She affords, as I consider it, only another instance of what women will be brought to, by a love which listens to no considerations, which disregards all else beside, when the interests, the wishes, the happiness, the honour, or even the passions, caprices, and failings of the beloved object are concerned; and if the world, in a compassionate mood, will gently scan the softer errors of sister-woman, may we not claim a kindly construing for the motives which plunged into the Aceldama of this blood-washed tragedy the sorely urged and brokenhearted Lady Macbeth?

TIMON OF ATHENS.

THE story of Timon the Misanthrope was popular not only in his native land of Greece, but in the English literature of the Middle Ages. Classical readers, who are of course acquainted with the lively dialogue of Lucian, were once apt to look upon the philosopher of Samosata as affording the original of the play of Shakspeare; but I doubt if Lucian, though familiar to the learned, was popularly known even at the end of the sixteenth century in England. Shakspeare was indebted for the hint, and the principal

incidents of his drama, to Plutarch, translated from the French of Amyot by Sir Thomas North, and to Painter's Palace of Pleasure. Dr. Farmer, in his very shallow and pretending Essay on the Learning of Shakspeare, announces this important fact among others equally important, with much flourish; and those who feel inclined for such inquiries, will find sufficient to satisfy their curiosity in the voluminous notes gathered by the industry of Malone, Steevens, and Boswell.

To use the phrase of Dr. Farmer, which immediately succeeds his notice of Timon, "were this a proper place for such a disquisition," I should have something to say, not merely on the learning of Shakspeare,—a point on which I differ exceedingly with the Master of Emanuel,—but on the utility of learning to a dramatist. I should be prepared to contend, that though the greater the store of knowledge, no matter whence derived,-from books, from observation, from reflection,-possessed by a writer on any subject, and the larger the field whence an author of works of imagination can cull or compare, so much more copious will be his sources of thought, illustration, ornament, and allusions; yet that the dramatist, and indeed the poet in general, (the exceptions are few, and easily accounted for,) should not travel far out of the ordi

nary and beaten path for the main staple and material of his poem. Without immediately referring to the question of classical learning, many reasons exist for thinking that Richard the Third was not so deformed either in mind or body as he is represented in the two plays in which he appears in Shakspeare, or in the single one into which they are both clumsily rolled for the stage; but popular opinion, and the ordinary chronicles of the times, so represented him. Northern antiquaries are generally of opinion that Macbeth was the true king, and that the blood-stained mantle of cruelty and oppression ought to be shifted to the shoulders of the "gracious Duncan," who was in reality the usurper. In like manner we can conceive that if the authorities of Saxo-Grammaticus or Geoffry of Monmouth could be hunted up, a different colouring might be given to the tales of Hamlet or Lear. But what is all this to the purpose? It is no part of the duty of the dramatist to invade the province of the antiquary or the critic; and yet, for confining himself to his proper department, he incurs the censure of Farmer, and other persons of the same calibre of intellect. If Shakspeare had had all the concentrated knowledge of all the antiquarian societies of Denmark, Scotland, Norway, or Wales, he would have completely

forgotten, what it was utterly impossible he should forget, the first principles of dramatic art, if he depicted Macbeth, Lear, or Hamlet in any other manner than that which he has chosen. He would not have taken the trouble, even if editions of Saxo-Grammaticus or Hector Boethius were as plenty as blackberries, to turn over a single page of their folios. He found all that his art wanted in the historians or romancewriters of the day,-in Hall or Holinshed, or the Tragical History of Hamblet, and that, too, translated, not from the Latin of the Danish annalist, but from the French of the story-teller Belleforest. Common sense would dictate this course; but if the learned languages be wanted to support it, I may quote Horace, who, being eminently the poet of common sense, speaks for all times and countries.

"Rectiùs Iliacum carmen deducis in actus,

Quàm si proferres ignota indictaque primus."

Take the tale or the legend as it is popularly believed for the foundation of your drama, and leave to others the obscure glory of hunting after new lights, or unheard-of adventures.

In his classical plots the same principle holds. In his Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus,

and Timon of Athens, "it is notorious," to use the
words of Dr. Farmer, " that much of his matter-of-fact
knowledge is deduced from Plutarch; but in what
language he read him, hath yet been the question."
A more idle question could not have been asked. He
might, for anything we know to the contrary, have
read him in Greek; but for dramatic purposes he used
him in English. Sir Thomas North's translation of
Plutarch was a remarkably popular book; and Shak-
speare, writing not for verbal critics, anxiously collating
the version with the original, and on the look-out to
catch slips of the pen or mistakes of the press,* but

* Such as Lydia for Libya, in Antony and Cleopatra. Act iii. Sc. 6.

Upton, correcting it from the text of Plutarch, substituted Libya ; and Dr. Johnson and other commentators adopted the correction. Farmer had the great merit of discovering that the word is Lydia. in North, whom Shakspeare followed. It was a great shame indeed that he had not noticed the error, and collated the English with ell the Greek! In the same spirit of sagacious criticism it is remarked, that Cæsar is made to leave to the Roman people his gardens, &c. "on this side Tiber," whereas it should be "on that side Tiber," the original being wéρav тov πотapov. North translates it, however, "on this side," and Shakspeare again follows him without turning to the Greek. Farmer, with an old rhetorical

sillys

pass.

those Farmer was simply showing the error of whe sopposed that Shakespeare had followed the fove the All this is moolent chreanery.