of passion, and a modern critic raving about the artistic significance of Shakspeare's puns, indicates the extremes of criticism through which the "myriad-minded" poet has passed. At present, there appears to be no danger that his intellectual supremacy will be questioned. The antiquary who ventures to stammer a little in the old jargon is quietly dropped by good society; the sciolist who blurts out a blunt objection is vehemently hissed into non-existence. Schlegel's prediction, that Shakspeare's fame for centuries to come would continue to gather strength, like an Alpine avalanche, at every moment of its progress," seems to be in the process of verification; for with every new edition and criticism the giant dilates into larger and larger dimensions. He has invaded France; he has conquered Germany. The principalities and powers of literature find no safety but in the acknowledgment of his supremacy. To the old republic of letters he comes as the intellectual Cæsar, who is to establish a universal dominion. The different orders of the literary state, far from opposing his pretensions, are engaged in hymning his divinity. Here and there some lean Cassius mutters treason against the god, complains that he bestrides the world like a Colossus, and leaves other poets little to do but peep about for dishonorable graves; but all peevish exceptions are drowned in the universal shout which lifts his name to the skies.

"Nothing can cover his high fame but heaven,
No monuments set off his memories

But the eternal substance of his greatness."

This idolatry of Shakspeare is partly the cause and partly the effect of a new school of criticism, which assumes to judge works of art after a new code of principles. The mistake which the old order of critics made consisted in overlooking the doctrine of vital powers. They judged the form of Shakspeare's works by certain external rules, before they had interpreted the inward life which shaped the form. Shakspeare's genius was always felt as supreme above others, because its reality and force could not be resisted; but the criticism which should have made it understood as well as felt, which should have accounted for its effects, pursued exactly the opposite course. Instead of attempting to translate it to the understanding by evolving its principles, it placed it in antagonism to certain notions in the understand

ing, which were unfounded in the nature of things. Because genius has its own laws, it is not therefore to be considered lawless; yet such was the judgment passed upon Shakspeare's genius by men who, substituting dogmatism for analysis, did not possess the first requisite of a critic, that of understanding the thing criticized. The consequence was an absurd opposition between judgment and feeling, taste and genius. Men were compelled to admire what they were taught to condemn. We perceive the effect of this even in a man of such comprehensive sympathies as Dryden. Nothing can be more contemptible than Dryden's criticism on Shakspeare's art; yet when he abandoned his rules and trusted to his own conceptions of excellence, when he ceased to judge as a critic and spoke as a poet, nothing can excel the warmth or the accuracy of his rhapsodies. Eliminate from his celebrated passage on Shakspeare every term which may be called critical, and there is nothing in English literature, from Ben Johnson to Coleridge, which contains so true a representation of Shakspeare's mind.

Now the critical revolution which has taken place in the present century does not pretend so much to increase our sympathy with Shakspeare as to increase our knowledge of him; and accordingly we perceive its influence not merely in the opinions of men of imagination and sensibility, but in those of critics chiefly distinguished for sense and understanding. The revolution, being one of principles, has affected the judgments of writers who bear, in mind and character, the same relative position to the present period which the old critics bore to their time. It would be unjust to compare Schlegel and Coleridge with Johnson and Malone, as indicating a change in the general scope and spirit of literary judgments; but if we compare Johnson with Hallam, we are still conscious of a great and essential difference, a difference not so much in the faculties employed as in the principles by which they are guided. This is so true, that the meaning of judgment and taste, so far as the results obtained by their exercise are concerned, has completely altered. When Dr. Johnson said of Cymbeline, that to notice its defects and improbabilities in detail were "to waste criticism on unresisting imbecility," he proved himself a person of great judgment, according to the principles of the eighteenth century; but a man who hazarded such an opinion

now would be set down, we will not say as an ignoramus, but as one whose taste was under the dominion of individual caprice, and whose judgment was wholly deficient in cor

rectness.

The two works named at the head of the present article, Mr. Verplanck's edition of Shakspeare and Mr. Hudson's Lectures, are a fair indication of the progress which criticism has made within a century. Neither could have been produced fifty years ago, for the materials were wanting. Mr. Verplanck had the wide field of English antiquarian, verbal, and æsthetical criticism open to him, and he has swept over the whole domain. He has especially availed himself of the researches of the various commentators, without, however, adopting their insufferable prolixity of statement. His edition, though it has the character of a rifacimento, still combines a greater number of positive merits, and is calculated for a wider variety of readers, than any with which we are acquainted; but it is so in virtue of the judgment the editor has evinced in selecting the peculiar excellences of many editions, and in avoiding the peculiar faults of each. He had at his command a singularly rich collection of materials, embodying the results of a century of research, and containing the separate items of a good edition floating about in an ocean of words. There was, therefore, a constant strain upon his judgment and taste in the mere task of selection and compression. Antiquarians and commentators are apt unconsciously to rate their discoveries and illustrations as of more value than the things to which they refer; and Shakspeare especially has been sacrificed by a class of lynxeyed dogmatists, always quarrelling among themselves, and each claiming for the morsels of useful knowledge he has contributed a ludicrous importance.

Mr. Verplanck has shown much strength and catholicity of mind in not being embarrassed by the varying opinions of this army of acute triflers, at the same time that he has largely availed himself of their labors. In the notes to each play; in tracing out the sources, historical and romantic, of the plots; in the bibliographical discussion as to the order in which the plays were printed, he blends his own learning very gracefully with what he has condensed from others. The text appears to be the portion of the work on which he has expended the greatest care, and is the result of a

most cautious comparison, word by word, of the original quarto editions of the various plays with the original folio published by Heminge and Condell, and of both with the editions of Malone, Collier, and Knight. Though, from the nature of the case, the text of no one editor can be so perfect as to settle all disputes regarding particular passages, we think it must be conceded to Mr. Verplanck that he has executed this difficult and delicate task with a great deal of acuteness and sagacity, and displayed a much clearer insight into the spirit and form of Shakspeare's style than a large majority of those who have undertaken the drudgery of its arrangement.

But it is as a critic, rather than as an editor, that Mr. Verplanck claims our attention here. His introductions to the plays are really additions to the higher Shakspearian criticism, not so much for any peculiar felicity in the analysis of character, as in the view, partly bibliographical, partly philosophical, which he takes of the gradual development of Shakspeare's mind, and the different stages of its growth. It is the first connected attempt to trace out Shakspeare's intellectual history and character, gathering, to use Mr. Verplanck's own words, "from various, and sometimes slight and circumstantial, or collateral, points of testimony, the order and succession of his works, assigning, so far as possible, each one to its probable epoch, noting the variations or differences of style and of versification between them, and in some cases (as in Romeo and Juliet, Henry Fifth, and Hamlet), the alterations and improvements of the same play by the author himself, in the progress of his taste and experience; thus following out, through each successive change, the luxuriant growth of his poetic faculty and his comic power, and finally, the still nobler expansion of the moral wisdom, the majestic contemplation, the terrible energy, the matchless fusion of the impassioned with the philosophical, that distinguished the matured mind of the author of Hamlet, of Lear, and of Macbeth." In this portion of his labors, Mr. Verplanck has shown a solidity and independence of judgment, and a power of clearly appreciating almost every opinion from which he dissents, which give to his own views the fairness and weight of judicial decisions. His defects as a critic are principally those which come from the absence in part of sensitive sympathies and of the

power of sharp, minute, exhaustive analysis. He is of the school of Hallam, a school in which judgment and generalization rule with such despotic control, that the heart and imagination hardly have fair play, and strongly marked individualities too often subside into correct generalities.

Before hazarding any remarks on Mr. Hudson's striking Lectures, it may not be out of place to refer to a few of the philosophical critics who have preceded him, in order that his station among them may be calculated with some degree of accuracy. After a careful perusal of his work, we have been forced to the conclusion, that, in spite of its faults, there is no single critical production on Shakspeare which equals it in completeness and force of thought in the examination of individual characters. It is a work which no person could have written without devoting himself with rare constancy to one object, and without availing himself to some extent of the labors of his predecessors in the same department of thought. The materials for a critical view of Shakspeare are widely scattered. Almost every eminent poet and critic of Germany and England has, within the last half-century, recorded his impressions of the world's master mind; and perhaps in the stray observations of Goethe we have glances into the nature of Shakspeare's genius as profound and accurate as ever were won by the intensest toil of inspection. Hallam, Carlyle, Campbell, and many others, have presented striking criticisms on the plays, or thrown out valuable suggestions respecting the characters, in works not exclusively devoted to Shakspeare. Hazlitt, Mrs. Jameson, and Ulrici have produced separate volumes on the subject. Of the professed critics, however, Schlegel and Coleridge, as they are first in point of time, appear to us first in respect to excellence. They were, to a great extent, the originators of the school of philosophical criticism, and we find in them a systematic statement of its principles, in their application to all forms of imaginative literature.

The history of the variations of criticism with regard to Shakspeare would involve a consideration of all critical theories, from those founded on individual impressions to those based on an observation of the essential laws of mental growth and production. These two extremes of criticism, as different as subject and object, are often confounded, a work of art as it affects a particular mind being commonly a con