an angel and another all a devil. And this state belongs to many children of a larger growth. Hence is Shakespeare's view of life so useful as a study. With him life is a play, a tragedy, a diversified scene of sorrow and joy, of vice and virtue, of doubt and aspiration. He represents the whole of life.

On account of this wholeness, Shakespeare is healthful, sound, truly human, not many-sided, but spherical. Goethe is the many-sided man, writing from his own subjective states, much as he strove after a real power of objective representation. Hence he is more truly the mirror of his own lawless, striving, aspiring, subjective age, than he is of universal humanity. In Shakespeare, there is no such predominating tendency. He is not angular, as would result from sides, however numerous. Angularity is not beautiful in the human form, and does not belong to a true work of art. It is the predominance of that which should be subordinate and moulded into harmonious subjection by a living texture of pliant, blood-filled flesh. The disease which Shakespeare portrays in his representation of life is never contagious. There is no danger of transferring through sympathy the morbid condition of any part to ourselves; for we are not brought into the subjective siren-sphere of an over-wrought tendency. In his maturer years, Goethe recognized this lawless and morbid state in his earlier works, and he sought to counteract it; not, however, by changing his real point of view, but by curbing and restraining certain predominant influences. Thus he became more decorous and conventional, but not more universal and complete. The fault was in his position and in his state. There was too much of

Goethe, and not enough of man.

We wonder at the vast

range of his individual powers; we are not inspired with a new life. He represents states and temperaments, now one and now another, and now several in combination; yet it is not essential man in these conditions, but what is very different, Goethe himself with all his limitations.

By what magic of creative power, by what path of selfannihilation or self-postponement, Shakespeare advanced, we cannot tell; but we feel nothing of this selfish personality in

his works; we feel, on the other hand, that the finite and earthbound is subordinated, and that the man himself has become a vehicle for the universal life, a consciously co-operating agent in embodying that life which flows from the great fountain of life into each human soul. He is no passive instrument, or mechanical conduit, but a voluntary co-worker in a creative and joyous ecstasy of being, the reporter of life as it was purely mirrored in his own being. Life and the mirror in which it was reflected, this is the Shakespeare with whom we have to do. No theory or partial one-sidedness distorted his view in his best representations. He reported that which it was given him to see. Life there shows itself, accordingly, as the reconciliation of law and freedom, of Divine power and human free-will, of ever-present justice and never-intermitted responsibility in each man and in each society of men, in the individual soul and the soul of each nation of mankind.

The finale of Shakespeare's life, so often sneered at as unworthy of so much magnificence of genius, - with his insignificant achievements in any other sphere than that of the really despised, though loudly applauded dramatic one, and his ignoble ending as a petty householder and proprietor of a few acres in the far-removed county of Warwick, seems to us the close most befitting the real greatness of the man, and the sound, wholesome English nature which is the core of all his representations of human life and human history. It is in perfect keeping with his freedom from subjective bias, and his ability to enter into each sphere of activity and human interest. It is in harmony with the ideal tendency of his pre-eminently childlike and nature-loving, however comprehensive and manlike, intellect. There was to him, we must believe, something which touched the deepest chord of sentiment in that Warwickshire air, the banks of that sedgy stream, and the "sweet shade of the hawthorn bush." Would it have been proof of the inward soul of greatness to toil for the acknowledgment of what he must have consciously felt to be his, to watch zealously over the printing and publishing of that which he knew the world could not let fall from the seat in which it was enshrined?

It was fitting, that, when the stirring life had imparted its

secrets, or rather had furnished the adequate medium through which the secret powers of the imagination could unfold and exercise themselves, the heart should be drawn towards the heaven of the childhood's home. At a superficial glance, there is something of melancholy in the thought, that such a genius of all-comprehensive sway, in which all earth's glory and earth's greatness could find themselves more than mastered, and where they could be appropriated, and made to abide patiently until each feature was sketched and each lineament portrayed, the whole again represented in vital forms, - that such a one should bury himself in his secluded village, and, occupying himself with house and land, become a thrifty, prosaic, well-to-do man of every-day, household life. But what should we expect of him who has so thoroughly weighed, measured, gauged, and sounded the outside splendors of life, all the pageants of an hour, and the no less mere pageants of an age? Is not this new place as great as any new palace? Is not life as great in the humble as in the lordly condition? Is not the country justice as real and great a thing as the king? Did he not really deem the one equally human with the other? "The cloud-capt towers, the solemn temples," could not impose upon him as towering in any real sense over that pleasant house and garden of his, that village church surrounded with its graves. This soul, saturated with common sense as well as trembling with a poetic sensitiveness to the surrounding sphere of nature's loveliness, this soul was so truly human, as to feel an interest in the commonplace round of humble duties, amidst natural scenes and homely pursuits. The vital power within him could fill out these with the fresh-flowing streams of life. His was a sound, manly heart, free from foolish illusions, and those petty subjectivities of passion and energizing desire by which Nature secures her ends in ordinary men. Would it have been greater for him, like Scott at Abbotsford, to be haunted by some dream of the aristocratic past, to build up some mimic pile of Gothic castle, and seek to found a baronial estate? He was too great for playthings like this, or for what it symbolizes. There was to him a reality, and so an infinite, in the humblest human sphere. He did not need,

like Scott, the sad changes in his own subjective state to lead him to ask, in plaintive strain,

"The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree,

Are they still such as once they were,

Or is the dreary change in me?”

As they once were, so they remained to him always; for he built no mere castles in the air or castles in stone. He planted himself upon the homely, every-day realities of life. He believed in the concrete; abstract sentimentalities find no defence from his common-sense page. Had he loved honor, loved fame, loved any of the gauds and gewgaws of so-called great, but in reality ordinary minds, he could not have been the true artist, the true poet, that he was. Let him be judged by this highest standard, and not by applying to him the commonplace dicta of a vulgar arithmetic of worldly honors, titles, and emoluments.

-

ART. VIII. 1. Mémoires du Duc DE RAGUSE. Vols. VIII. and IX.

2. Choix d'Etudes sur la Literature Contemporaine. Par M. VILLEMAIN. 1 vol. 8vo.

3. Une Conversation sous l'Empire. Par M. VILLEMAIN. 4. Des Appels comme d'Abus. Par M. DE MONTALEMBERT. 5. Madame Bovary. Par GUSTAVE FLAUBERT. 2 vols.

THERE can be no exaggeration in saying that the Mémoires of Marshal Marmont are the literary, and in some respects the political, event of the current year in France. Never did any book provoke such a tumult of reproach and recrimination, and the replies to it will be nearly as voluminous as the Mémoires themselves. From the Bonaparte family and that of Eugene Beauharnais downward, there is scarcely an individual mentioned by the Duc de Raguse, who does not protest against the manner of the mentioning, or declare the

alleged facts absolutely false. Still, if the character of Marmont, which is the coloring medium of all his narrative, be taken into consideration, and those parts of his recital be set aside which are the result of false perception, not of voluntary mendaciousness, there remains in the nine heavy volumes before us more than sufficient material to constitute one of the most important historical documents of modern times. The reader's interest attaches itself almost equally to two objects, to the writer and to the hero of his book.

Before proceeding further, let us make one observation, the justice of which strikes the French public daily more and more. Naturally, the establishment of the second Empire, in the person of the nephew, has caused the national attention to flow backward in a spontaneous current towards the uncle. Books without end are written upon all the events, and all the glories, of the reign of Napoleon I. The "Empire" of 1804, the "old Empire" as it is styled, is a popular theme, a "selling subject," one on which publishers are willing to treat with authors on handsome terms, and one on which the vast army of employés, high and low, are ready to pinch themselves in order to buy information. Yet it is nevertheless certain, that, in spite of all this, in spite of the desire of the whole world of officials, and hungry aspirants for office, to court present impe rial favor by adulation of the imperialism of the past, in spite of the strong hope of those who rule France that every fresh record of the first Empire should turn to the glorification of the existing Empire, its likeness and its result, — in spite of all this, the effect has been undeniably the precise reverse. The impetus once given, there were no means of checking it; enemies wrote as well as flatterers, judges as well as friends, and (as always happens when any subject is handled on all sides) the real truth-or, at all events, something very, very near ithas emerged from this sea of manuscript; the phantom of Napoleon-Cæsar has been called up, has really "come when it was called," and has not faded from view till it has left printed upon the visual sense of the mass the outlines of what the original form really was. From the admiring, conquest-loving Bonapartist, (for such he has been in reality all his life,) Thiers; from the sagacious, liberal Villemain; from the neu