engaged in bandying folly against folly, and he therefore does not such before those by whom he most desires to be respected. When alone with them, his true character appears;-and what can be more sensible? His counsels to his son have never been for worldly wisdom surpassed. The ten precepts of Lord Burleigh, addressed to his son Robert, on which it is generally supposed the apophthegms of Polonius are based, are perhaps equal in shrewdness, but they want the pithiness and condensation of verse. Neither are they as philosophical, being drawn, to talk logically, à posteriori, while those of Shakspeare are deduced à priori. Take, for example, Lord Burleigh's fifth maxim on borrowing and lending money:

"Beware of suretyship for thy best friends. He that payeth another man's debts seeketh his own decay. But if thou canst not otherwise choose, rather lend thy money thyself upon good bonds, although thou borrow it; so shalt thou secure thyself, and pleasure a friend. Neither borrow money of a neighbour or a friend, but of a stranger, where, paying for it, thou shalt hear no more of it, otherwise thou shalt eclipse thy credit, loose thy freedom, and pay as dear as to another. But in borrowing of money be precious of thy word, for he that

takes care of keeping payment is lord of another man's

Full of practical good sense, no doubt, as indeed is everything that "wise Burleigh spoke;" but it might occur to minds of smaller calibre than that of the Lord High Treasurer. Polonius takes higher ground.

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friend;

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry."

Lord Burleigh gives us but the petty details,-in Shakspeare we find the principle.

Again, his Lordship's ninth precept is :

"Trust not any man with thy life, credit, or estate; for it is mere folly for a man to enthrall himself to a friend, as though, occasion being offered, he should not care to become thine enemy."

It is good advice; but how much better done by Polonius!

"This above all. To thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man."

A comparison of all the precepts of the poet and the statesman would yield a similar result. And yet nobody ever thought of exhibiting Burleigh, inferior as he is

How do in dramatical wisdom, as an object of merriment upon toy the stage for many a year after he had been gathered do fat bram to his fathers, until it pleased the author of the Critic to put him forward to make his oracular nod. There is no use in moralizing, but we cannot help reflecting that Sheridan would have done better in life if he could have followed the prudential advice of the great minister whom he mocked. It is certain that if he had avoided mimicking him at humble distance elsewhere, and never thought of playing at Parliament,-if, content with winning dramatic honours only second to those of Molière, he had eschewed throwing himself into paths where the half-nods of the less than tenth-rate Burleighs are of more weight than all the wit and genius of the School for Scandal, there would not have been any necessity that his death should be neglected and his funeral honoured, with a contempt and a sympathy equally characteristic of those whom his Lordship calls "the glow-worms, I mean parasites and sycophants, who will feed and fawn upon thee in the summer of prosperity, but in adverse storms they will shelter thee no more than an arbour in winter.”

That the austere Lord High Treasurer might have been the mark for the covert wit of the dramatist,covert indeed, for in his time, or in that which imme

diately succeeded it, there was no safety in making unseemly jests too openly about him,-is highly probable; and the enemy of Essex and Raleigh* could not be an object of admiration in the eyes of Shakspeare. Lord Burleigh, in his courtly demeanour, was as observant of etiquette as Polonius, and as ready in using indirections to find thereby directions out. The Queen was fond both of ceremony and statecraft: but I doubt much that the old gentleman in Hamlet is intended for anything more than a general personification of ceremonious courtiers. If Lord Chesterfield had designed to write a commentary upon Polonius, he could not have more completely succeeded than by writing his famous letters to his son. His Lordship, like every man of taste and virtue, and what Pope has comprehended in the expressive term of "all that," in his time utterly

* Even in these precepts his lordship cannot avoid a "gird" at those remarkable men whose accomplishments were, however, much more likely to please poets and adventurers than sober statesmen. We know how Spenser immortalizes the Shepherd of the Ocean, and with what pomp of verse "the general of our gracious emperess" is introduced almost by name in the chorus of Henry V. Shakspeare's most national play, as a fit object of comparison with the hero of Azincour himself. In Lord Burleigh they only appear as suiteth examples to point the moral of a maxim. "Yet I advise thee not to affect or neglect popularity too much. Essex-shun to be Raleigh."

Seek not to be

Shakspeare. There is nothing to blame in

at can we talk on but of what we know? One of the grandest of the herd, Horace Walpole, wrote the Mysterious Mother, and therefore he had a right (had he not?) to offer an opinion on Macbeth, and to pronounce Midsummer Night's Dream a bundle of rubbish, far more ridiculous than the most absurd Italian opera. Lord Chesterfield wrote nothing, that I know of, to give him a name as an author, except his Vletters. Of course he wrote despatches, protocols, and other such ware, worthy, no doubt, of the Red Tapery of which he was so eminent a member.

IAGO.

I HAVE been accused by some who have taken the trouble of reading these papers, that I am fond of paradoxes, and write not to comment upon Shakspeare, but to display logical dexterity in maintaining the untenable side of every question. To maintain that Falstaff was in heart melancholy and Jaques gay, to contrast the fortunes of Romeo and Bottom, or to plead the cause of Lady Macbeth, is certainly not in accordance with