As we shall now go on to the second class, and quote passages where the hand of Shakspeare is not so easily discerned from our authors', if the reader happens to remember neither, it may be entertaining to be left to guess at the different hands. Thus each of them describing a beautiful boy :

"Dear lad, believe it,

For they shall yet belie thy happy years
That say thou art a man: Diana's lip

Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe
Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound,
And all is semblative a woman's part."

The other is,

"Alas! what kind of grief can thy years know?

Thy brows and cheeks are smooth as waters be
When no breath troubles them: Believe me, boy,
Care seeks out wrinkled brows and hollow eyes,
And builds himself caves to abide in them."

The one is in Philaster, vol. x. page 169; the other in Twelfth-Night, act i. scene 4.-In the same page of Philaster there is a description of love, which the reader, if he pleases, may compare to two de scriptions of love in As You like It-both by Silvia, but neither preferable to our authors'. I can

sage in this play, that seems to deserve the same admiration, is rejected by this great man as not Shakspeare's. The French King, speaking of the Black Prince's victory at Cressy, says,

While that his mountain sire, on mountain standing,
"Up in the air crown'd with the golden sun,"
Saw his heroic seed, and smil'd to see him

Mangle the work of nature. Henry V. act ii. scene 4.

I have marked the line rejected, and which seems to breathe the full soul of Shakspeare. The reader will find a defence and explanation of the whole passage in a note on Thierry and Theodoret, act IV. scene I. vol. XII.—Seward.

not quote half of those which occur in the play of Philaster alone, which bear the same degree of likeness as the last-quoted passages, i. e. where the hands are scarce to be distinguished; but I will give one parallel more from thence, because the passages are both extremely fine, though the hands, from one single expression of Shakspeare's, are more visible; a prince deprived of his throne and betrayed, as he thought, in love, thus mourns his melancholy state:

"Oh! that I had been nourish'd in these woods
With milk of goats and acorns, and not known
The right of crowns, nor the dissembling trains
Of women's looks; but digg'd myself a cave,
Where I, my fire, my cattle, and my bed,
Might have been shut together in one shed;
And then had taken me some mountain girl,
Beaten with winds, chaste as the harden'd rocks
Whereon she dwells; that might have strew'd my bed
With leaves and reeds, and with the skins of beasts
Our neighbours; and have borne at her big breasts
My large coarse issue!"

In the other, a king thus compares the state of roy alty to that of a private life :

"No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these laid in bed majestical,

Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,
Who with a body fill'd, and vacant mind,

Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread;
Never sees horrid Night, the child of hell:
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set,
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn,
Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse;
And follows so the ever-running year
With profitable labour to his grave.
And (but for ceremony) such a wretch
Winding up days with toil, and nights with sleep,
Hath the forehand and 'vantage of a king.”

Juvenal, Sat. vi.-Seward.

The instances of these two classes, particularly the former, where the exquisite beauties of Shakspeare are not quite reached, are most numerous and though the design of the notes in this edition was in general only to settle the text, yet in three of the plays, The Faithful Shepherdess, The False One, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, that design is much enlarged, for reasons there assigned. And if the reader pleases to turn to these, he will find several parallels between Fletcher, Shakspeare, and Milton, that are most of them to be ranged under one of these classes: But there is a third class of those instances where our authors have been so happy as to soar above Shakspeare, and even where Shakspeare is not greatly beneath himself.

In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the forlorn Julia, disguised as a boy, being asked of Silvia how tall Julia was, answers,

"About my stature; for at Pentecost,

When all our pageants of delight were play'd,
Our youth got me to play the woman's part,
And I was trimm'd in madam Julia's gown.
And at that time I made her weep a-good,
For I did play a lamentable part.
Madam, 'twas Ariadne passioning
For Theseus' perjury and unjust flight;
Which I so lively acted with my tears,
That my poor mistress, moved therewithal,
Wept bitterly, and would I might be dead,
If I in thought felt not her very sorrow."

Act iv. scene the last.

There is something extremely tender, innocent, and delicate, in these lines of Shakspeare, but our authors are far beyond this praise in their allusion to the same story. In The Maid's Tragedy, Aspatia, in like manner forsaken by her lover, finds her maid Antiphila working a picture of Ariadne; and, after several fine reflections upon Theseus, says,

"But where's the lady?

Ant. There, madam.

Asp. Fy, you have miss'd it here, Antiphila,
These colours are not dull and pale enough,
To shew a soul so full of misery

As this sad lady's was; do it by me;

Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia,

And you shall find all true.-Put me on th' wild island.
I stand upon the sea-beach now, and think

Mine arms thus, and mine hair blown by the wind,
Wild as that desart, and let all about me

Be teachers of my story: do my face

(If thou hadst ever feeling of a sorrow)

Thus, thus, Antiphila; strive to make me look
Like Sorrow's monument; and the trees about me
Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges, and behind me
Make all a desolation; see, see, wenches,
A miserable life of this poor picture."

Vol. xii. p. 51.

Whoever has seen either the original or print of Guido's Bacchus and Ariadne will have the best comment on these lines. In both are the arms extended, the hair blown by the wind, the barren roughness of the rocks, the broken trunks of leafless trees, and in both she looks like Sorrow's monument. So that exactly ut pictura poesis; and hard it is to say, whether our authors or Guido painted best. I shall refer to the note below for a farther comment, and proceed to another instance of superior excellence in our authors, and where they have more evidently built on Shakspeare's foundation. At the latter end of King John the King has received a burning poison; and being asked

"How fares your majesty?

2

K. John. Poison'd, ill fare! dead, forsook, cast off;
And none of you will bid the Winter come,

As this note contains nothing but a string of very needless emendations on the above speech, and some others in the Maid's Tragedy, it is here omitted."

To thrust his icy fingers in my maw;

"Nor let my kingdom's rivers take their course
Through my burnt bosom; nor entreat the North
To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips,
And comfort me with cold.-I do not ask you much,
I beg cold comfort."

The first and last lines are to be ranged among the faults that so much disgrace Shakspeare, which he committed to please the corrupt taste of the age he lived in, but to which Beaumont and Fletcher's learning and fortune made them superior. The intermediate lines are extremely beautiful, and marked as such by the late great editor, but yet are much improved in two plays of our authors, the first in Valentinian, where the Emperor, poisoned in the same manner, dies with more violence, fury, and horror, than King John; but the passage which I shall quote is from a Wife for a Month, a play which does not upon the whole equal the tic sublimity of Valentinian, though it rather excels it in the poisoning scene. The prince Alphonso, who had been long in a phrenzy of melancholy, is poisoned with a hot fiery potion; under the agonies of which he thus raves:

"Give me more air, more air, air; blow, blow, blow,
Open, thou eastern gate, and blow upon me;
Distil thy cold dews, oh, thou icy moon,
And rivers run through my afflicted spirit.
I am all fire, fire, fire; the raging Dog-star

Reigns in my blood; oh, which way shall I turn me ?
Ætna and all her flames burn in my head.

Fling me into the ocean or I perish.

Dig, dig, dig, dig, until the springs fly up,

The cold, cold springs, that I may leap into them,

poe

And bathe my scorch'd limbs in their purling pleasures;

Or shoot me into the higher region,

Where treasures of delicious snow are nourish'd,
And banquets of sweet hail.

Rug. Hold him fast, friar,