HEAD, BY W. MARSHALL,

TO THE POEMS IN 1640.

THE writers of Catalogues are happy persons; they describe many portraits which cannot be found, and so circumstantially as to lead one to imagine, that once they must have existed. Among these desiderata is to be numbered one of Shakspeare, by that excellent engraver John Payne. Mr. Granger says of it, that the poet is 'represented with a laurel branch in his left hand.' But all my inquiries have never been able to procure a sight of this print; and perhaps it is confounded with that by W. Marshall, which certainly exhibits our poet with this sinistrous decoration.

Payne wanted only application to confirm. both his fortune and his fame. He had a good deal of the firm and forcible manner of his mas

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ter, Simon Passe, and he executed some heads after Cornelius Jansen, in a style so beyond the common embellishments of his time, that it is greatly indeed to be regretted that his Shakspeare has disappeared, if he really engraved it. I confess I am half-tempted to think it will yet be found, for the reason which I now proceed to assign.

Whoever is acquainted with the loose and wiry manner of Marshall, witness his bust of Fletcher, and the wretched "bi-forked hill" on which he has grounded it*, cannot but feel that his head of Shakspeare in 1640, is in a manner not his own; and indeed a dark and strongly relieved print, instead of the dry, tasteless, colourless thing which he bestowed as a usual sign to Mr. Moseley's editions of the cotemporary poets. I therefore feel almost confident, that Marshall here copied the head by John Payne. Indeed, taking the half-length of Elizabeth by Crispin de Passe the father, after whom they all worked, as the model, the head

* See the folio, 1647.

by Marshall is exactly such a performance as you would expect from that school, where, as is certain, the pupils, though like, are yet inferior to the master. A good deal of their inferiority is produced by their designing their own heads, and conferring upon them crowns of bays, &c. as to which, the poets might properly enough exclaim with Cowley,

Had I a wreath of bays about my brow,

I should contemn that flourishing honor now,
Condemn it to the fire, and joy to hear

It rage and crackle there.

Nor does Marshall's head of Milton, prefixed to the poems in 1645, partake any more than that of Fletcher, of the better manner of the school of Passe. The poet's displeasure, shrouded in the Greek language, was engraven by Marshall himself under his print. This stratagem of the republican poet, might by Sir Hugh Evans have been pronounced 'fery honest knaveries.' But he speaks plainly enough in the Defensio pro se against Alexander More, who had censured the vanity of exhibiting his effigies