and the kindliest intentions-he is eminently an unlucky man. The record of his actions in the play before us does not extend to the period of a week; but we feel that there is no dramatic straining to shorten their course. Every thing occurs naturally and probably. It was his concluding week; but it tells us all his life. Fortune was against him; and would have been against him, no matter what might have been his pursuit. He was born to win battles but to lose campaigns. If we desired to moralize with the harsh-minded satirist, who never can be suspected of romance, we should join with him in extracting as a moral from the play—

"Nullum habes numen, si sit prudentia; sed te

Nos facimus, Fortuna, deam cœloque locamus;"

and attribute the mishaps of Romeo, not to want of fortune, but of prudence. Philosophy and poetry differ not in essentials, and the stern censure of Juvenal is just. But still, when looking on the timeless tomb of Romeo, and contemplating the short and sad career through which he ran, we can not help recollecting his mourning words over his dying friend, and suggest as an inscription over the monument of the luckless gentleman,

"I THOUGHT ALL FOR THE BEST."

NO. IV.-BOTTOM, THE WEAVER.

"Some men are born with a silver spoon in their mouths, and others with a wooden ladle."-Ancient Proverb.

"Then did the sun on dungnill shine."-Ancient Pistol.

IT has often been remarked that it is impossible to play the enchanted scenes of Bottom with any effect.* In reading the poem we idealize the ass-head; we can conceive that it represents in some grotesque sort the various passions and emotions

"The Midsummer Night's Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. The spectacle was grand; but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled. Poetry and the stage do not agree well together. The attempt to reconcile them in this instance fails not only of effect, but of decorum. The ideal can have no place upon the stage, which is a picture without perspective: everything there is in the fore-ground. That which was merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately becomes an unmanageable reality. Where all is left to the imagination (as is the case in reading) every circumstance, near or remote, has an equal chance of being kept in mind, and tells according to the mixed impression of all that has been suggested. But the imagination can not sufficiently qualify the actual impressions of the senses. Any offence given to the eye is not to be got rid of by explanation. Thus Bottom's head in the play is a fantastic illusion, produced by magic spells: on the stage, it is an ass's head, and nothing more; certainly a very strange costume for a gentleman to appear in. Fancy can not be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine. Fairies are not incredible, but fairies six feet high are so. Monsters are not shocking if they are seen at a proper distance. When ghosts appear at midday, when apparitions stalk along Cheapside, then may the Midsummer Night's Dream be represented without injury at Covent Garden or at Drury Lane. The boards of a theatre and the regions of fancy are not the same thing."-HAZLITT.

of its wearer; that it assumes a character of dull jocosity, or duller sapience, in his conversations with Titania and the fairies; and when calling for the assistance of Messrs. Peas-blossom and Mustard-seed to scratch his head, or of the Queen to procure him a peck of provender or a bottle of hay, it expresses some puzzled wonder of the new sensations its wearer must experience in tinglings never felt before, and cravings for food until then unsuited to his appetite. But on the stage this is impossible. As the manager can not procure for his fairies representatives of such tiny dimensions as to be in danger of being. overflown by the bursting of the honey-bag of an humble-bee, so it is impossible that the art of the property-man can furnish Bottom with an ass-head capable of expressing the mixed feelings of humanity and asinity which actuate the metamorphosed weaver. It is but a paste-board head, and that is all. The jest is over the first moment after his appearance; and, having laughed at it once, we can not laugh at it any more. As in the case of a man who, at a masquerade, has chosen a character depending for its attraction merely on costumeadmire a Don Quixote, if properly bedecked in Mambrino's helmet and the other habiliments of the Knight of La Mancha, at a first glance, but we think him scarcely worthy of a second.

we may

So it is with the Bottom of the stage; the Bottom of the poem is a different person. Shakespeare in many parts of his plays drops hints, "vocal to the intelligent," that he feels the difficulty of bringing his ideas adequately before the minds of theatrical spectators. In the opening address of the Chorus of Henry V. he asks pardon for having dared

"On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

So great an object. Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or, may we cram
Within this wooden O, the very casques

That did affright the air at Agincourt?"

and requests his audience to piece out the imperfections of the

theatre with their thoughts. This is an apology for the ordinary and physical defects of any stage—especially an ill-furnished one; and it requires no great straining of our imaginary forces to submit to them. Even Ducrow himself, with appliances and means to boot a hundredfold more magnificent and copious than any that were at the command of Shakespeare, does not deceive us into the belief that his fifty horses, trained and managed with surpassing skill, and mounted by agile and practised riders, dressed in splendid and carefully-considered costumes, are actually fighting the battle of Waterloo, but we willingly lend ourselves to the delusion. In like manner, we may be sure that in the days of Queen Elizabeth the audience of the Globe complied with the advice of Chorus, and,

"Four or five most vile and ragged foils

Right ill-disposed, in brawl ridiculous,"

should serve to represent to their imagination the name of Agincourt.

We consent to this just as we do to Greeks and Romans speaking English on the stage of London, or French on that of Paris; or to men of any country speaking in verse at all; or

*The late Andrew Ducrow, for several years manager of Astley's Amphitheatre, in London, was literally the greatest equestrian performer of his time in England. He had no education, but great natural quickness of intellect. His performances were at once picturesque and classical—particularly his representations of ancient statues. In the Noctes Ambrosianæ he is repeatedly referred to. North describes him as "indeed a prodigy," while the Shepherd asked, "Wha the deevil was Castor, that the ancients made a god o' for his horsemanship - -a god o' and a star-in comparison wi' your Ducraw?" Tickler declared that, "the glory of Ducrow was in his poetical inspirations." North pronounced his Living Statues to be "perfect — the very Prometheus of Eschylus." Ducrow amassed a very large fortune, and is interred in a particularly grand mausoleum (ultra-Egyptian as to architectural style), in Kensal-Green Cemetery, near London.-M.

to all the other demands made upon our belief in playing. We can dispense with the assistance of such downright matter-offact interpreters as those who volunteer their services to assure us that the lion in Pyramus and Thisbe is not a lion in good earnest, but merely Snug, the Joiner. But there are difficulties of a more subtle and metaphysical kind to be got over, and to these, too, Shakespeare not unfrequently alludes. In the play before us-Midsummer Night's Dream—for example, when Hippolita speaks scornfully of the tragedy in which Bottom holds so conspicuous a part, Theseus answers, that the best of this kind (scenic performances) are but shadows, and the worst no worse if imagination amend them. She answers that it must be your imagination then, not theirs. He retorts with a joke on the vanity of actors, and the conversation is immediately changed. The meaning of the Duke is, that however we may laugh at the silliness of Bottom and his companions in their ridiculous play, the author labors under no more than the common calamity of dramatists. They are all but dealers in shadowy representations of life; and if the worst among them can set the mind of the spectator at work, he is equal to the best. The answer to Theseus is, that none but the best, or, at all events, those who approach to excellence, can call with success upon imagination to invest their shadows with substance. Such playwrights as Quince, the Carpenter-and they abound in every literature and every theatre-draw our attention so much to the absurdity of the performance actually going on before us, that we have no inclination to trouble ourselves with considering what substance in the background their shadows should have represented. Shakespeare intended the remark as a compliment or a consolation to less successful wooers of the comic or the tragic Muse, and touches briefly on the matter; but it was also intended as an excuse for the want of effect upon the stage of some of the finer touches of such dramatists as himself,