Lep. What manner o' thing is your crocodile ?

Cæs.

Ant.

And the tears of it are wet.

Will this description satisfy him?

With the health that Pompey gives him; else he is a very epicure.

Pom. This health to Lepidus.

Ant. Bear him ashore.-I'll pledge it for him, Pompey.

Eno. There's a strong fellow, Menas.

Men. Why?

[Pointing to the Attendant who carries off Lepidus.

Eno. A bears the third part of the world, man: seest not?

Is not this "hoaxing" identical with the Sonnets 58 and 63. "Oh, how I faint," &c. &c.; "by spirits taught to write above a mortal pitch," by the Devil, Belzebub, and Mephistophiles. Yet these sonnets are taken in a serious light by the commentators, who do not perceive, that Shakspere is quizzing "the better spirit," nor do they see the delicate irony, with which he touches up the young Earl himself.

As Marlowe got his livelihood by writing plays, what was more natural, the theatres being closed on account of the plague, than that such a character should act the sycophant and panegyrize the rich and generous Southampton-the liberal patron of the Muses, and at the same time also, "his especial friend".

Pom.

Lepidus flatters both,
Of both is flatter'd; but he neither loves,
Nor either cares for him.

Act iii. sc. 2. Agrippa and Enobarbus.

Agr.
'Tis a noble Lepidus.
Eno. A very fine one: O, how he loves Cæsar!

Agr. Nay, but how dearly he adores Mark Antony!
Eno. Cæsar? Why, he's the Jupiter of men.
Agr. What's Antony? The god of Jupiter.
Eno. Spake you of Cæsar? How? the non-pareil!
Agr. O Antony! O thou Arabian bird!

Eno. Would you praise Cæsar, say,―Cæsar;

-go no further.

Agr. Indeed, he plied them both with excellent praises.
Eno. But he loves Cæsar best:-yet he loves Antony :

Ho! hearts, tongues, figures, scribes, bards, poets, cannot
Think, speak, cast, write, sing, number, ho, his love
To Antony. But as for Cæsar

Kneel down, kneel down, and wonder.

Agr.
Both he loves.
Eno. They are his shards, and he their beetle.

Can any Shaksperian critic explain or make a meaning out of the above beautiful piece of nonsense? What is meant by Agrippa saying, Antony is the god of Jupiter; when he knows that Cæsar's demon is the more powerful of the two; but light dawns upon us, on considering, that Marlowe, in his bombastic style, may have lauded Southampton as Jupiter, to whom Shakspere was a god; and Cæsar is "Cæsargo no further," is a direct reference to Sonnet 61.

Who is it that says most? which can say more,

Than this rich praise,- that you alone are you?
&c. &c.

Thus, this conversation, the imitations, and the hoaxing at Pompey's feast, all refer to the same epistle in the Sonnets, and to the same persons in the same relative position.

On the departure of Antony and Octavia, says,

Cæs.

Adieu, be happy!

Lep. Let all the number of the stars give light

To thy fair way!

And so exit Lepidus with Marlowe's "mighty line." May I ask, where did Shakspere meet with this character of Lepidus-a slight unmeritable man, a tried and valiant soldier, barren-spirited, learned, an imitator, easily hoaxed, drunken, and a gross-painting, grandiloquent poet?

To conclude, Antony is evidently not the Mark Antony of history, but the fully developed Shakspere of 1593—an archangel ruined; Lord Southampton is clearly pointed at in Enobarbus; the character of Marlowe is drawn with extraordinary accuracy; the Earl of Pembroke is very distinctly marked; and the allusion to Thomas Thorpe a home-thrust. It is impossible that Shakspere, in his fiftieth year, could, even offhand as a sketch, have written these passages without a clear and definite object; and yet the two apparently trifling and unmeaning conversations, the one with Menas, and the other about Lepidus, might have been omitted, and the parts of Pompey and Lepidus might have been dismissed in a few words, just like Fulvia, without injury to the body of the work; and perhaps the play would then have been cast in a more classical mould, less distasteful to French critics, and more worthy of a Daniel or a Pembroke's mother; but it would not have been a Reply to the tale in the Sonnets.

EXPLANATORY NOTES.

To avoid little disfiguring notes, the following words should be remembered; they occur several times :-Fair: beauty. To unfair to deprive of beauty. To owe to own. fault. Counterfeit portrait.

:

Amiss :

Sonnet 23.-' By' verse' is evidently a misprint for my; the poet means 'my immortal verse,' and not anybody's verse. Sonnet 42.-"My rose" was formerly applicable to young gentlemen as well as to young ladies; Ophelia says of Hamlet, that he was "the expectancy and rose of the fair state."

Sonnet 45.

None else to me, nor I to none alive,

That my steel'd sense or changes, right or wrong.1

It must be granted, "this passage is obscure, and that there is probably a misprint;" if we read, "or changes right or wrong," it might be explained, "whatever I do, I am always in the wrong, therefore my steel'd sense (in reality, his indignant feelings) will make no change, no difference between right or wrong towards others;" he will judge them as they judge

him.

Sonnets 48 and 67.-Notwithstanding "his singularly majestic personal presence," it has been supposed, that he was lame, from certain expressions in these two sonnets; but in each instance it means lame in character and not in body. Thus in the 67th, "Speak of my lameness and I straight will halt," in other words say, I am lame, and straight I will be lame, has no meaning, or at least he was not bodily lame be1 Ed. 1609.