[These Notes consist of two short papers contributed to The Champion, and some marginalia in the autograph of Keats in a copy of the 1808 reprint of the Shakespeare folio of 1623, now in the collection of Sir Charles Dilke. The late Joseph Severn had a copy of Johnson and Steevens's edition of Shakespeare, more or less annotated in manuscript by Keats; but I have not seen it, and I believe it has found its way to America. The first of the two published papers appeared in The Champion for Sunday the 21st of December 1817, the second in that for the following Sunday. The treasurable folio of 1808 contains two poems in Keats's autograph,— the King Lear sonnet and the Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton's Hair (see notes to those poems). The underlinings and annotations (the latter very few) are confined to five plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Troylus and Cressida, King Lear, The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, and Romeo and Juliet; and of these the two last-mentioned are only marked, without being annotated. The First Part of King Henry the Fourth is marked only in the first eight pages; and some few errors of the edition are corrected from a better copy; in Romeo and Juliet the markings extend over the first half of the play.-H. B. F.] NOTES ON SHAKESPEARE AND ON THE ACTING OF EDMUND KEAN. I. ON EDMUND KEAN AS A SHAKESPEARIAN ACTOR. "IN our unimaginative days,"-Habeas Corpus'd as we are out of all wonder, curiosity, and fear;-in these fireside, delicate, gilded days,-these days of sickly safety and comfort, we feel very grateful to Mr. Kean for giving · us some excitement by his old passion in one of the old plays. He is a relict of romance; a posthumous ray of chivalry, and always seems just arrived from the camp of Charlemagne. In Richard he is his sword's dear cousin; in Hamlet his footing is germain to the platform. In Macbeth his eye laughs siege to scorn; in Othello he is welcome to Cyprus. In Timon he is of the palace of Athens-of the woods, and is worthy to sleep in a grave "which once a day with its embossed froth, the turbulent surge doth cover." For all these was he greeted with enthusiasm on his reappearance in Richard; for all these his sickness will ever be a public misfortune. His return was full of power. He is not the man to "bate a jot." On Thursday evening he acted Luke in "Riches," as far as the stage will admit, to perfection. In the hypocritical selfpossession, in the caution, and afterwards the pride, cruelty, and avarice, Luke appears to us a man incapable of imagining to the extreme heinousness of crimes. To him they are mere magic-lantern horrors. He is at no trouble to deaden his conscience. Mr. Kean's two characters of this week, comprising as they do, the utmost of quiet and turbulence, invite us to say a few words on his acting in general. We have done this before, but we do it again without remorse. Amid his numerous excellencies, the one which at this moment most weighs upon us, is the elegance, gracefulness, and music of elocution. A melodious passage in poetry is full of pleasures both sensual and spiritual. The spiritual is felt when the very letters and points of charactered language show like the hieroglyphics of beauty; the mysterious signs of our immortal freemasonry! "A thing to dream of, not to tell!" The sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of Kean, and to one learned in Shakespearian hieroglyphics-learned in the spiritual portion of those lines to which Kean adds a sensual grandeur; his tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left them honeyless! There is an indescribable gusto in his voice, by which we feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future while speaking of the instant. When he says in Othello "Put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them," we feel that his throat had commanded where swords were as thick as reeds. From eternal risk, he speaks as though his body were unassailable. Again, his exclamation of "blood, blood, blood!" is direful and slaughterous to the deepest degree; the very words appear stained and gory. His nature hangs over them, making a prophetic repast. The voice is loosed on them, like the wild dog on the savage relics of an eastern |