the purposes of poetry. If we do not look upon it as madness, it be. comes contemptible. Timon, born to great estate, wastes it in riotous living; and, when his money is gone, he finds it not quite so easy to borrow as it had been with him to lend. The case is far from being uncommon; and it is borne in different ways, according to the different temperaments of men. It drives Timon out of his senses. Gold, and the pomps and vanities which it procures, had been to him everything. Nature had not supplied him with domestic attachments; he is without wife or children, kindred or relations, and he has made no friend. All that he regarded, vanished with his wealth. His soul, like that of the licentiate, Perez Garcia, lay in his purse; when the purse was lost, he lost his senses too. In his prosperity we do not find any traces of affection, honorable or otherwise, for women. In his curses, disresp ct for the female sex is remarkably conspicuous. The matron is a counterfeit, her smiling babe is spurious; the virgin is a traitor, there is no chastity which is not to Le sacrificed for Gold, that Ever young, fresh, loved, and delicate wooer, Whose blush does thaw the consecrated snow and those who do make the sacrifice are instantly converted into the plagues and torments of mankind. "There's more gold," he says to Phryne and Timandra, after a speech of frenzied raving; Do you damn others, and let this damn you,- These philosophical ladies assure him that they will do any thing for gold, and thank him for his compliments: More counsel with more money, bounteous Timon! He readily believes them to be no worse than the rest of their sex; and, as gold has been his all-in-all, feels no scruple in thinking that its ope ration ought to be resistless in subverting the honor of women, as well as the faith of men. Nothing, I repeat, except insanity, could raise such a character from contempt; but invest him with madness, and poetry will always be able to rivet our attention, and excite our sympa. thies for the moody passions of the man hated of the gods, wandering alone over the limitless plain of life without end or object, devouring his own heart, and shunning the paths of men. No women appear in this play except Phryne and Timandra, and they but in one short scene, when they do not speak, between them, fifty words. This, of itself, is sufficient to keep the play off the stage, for few actresses will be desirous of appearing in such cha racters. They are precisely the description of women suited to confirm Timon in his hatred of the human race, and his conviction of the power of money over all. It is unnecessary to say that ladies of a different class of soul are to be found in Shakspeare, but their place is not here. Isabels and Imogens, Juliets and Desdemonas, would have scorned the riot and sycophancy of his prosperous hours, and would have scared away by their unpurchaseable purity, the degrading visions of his misanthropical fancies in the wood. The mistresses of Alcibiades [the real Alcibiades, I should imagine, was much better accommodated' than he appears to be in this play.] are Timon's patterns of womankind; as the parasite train, who infested his house, are his patterns of mankind. Yet even he might have seen that his estimate was unjust. The churlish Apemantus, who ate roots while others revelled at his overloaded board, seeks him in the forest to offer something better than roots to mend his feast. His steward, Flavius, approaches him in his calamity with a tender of his duteous service. Alcibiades, the most honored of his guests, and who never had received any favors at his hands, offers him assistance unasked. These touches of kindness might have abated his censure, and made him waver in his opinions that he should find in the woods But no. The unkindest beast more kinder than mankind. The feeling which was at the root of his madness is as conspicuous in his reception of these offers, as in all other parts of his conduct. He patronizes to the end. He is touched by the devotion of Flavius, because he recognises Timon in the light of a master; he declines the gold of Alcibiades, because he wishes to show that he has more gold, and can still lavish it; but Apemantus he spurns. He will not accept assistance from a beggar, and a beggar upon whom it would be no matter of pride to waste his bounty, even if the perverse snarler would receive it. Insanity, arising from pride, is the key of the whole character: pride indulged, manifesting itself indirectly in insane prodigality, pride mortified, directly in insane hatred. Apemantus was wrong when he told him that he was long a madman, and then a fool. He should have reversed it. Timon was first a fool, and then a madman. Alcibiades sees at a glance that his wits Are drowned and lost in his calamities; and for such a catastrophe nothing can be a more unerring prepara tion than the stubborn will of pride. "Assuredly," says the Laureate, ❝in most cases, madness is more frequently a disease of the will than of the intellect. When Diabolus appeared before the town of Mansoul, and made his oration to the citizens at Eargate, Lord Will-be-will was one of the first that was for consenting to his words, and letting him into the town." Well may Dr. Southey conclude his speculations on this subject by saying, "In the humorist's course of life, there is a sort of defiance of the world and the world's law; indeed any man who departs widely from its usages, avows this; and it is, as it ought to be, an uneasy and uncomfortable feeling wherever it is not sustained by a high state of excitement, and that state, if it be lasting, becomes madThe Laureate in this sentence has written an unconscious commentary on the Timon of Shakspeare. The soul-stung Athenian, when he ness. made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood, called himself a misanthrope :-he was a madman! W. M. "The Doctor," &c. vol. iii. pp. 272 and 281. I believe no secret is violated in attributing this work to Dr. Southey. The text of Timon of Athens is about the most corrupt of the plays. I suggest a few alterations. ་ Act iii. Scene 1. Lucullus, wishing to bribe Flavius, says, Here's three solidores for thee." Steevens declares this coin to be from the mint of the poet. It is saiudores, i. e. saluts-d'or,-a piece coined in France by our Henry V. See Holinshed, Ruding, Ducange, &c. It is mentioned by Rabelais more than once. Act iv. Scene 3. "Raise me this beggar, and denude the lord, Read-" Robe me this beggar," i. e. array the beggar in the robes of the senator, and reduce the senator to the nakedness of the beggar, and contempt and honor will be awarded according to their appearance. Act iv. Scene 3. Timon, addressing gold, says, O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce Read-"kin-killer," i. e. destroyer of all kindred affection. King-killing was no crime in Athens, where, as Shakspeare knew, there was no king; and all Timon's apostrophes to the wicked power of gold relate not to the artificial laws of society, but to the violations of natural ties, as between son and sire, husband and wife. Same scene. Thou bright defiler Of Hymen's purest bed! thou valiant Mars! Perhaps fresh-lived. THERE'S NO MISTAKE IN THAT! "Errors excepted."-Bill of Costs. In public life it is most true Whate'er is thought of, said, or done, We all take care of Number One,- The Outs, now long deprived of place, Which means, "We'll go it, right or wrong!" There's no mistake in that! Good Louis Philippe feels, 'tis said, In very doleful plight, Since Frenchmen practise at his head With bullets day and night. For diadems, some play odd tricks; They're safer in a hat: Few crowns are now worth two-and-six, There's no mistake in that! "No man," (erst said Sir Boyle,) " 'tis plain, Can be at once in places twain ;" Of course much less in three. VERSAILLES. THE Museum at Versailles is the proudest monument ever yet erected to the glory of "la belle France." Never did Sovereign conceive a more appropriate mode of testifying his gratitude to the people who bestowed upon him his crown, than Louis Philippe, when he determined to consecrate Versailles to the memory of the stirring deeds and daring spirits recorded in the most brilliant passages of his country's annals. The idea was worthy of the monarch of a great people, and has been wrought out in a manner to show that, whatever may be the faults imputable to Louis Philippe as a king, his heart beats but for France, and he feels like a patriot and a Frenchman on the subject of his Country's glory. Should any whose lot it may have been to have paced, some few years since, through the vast and lonely saloons of Versailles, now chance to retrace their steps, how greatly must they admire "the conjuration, and the mighty magic," which has summoned up the illustrious dead to people once more these long-deserted halls, and converted these crumbling ruins into a theatre wherein all the great events in the history of France are, as it were, enacted once again! "Le palais de Versailles est le palais de souvenirs," says a late French writer, and well does it deserve that proud and expressive title; for within its walls are now assembled the effigies of all that are dead to the nation. No unworthy prejudices, no mean distinctions, have operated to the exclusion of one name or one event which sheds a lustre over the history of France. Clovis and Charlemagne; Francis, the King of Gentlemen; and Louis Quatorze, le Grand Monarque himself,-all are there. Napoleon, and the glories of his reign, are there, in la galerie de Napoleon, where all his history is told in the order of his battles. Nay, more; Charles the Tenth, at the invitation of his successor, takes his place amongst the assembled monarchs. Great must have been the labor, unwearied the researches, necessary to attain for this national monument the perfection which it has now reached. From the tombs of St. Denis, from the vaults of the Château d'Eu, from the mouldering ruins of churches and of monasteries, have the half.decaying figures of the monarchs of the first race been restored, to appear with crowned brow and sceptred hand in the Galleries of Sculpture. Their successors are seen caparisoned in coat of mail and plaited steel; while those of still more recent times appear, each of them, "In the same figure, like the king that's dead." But this care and spirit of research, be it remembered, have not been devoted to kings alone. Warriors, statesmen, sages, and poets, have shared the same honors with the sovereigns whom they served; and the same hall which displays the marbled effigies of the kings displays also the form of many a doughty crusader who fought beside them, and of many a noble dame kneeling in prayer to Heaven for a husband's safety. For, amidst the assembled hosts of steel-clad warriors and laurelled bards, the eye sees with delight those fairer portions of creation, whose matchless beauty and unwearied intrigue have ever exercised so great an influence over the manners and spirit of the times in |