several of the plays which form the nucleus of the Shakespeare drama had already been brought out, before the Stratford actor was yet in a position to assume that relation to it which proved so advantageous to his fortunes. Such a nucleus of the Shakespeare drama there was already, when the name which this actor bore, with such orthographical variations as the purpose required, began to be assumed as the name and device of that new sovereignty of genius which was then first rising and kindling behind its cloud, and dimming and overflowing with its greater glory all the less, and gilding all it shone on. The machinery of these theatrical establishments offered, indeed, the most natural and effective, as well as, at that time, on other accounts, the most convenient mode of exhibition for that particular class of subjects which the genius of this particular poet naturally inclined him to meddle with. He had the most profoundly philosophical reasons for preferring that mode of exhibiting his poems, as will be seen hereafter.

And, when we have once learned to recognize the actor's true relations to the works which have given to his name its anomalous significance, we shall be prepared, perhaps, to accept, at last, this great offer of aid in our readings of these works, which has been lying here now two hundred and thirty years, unnoticed; then, and not till then, we shall be able to avail ourselves, at last, of the aid of those "friends of his," to whom, two hundred and thirty years ago, "knowing that his wit could no more lie hid than it could be lost," the editors of the first printed collection of these works venture to refer us; "those other friends of his, whom, IF WE NEED, can be our guides; and, IF WE NEED THEM NOT, we are able to lead ourselves and others, and such readers they wish him."

If we had accepted either of these two conditions-if we had found ourselves with those who need this offered guidance, or with those who need it not

-if we had but gone far enough in our readings of these works to feel the want of that aid, from exterior sources, which is here proffered us-there would not have been presented to the world, at this hour, the spectacle-the stupendous spectacle of a nation referring the origin of its drama-a drama more noble, and learned, and subtle than the Greek--to the invention--the accidental, unconscious invention-of a stupid, ignorant, illiterate, third-rate play-actor.

If we had, indeed, but applied to these works the commonest rules of historical investigation and criticism, we might, ere this, have been led to inquire, on our own account, whether "this player here," who brought them out, might not possibly, in an age like that, like the player in Hamlet, have had some friend, or "friends," who, could, "an' if they would," or "an' if they might," explain his miracles to us, and the secret of his "poor cell."

If we had accepted this suggestion, the true Shakespeare would not have been now to seek. In the circle of that patronage with which this player's fortunes brought him in contact, in that illustrious company of wits and poets, we need not have been at a loss to find the philosopher who writes, in his prose as well, and over his own name also, "In Nature's INFINITE BOOK OF SECRESY, A little I can read;"

we should have found one, at least, furnished for that last and ripest proof of learning which the drama, in the unmiraculous order of the human development, must constitute; that proof of it in which philosophy returns from history, from its noblest fields, and from her last analysis, with the secret and material of the creative synthesis-with the secret and material of art. With this direction, we should have been able to identify, ere this, the Philosopher who is only the Poet in disguise-the Philosopher who calls himself the New Magician-the Poet who was toiling and plotting to fill the globe with his Arts, and to make our common, everyday human life poetical-who would have all our life, and not a part of it, learned, artistic, beautiful, religi

ous.

We should have found, ere this, ONE, with learning broad enough, and deep enough, and subtle enough, and comprehensive enough, one with nobility of aim and philosophic and poetic genius enough, to be able to claim his own, his own immortal progeny-undwarfed, unblinded, undeprived of one ray or dimple of that all-pervading reason that informs them; one who is able to re-claim them, even now, "cured and perfect in their limbs, and absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them."