his hero, and concludes by placing him as a favorite in the court of the amused caliph. This is the natural ending of such an adventure; but, as Bottom's was supernatural, it was to conclude differently. He is therefore dismissed to his ordinary course of life, unaffected by what has passed. He admits at first that it is wonderful, but soon thinks it is nothing more than a fit subject for a ballad in honor of his own name. He falls at once to his old habit of dictating, boasting, and swaggering, and makes no reference to what has happened to him in the forest. It was no more than an ordinary passage in his daily life. Fortune knew where to bestow her favors.* Adieu then, Bottom, the Weaver! and long may you go onward prospering in your course! But the prayer is needless, for you carry about you the infallible talisman of the ass-head. You will be always sure of finding a Queen of the Fairies to heap her favors upon you, while to brighter eyes and nobler natures she remains invisible or averse. Be you ever the chosen representative of the romantic and the tender before dukes and princesses; and if the judicious laugh at your efforts, despise them in return, setting down their criticism to envy. This you have a right to do. Have they, with all their wisdom and wit, captivated the heart of a Titania as you have done? Not they nor will they ever. Prosper, therefore, with undoubting heart despising the rabble of the wise. Go on your path rejoicing; assert loudly your claim to fill every character in life; and you may be quite sure that as long as the noble race of the Bottoms continues to exist, the chances of extraordinary good luck will fall to their lot, while in the ordinary course of life they will never be unattended by the plausive criticism of a Peter Quince. *Thomas Campbell, the poet, in his notice of the Midsummer Night's Dream, suggests how Shakespeare "must have chuckled and laughed in the act of placing the ass's head on Bottom's shoulders! He must have foretasted the mirth of generations unborn, at Titania's doating on the metamorphosed weaver, and on his calling for a repast of sweet peas."-M. No. V.-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 Shakespeare; but I doubt if Lucian, though familiar to the learned, was popularly known even at the end of the sixteenth century in England. Shakespeare 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 Paynter's "Palace of Pleasure."* Dr. Farmer, in his very we * Ulrici declares Timon of Athens to be "unquestionably one of the last tragedies of our poet; in all probability the very last," which come down to us unfinished, and argues that it could not have been written before 1602. It can not be established, as is the case with Othello, that it was ever acted in the lifetime of the author. It was first printed in the folio edition of 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death. Malone fixes 1610 as the probable date when it came from his pen, and, Charles Knight says, know of no extrinsic evidence to confirm or contradict this opinion." Coleridge (who characterizes it as a bitter dramatized satire") affirms that it belongs, with Lear and Macbeth, to the last epoch of the Poet's life, when the period of beauty was past, and "that of Leinotés and grandeur succeeds." He designates it, also, as "an after vibration of Hamlet;" but it is remarked by Verplanck that the sad morality of Hamlet is, like the countenance of the Royal Dane, more in sorrow than in anger;" while that of Timon is fierce, angry, caustic, and vindictive. It is, therefore (he says), that, instead of being considered as an after vibration of Hamlet, it would be appropriately described as a solemn prelude, or a lingering echo, to the shallow and pretending "Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare," 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 Shakespeare—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 - wild passion of Lear." Hallam also assigns it to the later years of Shakespeare, when he wrote as "the stern censurer of mankind." As to the origin of this drama, Knight agrees with a theory suggested by Dr. Farmer, that there existed some earlier popular play of which Timon was the hero, and that in the version we now possess, little more than the character of Timon really owns Shakespeare as author. Such a play there is, and it was lately printed in England, to show how little, if indeed any thing, Shakespeare drew from it. From Paynter's "Palace of Pleasure," Shakespeare may have derived the story, aided by Sir Thomas North's English translation of Lucian, in which it first appeared. There also was a Latin version of Lucian, as well as one in Italian (by Lonigo), which Shakespeare might have used· if he did not read Greek.-M. * This paper was published in Bentley's Miscellany for March, 1838. In the following year, appeared, in Fraser's Magazine, Dr. Maginn's able and erudite papers on Dr. Farmer's "Essays on the Learning of Shakespeare." These comments, which fully discuss Shakespeare's claims to be considered other than a man with "little Latin and less Greek," form part of the present volume.-M. 66 accounted for), should not travel far out of the ordinary 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 Shakespeare, or in the single one into which they are both somewhat 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 coloring 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 Shakespeare 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 storyteller Belleforest. Common sense would dictate this course; but if the learned language 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 In his classical plots the same principal holds. Anthony and Cleopatra, Julius Cæsar, 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 any thing 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 Shakespeare, 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 for the ordinary frequenters of the theatre, consulted * *Such as Lydia for Libya, in Anthony and Cleopatra. Act III., sc. 6, made her Of Lower Syria, Cyprus, Lydia, Absolute queen." 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 Shakespeare followed. It was a great shame indeed that he had not noticed the error, and collated the English with 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 потago. North translates it, however, "on this side," and Shakespeare again follows him without turning to the Greek. Farmer, with an old rhetorical artifice, says, "I could furnish you with many more instances, but these are as good as a thousand." He bids us turn to |