Obrazy na stronie
PDF
ePub

great and fertile a source of instruction and delight is reserved for my own times: but I can yet regret, that such a novelist did not exist in the days of Shakspeare; who, from tales which he could so easily have converted to the purposes of the stage, might have added even new features to his own vast range of dramatic excellence.

[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][merged small]

THE POETIC CHARACTER

OF

SHAKSPEARE.

HAVING thus laid before my readers the evidence for the authenticity of certain portraits of our great Bard, and by the most perfect engravings made them acquainted with his person, it seems to be only completing the picture, to add the truest portrait that exists of his power as a poet. The verses which follow, have been hitherto but slightly noticed by the critics upon Shakspeare, with the exception of Dr. Drake, who quotes from them incidentally, when describing the peculiar influence of his mind upon our national drama.

They first appeared in the folio 1632, and are subscribed "The friendly admirer of his Endowments," I.M. S. It should seem that they were not composed when the collection of Shakspeare's plays first appeared in 1623, and they

may have been written in noble competition with the splendid tribute of Ben Jonson in that volume. The line taken by the latter poet is essentially different from that of the former. Jonson's is a rich and affectionate tribute of praise. The "friendly admirer" gives a graphic delineation of his genius, so copious that nothing can be added, so exact that nothing can be questioned, diminished, or extended. This too in a vein of poetry often sublime, always fanciful and figurative-elegant in the composition of its terms, and flowing majestically through verses refined in their cadence, and variable in their pauses :

Untwisting all the chains that tye
The hidden soul of harmony.

Whether the original printer of them knew the author, it were now useless to inquire: the editor of the succeeding folio in 1664, exhibits the signature J. M. S. as I think, without meaning any correction by the letter substituted, but as supposing them equivalent, and to be indifferently put for each other. A lapse of

« PoprzedniaDalej »