To bid the wind abase he now prepares,

And where he run, or fly, they know not whither. For through his mane and tail the high wind sings, Fanning the hairs, which heave like feather'd wings. That of Venus depicting the fierceness of the boar is bold His eyes like glow-worms shine when he doth fret, His snout digs sepulchres where'er he goes.

That Shakspeare may be traced in Venus and Adonis is undeniable; there are numerous passages, particularly such as relate to love, that bear a strong resemblance to others interspersed throughout his plays. The mind of the observer will often discover the similarity by asort of intuition, when the passage may not be verbally the same. There is often a certain character, a dim likeness connecting the resemblance of one passage in a writer with another; that, perhaps, for who knows the mysterious workings of intellect? may be of the same nature as the image which produced the second in the mind of the author from association with the first. I fancy such a resemblance in the following. "Sweet boy," she says, "this night I'll waste in 'sorrow, For my sick heart commands my eyes to watch:

Tell me, love's master, shall we meet to-morrow?"

Now the following occurs to me in Romeo and Juliet, and it is probable that this tragedy was his next performance.

Sweet, so would I :

Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing,

Good night, good night, parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good night till it be morrow!

How like Shakspeare are these lines where Venus laments Adonis :-
Alas, poor world, what treasure hast thou lost!
What face remains alive that's worth the viewing?
Whose tongue is music now? what canst thou boast
Of things long since, or any thing ensuing?

The flowers are sweet, their colours fresh and trim,
But true sweet beauty lived and died with him!

How beautifully are the eyes of Venus described, as she is looking upon Adonis and weeping :

But hers, which through the crystal tears gave light,
Shone like the moon in water seen by night.

The Rape of Lucrece is by no means equal in merit to Venus and Adonis; yet there are some fine passages here and there, particularly in Lucretia's lamentation. The sonnets partake too much of the reigning taste of the time, though they do not bear any resemblance to those of Sir Philip Sidney, which are obscure and full of art. Shakspeare's are more natural, and are in a finer spirit of poetry as might have been expected. There is a plaintiveness about those of Sidney which is not to be found in Shakspeare's; but in those of the latter there are mastertouches of the poet. Still they have too much sameness; and if, as there is some reason to believe, they were his last productions, they are a little out of place from the pen of a man who had passed the fire of youth and the prime of manhood. Shakspeare, however, bowed to the reigning taste, and writ his sonnets, most likely, to an ideal mistress ; if to a real one, the fair dame must have had a strong antipathy to the

marriage state, or the poet a curious faith in the efficacy of one argument for touching her heart. He woos his mistress constantly by representing how miserable it is for beauty to be childless, and rings the changes upon this theme through fifty sonnets. The presumption is, that Shakspeare knew nothing of Italian literature, and followed preceding examples among his own countrymen, who had no idea of any but the Petrarchian love-sonnet, deeming its use sacred to passion alone. Poets of his time had their ideal mistresses, if they had none of flesh and blood; and even at later periods they have puzzled their biographers to discover who the fair one might have been among their contemporaries, in the praises of whom they had been lavish, when the matchless being never existed out of their own imaginations*. If, however, the sonnets were the poet's later productions, as there is every reason to believe they were, it appears that he was repressed by some fancied rule from giving to them that variety of character which it was in his power to have done, and this rule must have been the example of preceding writers; and it is the more wonderful that they possess so little variety, when no poet, judging from his dramatic writings, had it more in his power to avoid sameness. That many of these sonnets are very beautiful must be acknowledged, in despite of conceits, and quibbles, and the sustaining a species of artificial love far removed from the natural affection which he best knew how to describe, and which was alone worthy his power of description; yet they merit close attention, they abound in passages that glow with imagination, and flow with singular ease. There is astonishing freedom of style in them for the period at which they were written; indeed it would be superfluous to remark, what has been often observed before,-the vast debt our language owes to Shakspeare, in refining it and showing what it was capable of effecting. The following sonnet intimates again the poet's confidence in his own talents before alluded to :

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date :
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,

By chance, or Nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest :
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

* There does not appear to me a shadow of ground for the conjectures of some late writers, respecting the origin and object of these sonnets. Shakspeare was past middle age when he wrote them, and they were published in 1609, during his lifetime. Conjecture may follow conjecture without end, but that which is certain is alone worthy of belief. Mr. Malone conjectured that Romeo and Juliet was written in 1591, but he could only substantiate its appearance in 1595. Some writers are too fond of inference where it is not needed. Shakspeare need not have been in love to have written his sonnets. Their object was doubtless ideal, because if sonnets were to be written at all, in those days, they must have been addressed to some mistress. It would be still more improbable to suppose he wrote them for another.

To me the allusions in this sonnet are beautiful; it has pathos and sentiment, and seems to confirm the idea of having been among the last things the great poet penned, as it refers to his age:

That time of year thou may'st in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the West,

Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second-self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

I know not how the idea of Shakspeare's unconsciousness of his powers is to be supported on reading this :

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes.
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crest and tombs of brass are spent.

How delicious is the following ! it has lusciousness, beauty, and marvellous ease. The commencement is truly worthy of Shakspeare, and reminds me strongly of his happy descriptions of morning in his plays.

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.
E'en so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all-triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out! alack! he was but one hour mine,

The region-cloud hath mask'd him from me now:

Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;

Suns of the world may stain, when heaven's sun staineth.

The sonnets of Shakspeare must, after all, be most valued for their intermixture of rich passages and imagery, and their connexion with their immortal author. One hundred and fifty-four sonnets, all running upon the same theme-all upon love, and yet descriptive of very few of its emotions, half of them turning upon the same idea, though

in many there is fine colouring and an exuberance of sweetness, cannot place them in any high rank as specimens of sonnet-writing. They are, however, well worthy frequent perusal; and what of Shakspeare's is there that is not?

1

The "Passionate Pilgrim" has great beauties, and many characteristic defects. Some exquisite passages have often been quoted from it without acknowledgment. "The Lovers Lament" is worthy of being learnt by heart: yet it is rather Spenserian than Shakspearian.acad The description of her faithless "maiden-tongued" lover by the disconsolate complainer, has surprising vigour and truth; her detail of the arguments by which her lover overcame her is also very happy. The influence of tears is thus finely alluded to.

O father, what a hell of witchcraft lies
In the small orb of one particular tear!
But with the inundation of the eyes
What rocky heart to water will not wear!
What breast so cold that is not warmed here !
O cleft effect! cold modesty, hot wrath,
Both fire from hence and chill extincture hath!

But I must quote no more.

I have thus glanced at a work in retrospective literature not ranked as it deserves, I must not be lengthy, though I have hardly skimmed the poems, and thereby done them injustice; yet what I have said may induce some discriminating readers to take them down from a dusty shelf and peruse them. They will find themselves repaid for their trouble-they will find much weighty bullion and pure gold, in its rough state, perhaps, but not less rich on that account, Y. J.

It was a remark of Horne Tooke's, that in the matter of advice there are two sorts of fools; those who will give, and those who will not take it. Now, as these embrace between them almost every man that breathes, there cannot be a subject quod magis ad nos pertinet. Yet, as every man's business is nobody's business, the theme is fairly going a begging. Like the "roasted pigs which run through the streets with knives and forks in their backs," methinks, it apostrophizes the periodical writer, as he passes along in his literary jog-trot, i. e. currente calamo, and crying "Come touch on me," puts in its claim to be served up pro bono publico. Not that we would insinuate the matter to be untouched; quite the reverse: but it has uniformly been handled in such a dull, tiresome, common-place, lack-a-daisical, sermonizing style, that "poppy and mandragoras, and all the drowsy syrups of" all the congregated universities of Europe could not render it more narcotic. Whoever will take the pains-having nothing better to do to inquire into this matter, and to turn over all that philosophy has produced for its illustration, will rise from his task with much the same sort of knowledge as the Bath mail-coachman has of the West of England, who, by dint of living on the road, is acquainted with the mile-stones, alehouse-signs, and country-seats within sight of his coach-box-but

no more.

All "this sort of thing" is very well for your authors in

folio, who, virtute officii, are bound to tell the reader, in return' for his "good and lawful money of Great Britain," whatever is not, in order to make a decent bulk for their book, before they come (in an appendix) to the few pages of what is; and who would ill discharge their functions, if they omitted to recount any one of the errors the world has committed respecting the matter in hand; telling the public, as if the public had never heard it before, how Cicero said this, how Plato talked like a madman concerning that, how Herodotus tells a story no one believes concerning the other; interlarding the whole with a due quantity of twice-two-are-four aphorisms, and with perpetual beggings of questions, after the most approved old fashion.

But we, who are " pent up" in the Utica of a single half-sheet (writers in fructu), and who are obliged to aim at being readablepray Heaven we succeed!-we, indeed, are compelled to go a little into the interior of the country, to leave the high-roads of literature, and pry into every hole and corner in search of novelty, leaving no stone unturned in order to "elevate and surprise." A tavern-keeper might as well hope to trade in musty victuals and sour wine, as a periodical hope for success in the common path. Nature and sense are nothing; we must be fantastical, and finical, and outlandish: and (novelty not being always attainable) if we take up with an old theme, we must have the art of a Monmouth-street clothier, and make our wares look ex as good as new," and shew no sign of their having been worn before. But to begin:

The disposition, impulse, instinct, propensity, or what you will, towards giving advice, is so universal among men, that, with the sole exception of those who sell it, no class in the community is exempt from the failing. They, indeed, who live by the trade, are cautious enough how they scatter their pearls to swine. The doctor, who, to the travelling question of "what would you advise me to take," answered, "Take advice"-is the type and model of the whole tribe. Law and physic are equally sententious and oracular; and they both hem in their assertions with such phalanxes of "ifs" and "buts," as seldom fail to leave the consultor in greater doubt than before. Yet, strange to say, this bought advice is almost the only species that is implicitly followed. So much, indeed, does the virtue of all counsel lie in the fee, that the best opinion is held to be useless, if gratuitously imparted: no man esteeming that worth having, which another does not hesitate to part withal. In this, therefore, the clergy are guilty of an egregious error, that they do not retail their opinions by the piece, but accept of a yearly stipend, and, doling out their weekly lucubrations gratis, "vex the dull ear of the drowsy hearer," by not first fixing his attention through an application to his pocket. Without this key, it would be difficult to understand the little use which is made of all the good advice which church and state procure to be administered to his Majesty's lieges, but which possesses so strikingly the singular property of "going in at one ear and out of the other." This is a fact that we press the more earnestly, as the matter of clerical remuneration is at present "before the public:"-but a word to the wise. to The same reason likewise explains the trifling benefit derived from those paternal admonitions which another of the government servants dispenses to the subject towards the close of our sessions and assizes, and which are proverbially inefficacious. Were the quantum meruit