another word till your master comes home at your peril; and, when he does come home, tell him that Mr. Bumble said he was to send a old woman's shell after breakfast to-morrow morning. Do you hear, sir? Kissing!" cried Mr. Bumble, holding up his hands. "The sin and wickedness of the lower orders in this porochial district is frightful; if parliament don't take their abominable courses under consideration, this country's ruined, and the character of the peasantry gone for ever!" With these words the beadle strode, with a lofty and gloomy air, from the undertaker's premises.

And now that we have accompanied him so far on his road home, and have made all necessary preparations for the old woman's funeral, let us set on foot a few inquiries after young Oliver Twist, and ascertain whether he be still lying in the ditch where Toby Crackit left him.

THE POPPY.

FROM UHLAND.

SEE where, soft cradled by the western winds,
'Mong its bright mates, the blooming poppy gleams!
The slumb'rous flower, whose garland fitly binds
The drowsy temples of the God of Dreams:
Now vermeil-tinctured, as it had been dipped
Amid the glow of day's departing red;
Now wan and pallid, as it had been tipped
With colours from the sickly moonbeams shed.

They told me, with the voice of warning care,
Whoe'er beneath the poppy sank to sleep
Was borne away to a dim region, where

Was nought save dreams-dull, passionless, and deep :—
Nor did the spell with waking hours depart;
Its chains still hung upon the soul, and all
That had been nearest, dearest to the heart,
Seemed shrouded in a visionary pall.

In my life's morn, unheeding of the hours,
Once lay I, musing many an idle tale,
Nestling unseen amid fair clustering flowers,
Far down within a solitary vale.

Oh! 'twas a time with joy and sweetness rife !
And, while I scarcely of the change did deem,
A picture seemed the moving world of life,
All real things were only as a dream.

E'er since that hour, within my bosom furled,
Has lain the golden vision then I knew ;—

My picture-it has been my living world,

My dream alone been firmly based and true.
The shapes, that rise and float around me now,
Bright as the stars-the eternal stars—are they !
Oh, poppy! flower of poesy! do thou

Among my locks entwine and bloom for aye!

E. N.

SHAKSPEARE PAPERS.-No. VI.

TIMON OF ATHENS.

THE story of Timon the Misanthrope was popular not only in his native land of Greece, but in the English literature of the Middle Ages. Classical readers, who are of course acquainted with the lively dialogue of Lucian, were once apt to look upon the philosopher of Samosata as affording the original of the play of Shakspeare; but I doubt if Lucian, though familiar to the learned, was popularly known even at the end of the sixteenth century in England. Shakspeare was indebted for the hint, and the principal incidents of his drama, to Plutarch, translated from the French of Amyot by Sir Thomas North, and to Painter's Palace of Pleasure. Dr. Farmer, in his very shallow and pretending "Essay on the Learning of Shakspeare," announces this important fact among others equally important, with much flourish; and those who feel inclined for such inquiries, will find sufficient to satisfy their curiosity in the voluminous notes gathered by the industry of Malone, Steevens, and Boswell.

To use the phrase of Dr. Farmer, which immediately succeeds his notice of Timon, "were this a proper place for such a disquisition," I should have something to say, not merely on the learning of Shakspeare,-a point on which I differ exceedingly with the Master of Emanuel,—but on the utility of learning to a dramatist. I should be prepared to contend, that though the greater the store of knowledge, no matter whence derived, from books, from observation, from reflection,-possessed by a writer on any subject, and the larger the field whence an author of works of imagination can cull or compare, so much more copious will be his sources of thought, illustration, ornament, and allusions; yet that the dramatist, and indeed the poet in general, (the exceptions are few, and easily accounted for,) should not travel far out of the ordinary and beaten path for the main staple and material of his poem. Without immediately referring to the question of classical learning, many reasons exist for thinking that Richard the Third was not so deformed either in mind or body as he is represented in the two plays in which he appears in Shakspeare, or in the single one into which they are both somewhat clumsily rolled for the stage; but popular opinion, and the ordinary chronicles of the times, so represented him. Northern antiquaries are generally of opinion that Macbeth was the true king, and that the blood-stained mantle of cruelty and oppression ought to be shifted to the shoulders of the "gracious Duncan," who was in reality the usurper. In like manner we can conceive that if the authorities of Saxo-Grammaticus or Geoffry of Monmouth could be hunted up, a different colouring might be given to the tales of Hamlet or Lear. But what is all this to the purpose? It is no part of the duty of the dramatist to invade the province of the antiquary or the critic; and yet, for confining himself to his proper department, he incurs the censure of Farmer, and other persons of the same calibre of intellect. If Shakspeare had had all the concentrated knowledge of all the antiquarian societies of Denmark, Scotland, Norway, or Wales, he would have completely forgotten, what it was utterly im

VOL. III.

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possible he should forget,-the first principles of dramatic art, if he depicted Macbeth, Lear, or Hamlet in any other manner than that which he has chosen. He would not have taken the trouble, even if editions of Saxo-Grammaticus or Hector Boethius were as plenty as blackberries, to turn over a single page of their folios. He found all that his art wanted in the historians or romance-writers of the day,-in Hall or Holinshed, or the Tragical History of Hamblet, and that, too, translated, not from the Latin of the Danish annalist, but from the French of the story-teller Belleforest. Common sense would dictate this course; but if the learned languages be wanted to support it, I may quote Horace, who, being eminently the poet of common sense, speaks for all times and countries.

Rectiùs Iliacum carmen deducis in actus,

Quàm si proferres ignota indictaque primus.

Take the tale or the legend as it is popularly believed for the foundation of your drama, and leave to others the obscure glory of hunting after new lights, or unheard-of adventures.

In his classical plots the same principle holds. In his Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Cæsar, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens, "it is notorious," to use the words of Dr. Farmer, "that much of his matter of fact knowledge is deduced from Plutarch; but in what language he read him, hath yet been the question." A more idle question could not have been asked. He might, for anything we know to the contrary, have read him in Greek; but for dramatic purposes he used him in English. Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch was a remarkably popular book; and Shakspeare, writing not for verbal critics, anxiously collating the version with the original, and on the look-out to catch slips of the pen or mistakes of the press, but for the ordinary frequenters of the theatre, con* Such as Lydia for Libya, in Antony and Cleopatra. Act iii. Sc. 6.

made her

Of Lower Syria, Cyprus, Lydia,

Absolute queen.

Upton, correcting it from the text of Plutarch, substituted Libya; and Dr. Johnson and other commentators adopted the correction. Farmer had the great merit of discovering that the word is Lydia in North, whom Shakspeare followed. It was a great shame indeed that he had not noticed the error, and collated the English with the Greek! In the same spirit of sagacious criticism it is remarked, that Cæsar is made to leave to the Roman people his gardens, &c. "on this side Tiber," whereas it should be "on that side Tiber," the original being wigav rou Toraμou. North translates it, however, "on this side," and Shakspeare again follows him without turning to the Greek. Farmer, with an old rhetorical artifice, says, "I could furnish you with many more instances, but these are as good as a thousand." He had given three-and I extremely doubt if he could have given three more. He bids us "turn to the translation from the French of Amyot, by Thomas North, in folio, 1579, and you will at once see the origin of the mistake." It is hard to say in what sense Farmer uses the word "origin;" but the mistakes originate in Amyot, who translates the former passage "Royne d'Egypte, de Cypre, de Lydie," and the latter "et qu'il laissoit au peuple des jardins et vergers deça la rivière du Tybre." I agree with Farmer, however, in thinking that, if he could adduce the thousand instances of which he speaks, his argument would be nothing the better. It would only prove that Shakspeare, for the purposes of his plays, consulted North in English, and not Plutarch in Greek; a fact which may be readily conceded, and, as I have said in the text, completely justified on the true principles of the drama.

I do not agree with Upton and others in their proposed alteration of these two passages, which, however they may differ from the text of Plutarch, I would suffer to remain as they appear in the folio, because I am sure that Shakspeare so wrote

sulted the volume of the English knight, not that of the Boeotian biographer. If he had been as learned as Isaac Casaubon, he would have acted precisely in the same manner. The minute and unceasing study of classical literature since the days of Shakspeare has banished blunders from our editions and translations, and not even the most carelessly educated would deem it pedantic or misplaced in a dramatist to write with a constant reference to the original, no matter in what language, from which he drew his story; but, on the other hand, we should deem him a very dull critic indeed who would insist upon it that in a play avowedly, written after Hooke, or Gibbon, or Mitford, its author should verify every quotation, and take care that their authorities were given with all the perfections of the last " editio aliis longè locupletior."

Ben Jonson took another course, and his success was as indifferent as that of Shakspeare was overwhelming. His Sejanus and Catiline are treasures of learning. Gifford truly says of the latter, that "the number of writers whom Jonson has consulted, and the industry and care with which he has extracted from them every circumstance conducive to the elucidation of his plot, can only be conceived by those who have occasion to search after his authorities. He has availed himself of almost every scattered hint from the age of Sallust to that of Elizabeth for the correct formation of his characters, and placed them before our eyes as they appear in the writings of those who lived and acted with them." The consequence is, that Catiline is absolutely unbearable on the stage, and fails to please in the closet, because the knowledge with which it abounds is conveyed in an inappropriate form. If Jonson had bestowed the same pains, and expended the same learning, upon a history of the Catilinarian conspiracy, he might have produced a histothem. Of the third, referred to by Dr. Farmer, I am not so clear. In Antony and Cleopatra, Act iv. Sc. 1. Augustus, in reply to Antony's challenge, says:

Let the old ruffian know

I have many other ways to die-meantime,

Laugh at his challenge.

this!" says Upton; it is acknowledging he should fall under But if we read,

Let the old ruffian know

He hath many other ways to die : meantime,

I laugh at his challenge.

we have the poignancy and the very repartee of Cæsar in Plutarch." To this reading, which has been generally adopted, Dr. Farmer objects that, though it is certainly so in the Greek and the modern translation, "Shakspeare was misled by the ambiguity of the old one." Antonius sent again to challenge Cæsar to fight him, to which Cæsar answered, "That he had many other ways to die." The Doctor ought to have told us that the ambiguity here proceeded from Amyot; "Cesar luy fit reponse, qu'il avoit beaucoup d'autres moyens de mourir que celuy-là;" but it is not an ambiguity of a very puzzling kind. It appears to me that Shakspeare would have followed his text literally as usual, and borrowed the word "he." I am, therefore, in favour of Upton's reading; especially as it mends the metre, which, in the present text, is somewhat out of joint.

Cæsar to Antony. Let the old ruffian know
I have many other ways to die-meantime,
Laugh at his challenge.

Mac.

Cæsar must think, &c.

The proposed reading would make it much smoother.
Cæsar to Antony. Let the old ruffian
Know he hath many other ways to die:
Meantime, I laugh at 's challenge.
Mac.

Cæsar must think, &c.

We

rical treatise to be applauded, instead of a tragedy to be at most but tolerated. His learning oppressed him. He was too full of knowledge to borrow his plots, not to say from North, but from Plutarch himself. The inaccuracies of the old story-teller would have constantly shocked his scholar-like mind; and, instead of drawing characters or inventing situations, he would have been in perpetual quest of authorities to corroborate or contradict his principal text. Had there been any such thing as a Plutarchian life of Catiline, or "a Tragical History of the bloody conspiracy of Rome, showing how they swore upon a bowl of blood to burn the town, and murder the senators; with the particulars of the execution of some of the conspirators, and the killing of the rest in a bloody battle near unto the Italian mountains called the Alpes," the subject might have attracted the attention of Shakspeare, who would have assuredly looked no farther. The gossiping biographer or the prating ballad-monger would suffice for his purpose; and all other authors, from the age of Sallust to that of Elizabeth, might rest unconsulted in peace. should, however, have had characters which, if they were not as correctly formed, "and placed before our eyes as they appear in the writings of those who lived and acted with them," would have been placed before us as they appeared in the eyes of men themselves who saw them live and act. He would not have dressed up the dry-bones of history, skeleton-fashion; but clothed them with flesh, and sent upon the stage, not critical abstractions, but actual men. It is usual to talk of the art of Jonson as something opposed to the genius of Shakspeare. With deference to those who employ this language, it is not over-wise. In everything material the possession of genius includes the possession of art; and in their common pursuit it would be easy to prove that Jonson was as much inferior in dramatic art, as it is admitted he was in dramatic genius, to his illustrious contemporary. I am much mistaken if I could not support my opinion by the authority of no less a person than Aristotle himself, of whom Jonson thought so highly as to write a commentary on his Poetics. I do not say this out of any disparagement of that great writer, whose name, on many accounts, stands eminently high for erudition and genius in our own, as it would in any other literature, and whose memory was shamefully used by some of the Shakspearian commentators of the last century; but I refer to him because the acknowledged failure of his learned dramas affords, in my mind, a full justification of the course pursued by Shakspeare, and ought to put an end to the idle gabble as to the learning of him whom Dr. Farmer so complacently calls "the old bard." But the full discussion of this question, with the numberless incidental disquisitions to which it must give rise, would occupy too large a space to be ventured upon in these fleeting essays; and might make the readers of Bentley's Miscellany set me down, if its editor were rash enough to inflict such toil upon them, as a bore of the first magnitude for intruding my dry criticisms upon his pleasant and festive pages. I am rather afraid that they are something inclined to think me so already, and am unwilling farther to jeopardy my reputation on that score. I must confine myself to Timon.

Lucian introduces Timon after his fall from riches, besieging Jupiter with a storm of epithets, and railing at the dotage into which the god has fallen, and his imbecility in permitting so much