shall be more exquisitely lovely to our entranced vision than any rose of a cheek, or snow of a brow or a throat has ever seemed to us; when we shall behold the play of moral muscle, the sight of which shall fill us with a greater glow of enthusiasm than the finest feats of physical power have yet been able to rouse in us.

Of the gospel of this sort of beauty Browning, if not the apostle, — seeing that the time is not yet, — is most certainly the prophet, as witness specially in 'James Lee's Wife.' Keats's didacticism, "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," interpreted by this higher conception, Browning would doubtless accept and indorse; but he would be far from falling in with the added preachment, "This is . . . all ye need to know." He realizes that truth is more than beauty, taking the latter even in its widest and highest sense, that truth is even what we call ugliness, since ugliness is only a stage in the evolution of beauty.

The human is divine, and the divine human; but who would limit the divine to one special phase of the human? Truth is power, the consistency of continuity, the beginning, the middle, the end. Truth is the universe, and the universe is truth.

Keats's Lamia' is a sermon consistent with his doctrine. With beauty, that one small current of the life-blood of truth, it teems; but of that great arterial flow out of the heart of truth which is the consistency of continuity, it has but scant supply. Far from being a humanly embodied serpent, ethically or artistically considered, Lamia has all the pleading grace of innocence incarnated. She inspires in Lycius the sort of passion that might be roused by a vestal virgin; she exercises her powers of sorcery to make earth a fairyland for her beloved. She is the embodiment of innocent sensuousness, and dies a martyr to the cold, death-darting eye of philosophy so called. Compare this picture of the feminine embodiment of the influence of the evils of sense upon masculine humanity with that natural-born woman having the serpent's taint in her blood, Ottima.

That Keats's poetic faculty manifests itself in the portraying of the softer passions and emotions, needs not to be asserted. His one finished attempt at depicting the intenser and more fervid sort

in Otho the Great' is almost a travesty. Auranthe is a marionette, and Ludolph is a madman from the beginning.

Keats's highest conception of love is limited to the purest passion that can be experienced between two souls of different sex. This passion he deifies. But Browning's mind grasps love as a cosmic essence, and sees individual loves as the various manifestations of this essence only, taking tinge and character from the individualities which are the medium of the manifestation. The variety of these individual manifestations as portrayed by him is almost infinite, ranging all the stages of the evolution of human character, from the merely animal impulse in love to the highest ethical and æsthetical conception of the perfect balance and blending of sex in soul. But Browning does not deify even this highest conception. He worships the cosmic essence; he is never guilty of the idolatry of bowing down before the manifestation.

That Keats's poetic faculty manifests itself in the picture-making power of the imagination is evidenced in the fact that he enables us to see, almost with the eyes of the sense, that which his imagination reveals to him; but he is so occupied with demonstrating specially, and almost exclusively, the "truth of beauty," that his life portraitures lack character chiaro-oscuro.

Browning's poetic faculty manifests itself in the philosophic handling of the imagination, in that he gives us experiments or demonstrations in the imagination, worked out on the known principles of the inner life, saying to us, "Thus these things are, as you see; now let us find out how and why they are ;" and though we may not be able to accept his explanations as to how and why they are, we feel, nevertheless, that here is the scientific handling of the imagination; that here, in a word, is the effort to show us the cosmic verity of the beauty of truth, rather than to demonstrate to us the special verity of the truth of beauty.

Keats uses the imaginative faculty to restore to life that which is dead, and he works the miracle of resuscitating to living beauty a dead myth. Browning concerns himself more with the effort to discover the essential life-current in that which lives; but when he does touch a dead past, it is not only with resuscitating, but with

resurrectionary power, a power that endues with new life, and other and higher, as witness specially his handling of the story of Alkestis. In a word, in Keats's hands the gods are seen as ideal human beings; in Browning's, men are revealed as potential gods.

When we come to compare Keats and Browning as to power of range in the psychic and the cosmic strata of the atmosphere of thought, we find in Keats no traces of even isolated soarings into these rather rarified Aura; while as to Browning, it is here that he seems to be fully at home: he not only soars to these strata, he floats in them as in his native element. From and through them he sees nothing as small, nothing as revolting, nothing as heretical; all details are intensified to him as such, but they are regarded by him only with reference to universality. Everything that is, has for him the beauty of truth. He, with that prince of rangers through all strata of thought, Shakespeare, — untrammelled by any Pagan devotion to "beauty for beauty's sake," can revel in the detailed portrayal of a Caliban, -wonderful Caliban, in whom, as portrayed by Shakespeare, are epitomized all the sufferings and deprivations, the ambitions and aspirations, of the merely animal human; in whom, as portrayed by Browning, are embodied all the elements of the unconscious evolutionist, feeling, however blindly, that he has the universe to his father, and finding out this universe through the interpretation of his own individuality.

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And so is it ever with all that these cosmic thinkers touch. Their thought, starting with a germ of the special, expands inevitably and spontaneously into the universal. Thus a Shakespeare depicts the ardent heart of a Juliet appropriating the heavens and the earth as theatre of her own little drama of love, reveals the brain of a young Lorenzo as lifting the sense reception of sweet sound into the cosmic conception of the harmony of the spheres. Thus a Browning pictures for us the reflection in the limpid soul of a Pippa of the spirit of God moving upon the face of the deep in his moral cosmos, - paints for us, in the creative genius of an Abt Vogler, the mirroring of the creative faculty of the all-creating Eternal Energy. Alice Groff.

GENTLE WILL, OUR FELLOW.

WRIT IN 1626 A. D. BY JOHN HEMINGE, SERVANT OF HIS GRACIOUS MAJESTY KING CHARLES I.; EDITED IN 1892 A. D. AS ALL, THOUGH FEIGNED, IS TRUE" BY F. G. FLEAY, SERVANT OF ALL SHAKESPEARIAN STUDENTS IN AMERICA, ENGLAND, GERMANY, OR

ELSEWHERE.

(Continued.)

ARLY in 1599 we opened our new theatre on the Bankside, called the Globe. It was builded out of the stuff of the old Theater, which had been removed by the Burbadges to the new site. There was a sign of Hercules bearing the Globe, with the motto, Totus mundus agit histrionem; or, as Shakespeare hath it, "All the world is a stage, the men and women merely players," to which our poets were fond to allude.

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The first plays of Shakespeare that we there acted were 'Henry V.,' in which he ended his Falstaff histories, Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor,' and 'As You Like It.' I mention 'Henry V.' first, because this play was a continuation of the preceding plays on Henry IV., with which they all together form a trilogy after the manner of the ancient Greeks, to which 'Richard II.' serves as an introduction. In 'The Merry Wives' Falstaff was again revived by the command of the Queen, who gave Shakespeare the difficult task of writing love passages for him. This play was founded on the old 'Jealous Comedy,' which we had played at the Rose eight years before, some parts of which may still be read in the stolen, imperfect copy printed in quarto. Encouraged by Her Majesty's order, which showed plainly that she retained no anger for the late offence in bringing Oldcastle on the stage, Shakespeare introduced one Robert Shallow, justice of the peace, as bearing the Lucy arms, and even had the boldness to recall the memory of the complaint which Lord Cobham had made against us, by making Ford, the jealous man, assume the name of Brooke. This was, however, altered afterward to Broome. As You Like It,' founded

on the prose story of 'Rosalind, or Euphues' Legacy,' by Dr. Lodge, was, in the opinion of many, the most perfect instance of a Pastoral Comedy that has been seen on any stage.

After this, in the year 1600, Shakespeare, having brought to an end his English Chronicle plays, began to do for Plutarch what he had done for Holinshed, and wrote his 'Julius Cæsar.' This play, which, as lately published, contains both Cæsar's Tragedy and Cæsar's Revenge, is not in all parts the same as at first acted; one line in particular, "Cæsar did never wrong but with just cause," had offended the criticasters, who cried mew at it; and Jonson, last year, in his 'Staple of News,' held it up to ridicule on our own stage, which, methinks, was hardly fair to the dead poet or to us, seeing that we had printed the altered version in accordance with the wishes of Master Jonson himself.

This murder and revenge play offers a striking instance of that fashion, the continual changes whereof are so mischievous to our quality. Master Heywood hath spoken of the decline of rhyming plays. "There was a time," saith he, "strong lines were not looked after, but if rhyme, O, then 't was excellent!" Dumb shows and Inductions have in like manner had their day; Prologues and Epilogues have come into fashion, and now there are signs that movable scenes and such machines as they use in masks will be some day looked for on the common stages. I pray that this may never be in my time. When it shall come, if it come at all, the scenepainter and the upholsterer will stand between the poet and his audience, and well-nigh obscure him from view. But fashion is a strange thing, and not easy to understand. Just at this time the town would have revenge plays in couplets. At the Fortune, which had lately been builded for Ned Alleyn and his company, they acted, soon after, two Danish plays on Hoffmann, a tragedy and a revenge; and at the very same time that we presented 'Cæsar,' the Paul's boys, who had just reopened the Whitefriars playing-place, were acting 'Antonio and Mellida,' by Marston, and the Chapel boys at Blackfriars the old play on 'Jeronymo,' by Kyd; in both cases alike a tragedy and a revenge play. On every stage "Vindicta" was the cry.