The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

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and influence of his rising name. There was work at home which concerned him more nearly, not less deeply, to which that new influence was made at once subservient; and in that there were enemies to be encountered more f

fleet of twenty-three ships sailing at one time on his errands-this legislator, for he sat in Parliament as representative of his native shire-this magnificent courtier, who had raised himself, without any vantage-ground at all, from a position wholly obscure, by his personal achievements and merits, to a place in the social ranks so exalted; to a place in

rvey and choice of intentions; impelled by thirst of adventure, or thirst of power, or thirst of gold, to the execution of his part in the great human

t was the large and manly comprehension, 'the large discourse looking before and after,' it was the overseeing and active principle of 'the larger whole,' that predominated and had the steering of his course. It is the common human form which shines out in him and makes that manly demonstration, which commands our common respect, in spite of those particular defects and o'ergrowths which are apt to mar its outline in the best historical types and patterns of it, we have been able to get as yet. It was the intellect, and the sense which belongs to that in its integrity-it was the truth and the feeling of its obligation, which was sovereign with him. For this is a man who appears to have been occupied with the care of the common-weal more than with anything else; and that, too, under great disadvantages and impediments, and when there was no honour in caring for it truly, but that kind of honour which he had so muc

s voyages; and they were his 'companions' in the toil and excitement of his campaigns on land. He studied them in the ocean-storm; he studied them in his tent, as Brutus studied in

ed, one of that clique of Elizabethan Naturalists, who thought that there was no more curious thing in nature; and instead of taking a Jack Cade view of the subject, and inferring that an adequate knowledge of it comes by nature, as reading and writing do in that worthy's theory of education, it was the private opinion of this school, that there was no department of learning which a scholar could turn his attention to, that required a more severe and thorough study and experiment, and none that a man of a truly scientific turn of mind would find better worth his leisure. And the study of antiquity had not yet come to be then what it is now; at least, with men of this stamp. Such men did not study it to discipline their minds, or to get a classic finish to their style. The books that such a man as this could take the trouble to carry about with him on such errands as those that he travelled on, were books that had in t

eady he had found means for ekeing out and perfecting that liberal education which Oxford had only begun for him, so that it was as a man of rares

Buckhurst, Henry Lord Paget, Edward Earl of Oxford, and some others, are included in the contemporary list of this courtly company, whose doings are somewhat mysteriously adverted to by a critic, w

ose quaint memorials of the elder chivalry, that were spread out on it, over the dead letter of the past, the brave Atlantic breeze came in, the breath of the great future blew, when the turn came for this knight's adventure; whether opened in the prose of its statistics, or set to its native music in the mystic melodies of the bard who was there to sing it. The Round Table grew spheral, as he sat talkin

story,-'the prince and mirror of all chivalry,' the patron of the young English Muse, whose untimely fate keeps its date for ever green, and fills the air of this new 'Helicon' with immortal lamentations. The shining foundations of that so splendid monument of the later Elizabethan genius, which has paralyzed and confounded all our criticism, were laid here. The extraordinary facilities which certain departments of literature appeared to offer, for evading the restrictions which this new poetic and philosophic development had to encounter from the first, already began to attract the attention of men acquainted with the uses to which it had been put in antiquity, and who knew what gravity of aim, what height of execution, that then rude and childish English Play had been made to exhibit under other conditions;-men fresh from the study of those living and perpetual monuments of learning, which the genius of antiquity has left in this department. But the first essays of the new English scholars

ever servilely copying a foreign original. The English genius is already triumphant in them. Their very crudeness is not without its historic charm, when once their true place in the structure we find them in, is recognised. In the later works, this crust of scholarship has disappeared, and gone below the surface. It is all dissolved, and gone into the clear intelligence;- it has all gone to feed the majestic current of that new, all-subduing, all-grasping originality. It is in these earlier performances that the stumbling-blocks of our present criticism are strewn so thickly. Nobody can write any kind of criticism of the 'Comedy of Errors,' for instance, without recognizing the Poet's acquaintance with the classic model, [See a recent criticism in 'The Times.']-without recognizing the classic treatment. 'Love's Labour's Lost,' 'The Taming of the Shrew,' the condemned parts of 'Henry the VI.,' and generally the Poems which are put down in our criticism as doubtful, or as the earlier Poems, are just those Poems in which the Poet's studies are so flatly betrayed on the surface. Among these are plays which

late Shepherd's Calendar, are included in the list of Poets to whom this remark is applied. It is Raleigh's verse which is distinguished, however, in this commendation as the most 'lofty, insolent, and passionate;' a description which applies to the anonymous poems alluded to, but is not particularly applicable to those artificial and tame performances which he was willing to acknowledge. And this so commanding Poet, who was at the same time an aspiring courtier and meddler in affairs of state, and who chose, for some mysterious reason or other, to forego the honours which those who were in the secret of his literary abilities and successes,-the very best judges of poetry in that time, too, were disposed to accord him,-and we are not without references to cases in antiquity corresponding very nearly to this; and which seemed to furnish, at least, a sufficient precedent for this proceeding;-this so successful poet, and courtier, and great man o

n suing for leave to lay at her feet its new crowns and garlands. Indirectly, he did convert her into a patron,-a second-hand patron of those deeper and more subtle movements of the new spirit of the time, whose bolder demonstrations she herself had been forced openly to head. Seated on the throne of Henry the Seventh, she was already the armed advocate of European freedom;-Raleigh had contrived to make her the legal sponsor for the New World'

ts to Ireland, whither he had gone on this occasion to inspect a seignorie which his 'sovereign goddess' had then lately conferred upon him, he makes his re-appearance at court with that so obscure personage, the poet of the 'Faery Queene,' under his wing;-that same gentleman, as the court is informed, whose bucolics had already attracted so much attention in that brilliant circle. By a happy coincidence, Raleigh, it seems, had discovered this Author in the obscurity of

m; another 'On Music,' in which art he had found leisure, it seems, to make himself a proficient; and as to the poetic tributes to him,-some of them at least are familiar to us already. In that gay court, where Raleigh and his haughty rivals were then playing their deep games,-where there was no room for Spenser's muse, and the worth of his 'Old Song' was grudgingly reckoned,-the 'rustling in silks' is long since over, but the cour

in that fierce satire into which so much Elizabethan bitterness is condensed, under the difference of the reckless prodigality whi

nd of intellectual mastery, he could not be content with the pen-with the Poet's, or the Historian's, or the Philosopher's pen-as the instrument of his mental dictation. A Teacher thus furnished and ordained, seeks, indeed, naturally and instinctively, a more direct and living and effective medium of communication with the audience which his time is able to furnish him, whether 'few' or many, whether 'fit' or unfit, than the book can give him. He must have another means of 'delivery and tradition,' when the

eir day-in their own ancient halls. It would be sometime yet, perhaps, however, before that study of the dead languages, which was of course one prominent incident of the first revival of a dead learning, would come to take precisely the same place in those institutions, with their one instinct of conservation and 'abhorrence of change,' which the old monastic philosophy had taken in its day; but that change once accomplished, the old monastic philosophy itself, religious as it was, was never held more sacred than this profane innovation would come to be. It would be some time before those new observations and experiments, which Raleigh and his school were then beginning to institute, experiments and inquiries which the universities would have laughed to scorn in their day, would come to be promoted to the Professor's chair; but when they did, it would perhaps be difficult to convince a young gentleman liberally educated, at least, under the wings of one of those 'ancient and venerable' seats of learning, now gray in Raleigh's youthful West-ambitious, perhaps, to lead off in this popular innovation, where Saurians, and Icthyosaurians, and Entomologists, and

home, and the splendour of his heroic achievements abroad, and all those new means of influence which his great position gave him, to the advancement of those deeper, dearer ambitions, which the predominance of the nobler elements in his constitution made inevitable with him. Even then he was ready to endanger those golden opin

ty of his own. The germ of a new 'universality' would not be wanting in it. His library, or his drawing-room, or his 'banquet,' will be Oxford enough for him. He will begin it as the old monks began theirs, with their readings. Where the teacher is, there must the school be gathered together. And a scho

nly, but all the successful agents of human advancement, the initiators of new eras of man's progress, the inaugurators of new ages of the relief of the human estate and the Creator's glory-when such an one indeed appears, there will be no lack

ment of his age might, perhaps, be characterised as Socratic; though certainly not because he lacked the use, and the most masterly use, of that same weapon with which his younger contemporary brought out at last, in the face of his time, the plan of the Great Instauration. In the heart of the new establishment which the magnificent cour

eeded the master's modulation to give them their significance. For the new doctrine had need to be clothed in a lan

ons, that it came to be considered ultimately as a 'School,' of which he was the head-master-the fact that the new experimental science was supposed to have had its origin in this association,-that opinions, differing from the received ones, were also secretly discussed in it,-that anagrams and other devices were made use of for the purpose of infolding the esoteric doctrines of the school in popular language, so that it was possible to write in this language acceptably to

d arrayed against him on foreign battle fields, knew already what kind of embodiment of power this was that was rising into such sudden favour here at home, and would have crushed him in the germ-that foe which would never rest till it had pursued him to the block, which was ready to join hands with his personal enemies in its machinations, in the court of Elizabeth, as well as in the court of her successor, that vast, malignant, indefatigable foe, in which the spirit of the old ages lurked, was already at his threshold, and penetrating to the most secret chamber of his councils. It was on the showing of a Jesuit that these friendly gatherings of young men at Raleigh's table came to be branded as 'a school of Atheism.' And it was through such agencies, that his enemies at court were able to sow sus

the custom-bound time, would have roused and organised a new social life in it. It is still the second-hand hearsay testimony which is quoted here. 'He is said to have set up an Office of Address, and it is supposed that the office might respect a more liberal intercourse-a nobler mutuality of advertisement, than would perha

know what is already done in the business of learning, what is at present in doing, and what is intended to be done, to the end that, by such a general communication of design and mutual assistance, the wits and endeavours of the world may no longer be as so many scatt

at the honour is also ascribed to Montaigne; but we shall find, as we proceed with this inquiry, that all the works and inventions of this new English school, of which Raleigh was chief, all its

s philosophy could begin to be set forth in their true comprehension. The very trunk of it, the primal science itself, must needs be mystified and hidden in a shower of metaphysical dust, and piled and heaped about with the old dead branches of scholasticism, lest men should see for themselves how broad and comprehensive must be the ultimate sweep of its determina

that tendency was artistically developed or not, in which the new and nobler thoughts of men, in which their dearest beliefs, could find some vent and limited interchange and circulation, without startling the ear. Eventually there came to be a number of men in England at this time,-and who shall say that there were none on the continent of this school,-

a High Court of Wit, and a Bench of Peers in that estate of the realm, or ever these treasons could be brought to trial. For it was a mode of communication which involved in its more obvious construction the necessary submission to power. It was the instructed ear,-the ear of a school,-which was required to lend to it its more recondite meanings;-it was the ear of that new school in philosophy which had made History the basis of its learning,-which, dealing with principles

to harbour. It established a new, and more intimate and living relation between the author and his reader,-between the speaker and his audience. There was ever the charm of that secret understanding lending itself to all the effects. It made the reader, or the hearer, participator in the artist's skill, and joint proprietor in the result. The author's own glow must b

continental tours, full of the gallant young England of their day,-the Mercutios, the Benedicts, the Birons, the Longuevilles, came together fresh from the Court of Navarre, and smelling of the lore of their foreign 'Academe,' or hot from the battles of continental freedom,-it was there, in those réunions, that our Poet caught those gracious airs of his-those delicate, thick-flowering refinements-those fine impalpable points of courtly breeding-those aristocratic notions that haunt him everywhere. It was there that he picked up his various knowledge of men and manners, his acquaintance with foreign life, his bits of travelled wit, that flash through all. It was there that he heard the clash o

coeval with the origin of letters. The free-masonry of learning is old indeed. It runs its mountain chain of signals through all the ages, and men whom times and kindreds have separated ascend from their week-day toil, and hold their Sabbaths and synods on those heights. They whisper, and listen, and smile, and sh

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ct avowal of a double intention in it, the distinction between a particular and general one, the emphasis with which the elements of the ideal name, are discriminated and blended, furnish to the careful reader already some superficial hints, as to the capabilities of such a plan to one at all predisposed to avail himself of them. And, indeed, this Poet's manifest philosophical and historical tendencies, and his avowed view of the comprehension of the Poet's business

erneth him, and then recoursing to the things fore-past, and di

ng itself with the knowledge of 'things not dreamt of' by old reformers-that knowledge of nature which is power, which is the true magic. For this new Poet had seen in a vision that same 'excellent beauty' which 'the divine' ones saw of old, and 'the New Atlantis,' the celestial vision of her kingdom; and being also 'ravished with that excellence, and awakening, he determined to seek her out. And so being by Merlin armed, and by Timon thoroughly instructed, he went forth to seek her in Fairy Land.' There w

aleigh, 'in that Faery Queene, I mean Glory in my general intention; but, in my particular,

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soteric meaning of it was 'all in each,' or all in all, the new doctrine of the unity of science (the 'I

orary author in the Art of Poetry alludes, with a special commendation of Raleigh's vein, as the 'most lofty, insolent, and p