light of the world is gone-thus we leave the statue-" but the delighted spirit, to bathe in fiery floods or to reside in thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice," &c. Shakspeare here must be half unintelligible to the generality of his readers, who, ignorant of the philosophy and erudition of the passage, will lose half its grandeur. The penalty of fiery floods, of course, is easily understood as taught by the doctrines of the church; but the punishment of cold That very elegant scholar, Falconer, in his great work on Climate, remarks how religion is affected by climate :— "The effects of climate are very discernible in the rewards and punishments proposed by religion for obedience or disobedience to its precepts. Thus, the promise of a land abounding with milk and honey was a reward properly adapted to a hot climate, and especially to the Israelites, who had been accustomed to live in a country where the former of these was particularly esteemed."* What can be more voluptuous than the Mahommedan Paradise ?—a refinement upon the highest sensuality. The luxurious Asiatic promises himself a perpetuity of pleasure, without the satiety of sense; the Chinese sighs for nothing beyond an eternity of repose. Opposed to such dreams is the religion of the north: Zomalxis the Scythian and the Odin of the Saxons made heaven an illimitable forest, plentifully stocked with game; their happiness was to be found in hunting, military employments, and the joys of wine and company:† the precepts and pleasures of active life constituted their heaven. In moderate climates, where civilization has ever prevailed, more rational and manly enjoyments have been promised as the hereafter rewards of virtue; consisting of all those pleasures, physical and intellectual, to which the people have been attached on earth. Thus, in the sixth book of the Æneid, line 642 :— "Pars in gramineis exercent membra palæstris Again, in the 679th line "At Pater Anchises penitus convalle virenti *The worship of the cow in Egyyt was, no doubt, a political law. + Herodt., lib. iv.; Strabon, lib. vii. Milton, in that sublimely awful description of Pandemonium and the employment of the fallen spirits, has gone infinitely beyond Virgil: "Part on the plain, or in the air sublime, As at th' Olympian games or Pythian fields; Retreated in a silent valley, sing Their own heroic deeds, and hapless fall In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high We find the punishment, or the revv, of every country, corresponding in the same way with the sufferings of earth. "In climates, where they are exposed to inconvenience from excess of heat, the increase of it has been suggested as the mode of future punishment. Thus Homer speaks of the Titans being chained on burning rocks, which was a torment generally promised by the religion of hot countries; but in cold ones the contrary ideas prevailed.”* "The Hell, or Tartarus, there, was a place dark, cloudy, and destitute of food, and, above all, extremely cold, which was esteemed the most terrible circumstance of any, and from which the place derived its name and character. They gave it the name of Isaurin, that is, the Isle of the Cold Land, or Climate."+ Milton, who, though he borrowed more, yet, from the value he added, owes less to the ancients than almost any author, has improved, perhaps, upon this idea of Shakspeare's: "Thither, by harpy-footed furies hal'd, *Falconer. + See Smith's Gallic Antiquities, p. 22. VOL. V.-NO. XVIII. 2 L Are brought, and feel by turns the bitter change Their soft ethereal warmth, and there to pine Periods of time; thence hurried back to fire." The vulgar will be vulgar still: hence the Hell of many a simple, warm-hearted Christian, is only the exaggeration of bodily pain: nor would they pardon the blasphemy of supposing that the penalty of fire was metaphorical. Had we adopted the Nisthemi of our Saxon ancestors, instead of the Egyptian Hell, it would have been more poetical, though, perhaps, less dreadful. "This was a place consisting of nine worlds, reserved for those who die of disease and old age. Hela, or Death, there exercised her despotic power; her palace was anguish; her table, famine; her waiters, were expectation and delay; the threshold of her door was precipice; her bed, leanness ;" &c.* The sceptic in religion may plead against the divinity of revelation that the first principle of every religion-rewards and punishments-betrays an earthly rather than a divine origin, and which arises as much out of our selfishness as the fallibility of human judgment. The procedure and judgment of the Creator is naturally predicted by the verdict of an earthly judgment, as our ideas of the character and attributes of the Deity are formed by the highest possible perfections of man, or as our idea of eternity is formed, by the extension of time, beyond which human comprehension cannot pass. Rewards to us would cease to be such, if there were no penalties, and the latter is as essential to mankind as the former: the thought of an hereafter penalty has afforded to the devotee no little of that satisfaction which his self-martyrdom seemed justly to merit; for what becomes of self-denial, if the ultimate doom be universally the same? Earth teaches punishment, for such is inevitable with our inexperience and ignorance; but in a more perfect and higher nature, suffering may not, perhaps, be a concomitant. Claudio continues-" the weariest and most loathed worldly life, that age, ach, penury, and imprisonment can lay on nature, is a paradise to what we fear of death." This is infinitely finer than Hamlet's soliloquy-more positively true; this is " that pale cast of * See Mallet's North. Antiq., vol. i., p. 121. + The word revelation here does not apply to the Bible, which, of course, must be received has an exception to the above remarks. thought" which Hamlet refined upon-it seems too good for Claudio; such a fear of death is peculiar to exalted and deeply thinking minds. The celebrated Johnson could not hear the word death lightly pronounced; in an instant the current of his thoughts was turned awry, and with an inward dread he would solemnly pronounce that sublime passage of Milton, for "who would lose for fear of pain, this intellectual being."* The fear is not of death, but that uncertainty, which every mind capable of thought must, in spite of faith, sometimes dwell upon, the "dread uncertainty of after death," and, most horrible of all, the dread of annihilation, "to lose this intellectual being." After these inimitable scenes, the mind is relieved by the simplicity of the Duke's descriptions; indeed, nearly the whole of the next scenes are incidental, humourous, and light: the duet of Lucio and the disguised Duke is highly amusing.-Exit Lucio "Duke. No might nor greatness in mortality for we This is a salvo for all the wounds which candour inflicts; are all kings in degree, and have, more or less, our royal liabilities. Act the fourth opens with a song by Mariana. Though Shakspeare's rhymes are heavy, and more epigrammatic than delicate, yet in the occasional songs introduced in his plays I know of none in Anacreon more delicate and spirited.† "Take, oh take, those lips away, That so sweetly were forsworn ; * "Miss Seward There is one mode of the fear of death, which is certainly absurd; and that is the dread of annihilation, which is only a pleasing sleep without a dream. Johnson-It is neither pleasing, nor sleep; it is nothing. Now mere existence is so much better than nothing, that one would rather exist even in pain than not exist. The lady confounds annihilation, which is nothing, with the apprehension of it, which is dreadful.”—See Boswell's Life of Johnson. + The pleasures of the mind are so ascendant that the most illustrious men have sighed for a heaven of such enjoyment. Hence it is that we so readily communicate that happiness by a direction to the source of it; hence it is that I here distinguish the name of Tennyson, whose beautiful Lyrics are less known than they merit: one of the most beautiful is taken from this character of our poet. Never was written a more impressive and fascinating poem than Mariana in the Moated Grange; the imagery is incomparable. And those eyes, the break of day, bring again, Seals of love, but seal'd in vain, seal'd in vain." Isabella's pleading before the Duke is very fine; first appealing loud for justice the sense of her wrongs gives poignancy to her wit she retaliates by the cutting irony of question "is it not strange ? That Angelo's a murderer; is't not strange? That Angelo is an adulterous thief, An hypocrite, a virgin-violater; Is it not strange, and strange? Then she hurls down the truth at once, by the confirmation of Angelo's guilt: "Isab. It is not truer he is Angelo, Than this is all as true as it is strange: Nay, it is ten times true; for truth is truth To the end of reckoning. Duke Away with her.-Poor soul, She speaks this in the infirmity of sense. Isab. O prince, I conjure thee, as thou believ'st There is another comfort than this world, That thou neglect me not, with that opinion That I am touch'd with madness; make not impossible That which but seems unlike: 'tis not impossible But one, the wickedest caitiff on the ground, May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute, As Angelo; even so may Angelo, In all his dressings, characts, titles, forms, These transitions and impetuous reasonings of Isabella are very grand; our thoughts rush along with each successive change-we feel with her we plead with her. |