did not secure fresh liberties. Amsterdam was changed to York, and Orange to Albany. But these changes only commemorated the titles of a conqueror. It was nearly twenty years before that conqueror allowed for a brief period to the people of New York even that faint degree of representative government which they had enjoyed when the three-colored ensign of Holland was hauled down from the flag-staff of Fort Amsterdam. New Netherland exchanged Stuyvesant, and the West India Company, and a republican sovereignty, for Nicolls, and a royal proprietor, and a hereditary king. The province was not represented in Parliament; nor could the voice of its people reach the chapel of Saint Stephen at Westminster as readily as it had reached the chambers of the Binnenhof at the Hague.

LOUIS LEGRAND NOBLE

Was born in the vale of the Butternut Creek in Otsego county, New York, in 1812. He passed his early years in raral life and its associations at this place and in western New York, when he removed with his parents, in his twelfth year, to Michigan

and having pursued the course of instruction in the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church in New York, was in 1840 admitted to orders. He about this time published a few poems, Pewatem in the New World, and Nimahmin in Graham's Magazine, both Indian romances, and pure inventions of the author, together with a number of miscellaneous descriptive poems.

After his ordination, Mr. Noble was settled for a time in North Carolina, in a parish on the Albemarle river. Still devoted to nature, he passed his suminers in extensive tours in the Alleghanies. In 1844 he became rector of a church at Catskill, on the Hudson, where he enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with the artist Cole; the two friends being drawn to each other by a common love of nature and poetical sympathies. An ample record of this intercourse is preserved in Mr. Noble's eloquent memorial of his companion, modestly bearing its title from the artist's chief pictures, The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life, and other Pictures of Thomas Cole, N.A., with Selections from his Letters and Miscellaneous Writings: illustrative of his Life, Character and Genius. Mr. Cole died in 1848, and this work was undertaken, with full possession of his numerous manuscripts, shortly after. It did not, however, appear from the press till 1853. Its best characteristic is its sympathy with the genius of its subject. It may pass for an autobiography of the artist, so faithfully is his spirit represented by a kindred mind.

Mr. Noble is now a rector in Chicago. His poems are marked by their faithful description of nature, and a dreamy, poetical spirit, in harmony with the landscape.

**Mr. Noble's later works are: The Hours, and other Poems, 1857; and After Icebergs, with a Painter: a Summer Voyage to Labrador and Around Newfoundland, with the artist Church,

1861.

Louis L. Mobile

This

Territory, then considered in the region of the Far West. The family settlement was on the Huron river, in the midst of the primitive and unfettered influences of a world of natural beauty, well adapted to graft on the heart of an ingenuous, susceptible youth, a lifelong love of nature. vigorous existence, combining the toils of a frontier residence with the sports of the field, supplied the stock of poetical associations since liberally interwoven with the author's prose and poetical compositions. In the midst of the labors of the field, inspired by the books which had fallen in his way, he penned verses and planned various comprehensive poetical schemes. From this at once toilsome and visionary life he was called by the death of his father to a survey of the actual world. He applied himself resolutely to study,

TO A SWAN, FLYING BY NIGHT ON THE BANKS OF THE HURON.

Oh, what a still, bright night!--the dropping dew
Wakes startling echoes in the sleeping wood:
The round-topped groves across yon polished lake
Beneath a moon-light glory seem to bend.
But, hark!-what sound-out of the dewy deep,
How like a far-off bugle's shrillest note
It sinks into the listening wilderness.
A Swan-I know her by the trumpet-tone:
Winging her airy way in the cool heaven,
Piping her midnight melody, she comes.
Beautiful bird!--at this mysterious hour
Why on the wing, with chant so wild and shrill?—
The loon, most wakeful of the water-fowl,
Sung out her last good-night an hour ago;
Midway, she sits upon the glassy cove,
Whist as the floating lily at her side,
The purple-pinioned hern, that loves to fan,
At evening late, as thin and chill an air,
With the wild-duck is nodding in the reeds.
Frightened, perchance, from solitary haunt,
At grassy isle, or silver-sanded bank,
By barking fox, now, heedless of alarm,
With thy own music and its echo pleased,
Thou sail'st, at random, on the aerial tide.
Lone minstrel of the night, if such thou roamest,
His own who would not wish thy strong white
wings?-

Whether thou wheel'st into a thinner air,
Or sink'st aslant to regions of the dew,
How spirit-like thy bugle-tones must seem,
In whispers dying in the upper deep-
How sweet the mellow echoes, coming up,
Like answering calls, to tempt thee down to rest!
And hither, haply, thou wilt bend thy neck
To shake thy quills and bathe thy snowy breast
Till morn, if thy down-glancing eye catch not
Thy startling image rising in the lake.

Lone wanderer, that see'st, from thy far height,
The dark land set with many a star-bright pond,
Alight-thou wilt not find a lovelier rest.
Lilies, like thy own feathery bosom fair,
Lie thick as stars around its sheltering isles.
Fearless, among them, as their guardian queen,
'Neath over-bending branches shalt thou glide,
Till early birds shake down the heavy dew,
And whistling pinions warn thee to the wing.
Now clearer sounds thy voice, and thou art nigh :—
From central sky thy clarion music falls,
Oh, what a mystic power hath one wild throat,
Vocal, at midnight, in the depths of heaven?
What soothing harmonies the trembling air
Through the etherial halls may breathe, that ear
Which asks no echo-the internal ear,
Alone can list. But, hark, how hill and dell
Catch up the falling melody! They come,
The dulcet echoes from the hollow woods,
Like music of their own: while lingering in
From misty isles, steal softest symphonies.
It hath strange might to thrill each living heart.
The weary hunter, listening with hushed breath,
As the sweet tones with his sensations play,
A gentle tingling feels in every vein,
And all forgets his home and toilsome hunt.
River, that linkest in one sparkling chain
The crescent lakes and ponds of Washtenug,
For ever be thy darkening oaks uncut;
Thy plains unfurrowed and thy meads unmown!
That thy wild singing-birds, unscared, may blend,
Daily, with thine, their own free minstrelsy,
And nightly, wake thy silent solitudes.

Bird of the tireless wing, thou wilt not stoop;
Thine eye is on the border of the sky,
Skirted, perchance, by Huron or St. Clair.
The chasing moonbeams, glancing on thy plumes,
Reveal thee now a thing of life and light,
Lesseni g and sinking in the mistless blue.
There, thou art lost-thy bugle-tones are hushed!-
Tinkle the wood-vaults with far-dropping dew:
Yet, in mine ear thy last notes linger still;.
And, like the close of distant music mild,
Die, with a pleasing sadness, on my heart.

We are making a round of calls on all the icebergs of Cape St. John, painting, sketching, and pencilling as we go. Our calls are cut short for the want of wind, and we lie becalmed on the low, broad swells, majestically rolling in upon the Cape, only a mile to the south-west. Captain Knight is evidently unquiet at this proximity. A powerful current is setting rapidly in, carrying us over depths too great for our cables, up to the very cliffs. If the adventurous mariner, who first sighted this bold and forward headland, was bent upon christening it by an apostolic name, why did he not call it Cape St. Peter? All in all, it is certainly the finest coast scenery I have ever seen; and Captain Knight assures us it is the very finest on the eastern shore of Newfoundland. black, jagged wall, often four, and even five hun

It is a

dred feet in height, with a five-mile front, and the deep sea close in to the rock, without a beach, and almost without a foothold. This stupendous, natural wharf stretches back into the south-west toward the main land, widening very little for twenty miles or more, dividing the large expanse of White Bay on the west from the larger expanse of Notre Dame Bay on the east and south, the fine Ægean, before mentioned, with its multitudinous islands, of which we get not the least notion from any of our popular maps.

Such is a kind of charcoal sketch of Cape St. John, toward which, in spite of all we can yet do, we are slowly drifting. Unless there be power in our boat, manned by all the crew pulling across the current, with the Captain on the bow cracking them up with his fine, firm voice, I do not see why we are not in the greatest danger of drifting ashore. It is possible that there is a breath of wind under the cliffs, by which we might escape round into still water. With all the quiet of the ocean, I see the white surf spring up against the precipices. In the strongest gales of the Atlantic, the surges here must be perfectly terrific, and equal to anything of the kind on the globe. The great Baffin current, sweeping past with force and velocity, makes this a point of singular danger. To be wrecked here, with all gentleness, In a storm, the would be pretty sure destruction. chance of escape would be about the same as in the rapids of Niagara. After all, there is a fine excitement in this rather perilous play with the sublime and desolate. Would any believe it? I am actually sea-sick, and that in the full enjoyment of this grandeur of adamant and ice. I find I am not alone. The painter with his live colors falls to the same level of suffering with the man of the dull lead-pencil and the note-book. A slight breeze has relieved us of all anxiety, and all necessity of further effort to row out of danger. We are moving perceptibly up the wide current, and propose to escape to the north as soon as the wind shall favor.

We have just passed a fragment of some one of the surrounding icebergs that has amused us. It bore the resemblance of a huge polar bear, reposing upon the base of an inverted cone with a twist of a sea-shell, and whirling slowly round and round. The ever-attending green water, with its aerial clearness, enabled us to see its spiral folds and horns as they hung suspended in the deep. The bear, a ten-foot mass in tolerable proportion, seemed to be regularly beset by a pack of hungry little swells. First, one would take him on the haunch, then whip back into the sea over his tail and between his legs. Presently a bolder swell would rise and pitch into his back with a ferocity that threatened instant destruction. It only washed his satin fleece the whiter. While Bruin was turning to look the daring assailant in the face, the rogue had pitched himself back into his cave. No sooner that, than a very bull-dog of a billow would attack him in the face. The serenity with which the impertinent assault was borne was complete. It was but a puff of silvery dust, powdering his mane with fresher brightness. Nothing would be left of bull but a little froth of all the foam displayed in the fierce onset. He too would turn and scud into his hiding-place. Persistent little waves! After a dash singly, all around, upon the common enemy, as if by some silent agreement under water, they would all rush on, at once, with their loudest roar and shaggiest foam, and overwhelm poor bear so

completely, that nothing less might be expected than to behold him broken into his four quarters, and floating helplessly asunder. Mistaken spectators! Although, by his momentary rolling and plunging, he was evidently aroused, yet neither

Bruin nor his burrow were at all the worse for all the wear and washing. The deep fluting, the wrinkled folds and cavities, over and through which the green and silvery water rushed back into the sea, rivalled the most exquisite sculpture. And nature not only gives her marbles, with the finest lines, the most perfect lights and shades, she colors them also. She is no monochromist, but polychroic, imparting such touches of dove-tints, emerald and azure, as she bestows upon her gems and her skies.

We are bearing up under the big berg as closely as we dare. To our delight, what we have been wishing, and watching for, is actually taking place: loud explosions with heavy falls of ice, followed by the cataract-like roar, and the high, thin seas, wheeling away beautifully crested with sparkling foam. If it is possible, imagine the effect upon the beholder: This precipice of ice, with tremendous cracking, is falling toward us with a majestic and awful motion. Down sinks the long waterline into the black deep; down go the porcelain crags, and galleries of glassy sculptures, a speechless and awful baptism. Now it pauses and re

turns: up rise sculptures and crags streaming with the shining, white brine; up comes the great, encircling line, followed by things new and strange, crags, niches, balconies and caves; up, up it rises, higher and higher still, crossing the very breast of the grand ice, and all bathed with rivulets of gleaming foam. Over goes the summit, ridge, pinnacles and all, standing off obliquely in the opposite air. Now it pauses in its upward roll: back it comes again, cracking, cracking, cracking, "groaning out harsh thunder" as it comes, and threatening to burst, like a mighty bomb, into millions of glittering fragments. The spectacle is terrific and magnificent. Emotion is irrepressible, and peals of wild hurra burst forth from all.

The effect of the sky-line of this berg is marvellously beautiful. An overhanging precipice on this side, and steep slopes on the other, give a thin and notched ridge, with an almost knifelike sharpness, and the transparency and tint of sapphire, a miracle of beauty along the heights of the dead white ice, over which the sight darts into the spotless ultramarine of the heavens. On the right and left shoulders of the berg, the slopes fall off steeply this way, having the folds and the strange purity reculiar to snow-drifts. One who has dwelt pleasantly upon draperies in marble, upon those lovely swellings and depressions, those sweet surfaces and lines of grace and beauty of the human form, perfected in the works of sculptors, will appreciate the sentiment of the ices to which I point.

At the risk of being thought over-sentimental and extravagant, I will say something more of the great iceberg of Cape St. John, now that we are retiring from it, and giving it our last look. Of all objects an iceberg is in the highest degree multiform in its effects. Changeable in its colors as the streamers of the northern sky, it will also pass from one shape to another with singular rapidity. As we recede, the upper portions of the solid ice have a light and aerial effect, a description of which is simply impossible. Peaks and spires rise out of the strong and apparently

Cape St. John! As we slowly glide away toward the north, and gaze back upon its everlasting cliffs, confronted by these wonderful icebergs, the glorious architecture of the polar night, I think of the apostle's vision of permanent and shining walls, "the heavenly Jerusalem," "the city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God."

The good south wind" blows at last with strength, and we speed on our way over the great ocean, darkly shining in all its violet beauty. Pricking above the horizon, the peak of a berg sparkles in the glowing daylight of the west like a silvery star. C has painted with great effect, notwithstanding the difficulty of lines and touches from the motion of the vessel. If one is curious about the troubles of painting on a little coaster, lightly ballasted, dashing forward frequently under a press of sail, with a short sea. I would recommend him to a good, stout swing. While in the enjoyment of his smooth and sickening vibrations, let him spread his pallet, arrange his canvas, and paint a pair of colts at their gambols in some adjacent field.

HENRY NORMAN HUDSON.

town of Cornwall, Addison County, Vermont. MR. HUDSON was born January 28, 1814, in the The first eighteen years of his life were mainly spent on the farm and in the common school. For his early religious instruction he was indebted to the Rev. Jedediah Bushnell, whom he speaks of as a minister of the old New England school, a venerable and excellent man, a somewhat stiff and rigid Calvinist, indeed, but well fraught with the best qualities of a Christian pastor and gentleman." At the age of eighteen, Mr. Hudson removed to Middlebury, a town adjoining Cornwall, where he became apprenticed to Mr. Ira Allen, for the purpose of learning the trade of coach-making. Here he continued as apprentice and journeyman about four years, when he resolved to secure the benefit of a college education. He began the work of preparation in the fall of 1835, entered the Freshman class of Middlebury College the following August, and was graduated in 1840. His next three years were spent in teaching at the South, one year at Kentucky, and two years in Huntsville, Alabama. Having early acquired a taste for reading, and especially occupied himself with the study of Shakespeare, he found time to write out a course of lectures on his favorite author, which he first delivered at Huntsville, and shortly after at Mobile, in the winter of 1843-1. The next spring he repeated the course at Cincinnati. Induced by his success in these places he visited Boston the following winter, where the lectures were listened to by large and intelligent audiences, bringing the author both fame and profit. The first result was to enable him to discharge his pecuniary obligations to the friends by whose aid he had been assisted while in college. The lectures were repeated in New York, Philadelphia, and other cities with varying success, and finally appeared from the press of Baker and Scribner, in New York, in 1848.

Mr. Hudson's early religious views had undergone considerable change from the Congregational

William Croswell, who had then just entered on his ministerial work in the parish of the Advent. Earnestly attached to the man and his doctrines, Mr. Hudson became a member of the congregation, and not long after a candidate for orders in the diocese of New York. He was ordained by Bishop Whittingham, in Trinity Church, in 1849. The following year, at the solicitation of Messrs. Munroe and Co., of Boston, he engaged to edit the works of Shakespeare in eleven volumes, on the plan and in the style of the Chiswick edition published in 1826. This work was nearly completed in 1855, having reached its eighth volume, the publication having been somewhat delayed by the elaborate care bestowed upon it by the editor, and the necessity he has been under of associating with it more remunerating pursuits. The chief points in the edition are a thorough revision and restoration of the text according to the ancient copies, notes carefully selected and compactly written, and an introduction, historical, bibliographical, and critical, to each play.

In November, 1852, Mr. Hudson became party to an arrangement to edit the Churchman newspaper in New York. He entered upon the work, which he discharged with eminent ability, on the first of January, 1853, and continued in it till September 9, 1854, when he withdrew in consequence of what seemed to him unreasonable encroachments of the proprietor upon his province. In addition to these editorial and other labors, Mr. Hudson has written a number of elaborate articles in the monthly and quarterly periodicals, including Thoughts on Education, in the Democratic Review, a paper which contains the substance of a well digested volume; On Lord Mahon's and Macaulay's Histories, an essay on The Right Sources of Moral and Political Knowledge, in the Church Review; and a masterly review of Bailey's Festus in the American Whig Review. In 1850 Mr. Hudson published a sermon, Old Wine in Old Bottles, originally preached at the Church of the Advent, in Boston. The style of Mr. Hudson is marked by a cer

*

* May and July, 1845.

tain rugged strength and quaintness; occasionally reminding the reader, in its construction and the analytical subtleties of which it is the vehicle, of the old school of English theological writing. His composition is labored, sinewy, and profound. As a moralist, his views are liberal and enlarged, while opposed as far as possible to maudlin philanthropy and sentimentality. As a critic of Shakespeare he is acute, philosophical, reverential; following the school of Coleridge, and reproducing from the heart of the subject the elements of the author's characters, which are drawn out in a fine amplification.

THE WEIRD SISTERS-FROM THE LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE.

The Weird Sisters are the creatures not of any preexisting superstition, but purely of Shakespeare's own mind. They are altogether unlike any thing else that art or superstition ever invented. The old witches of northern mythology would not have answered the poet's purpose; those could only act upon men,-these act within them; those opposed themselves against human will,-these identify themselves with it; those could inflict injury, these inflict guilt; those could work men's physical ruin,these win men to work their own spiritual ruin. him the very will and spirit of resistance. Their Macbeth cannot resist them, because they take from power takes hold of him like a fascination of hell: it seems as terrible and as inevitable as that of original sin; insuring the commission of crime, not as a matter of necessity, for then it would be no crime, but simply as a matter of fact. In using them, Shakespeare but borrowed the drapery of pre-existing superstition to secure faith in an entirely new creation. Without doing violence to the laws of human belief he was thus enabled to enlist the services of old credulity in favor of agents or instruments suited to his peculiar purpose.

The Weird Sisters are a combination of the terrible and the grotesque, and hold the mind in suspense between laughter and fear. Resembling old up into human shape, but are free from all human women save that they have long beards, they bubble relations; without age, or sex, or kin; without birth, or death; passionless and motionless; anomalous alike in looks, in action, and in speech; nameless themselves, and doing nameless deeds. Coleridge describes them as the imaginative divorced from the good; and this description, to one who understands it, expresses their nature better than any thing else I have seen. Gifted with the powers of prescience and prophecy, their predictions seem replete with an indescribable charm which works their own fulfilment, so as almost to leave us in doubt whether foretell the subsequent events. they predestinate or produce, or only foresee and

Such as they are,

So withered and so wild in their attire:
That look not like the inhabitants o' the earth,
And yet are on't,-

such is the language in which they mutter their horrid incantations. It is, if such a thing be possible or imaginable, the poetry of hell, and seems dripping with the very dews of the pit. A wondrous potency, like the fumes of their charmed pot, seems stealing over our minds as they compound the ingredients of their hell-broth. In the materials which make up the contents of their cauldron, such

as

Toad, that under coldest stone, Days and nights hast thirty-one Sweltered venom, sleeping got; Witch's mummy; maw and gulf Of the ravined salt-sea shark;

Root of hemlock, digg'd i' the dark;
Liver of blaspheming Jew;

Gall of goat; and slips of yew,
Slivered in the moon's eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe,
Ditch-delivered by a drab;

-sow's blood, that hath eaten
Her nine farrow; grease that's sweaten
From the murderer's gibbet ;-

there is a strange confusion of the natural and supernatural, which serves to enchant and bewilder the mind into passiveness. Our very ignorance of any physical efficacy or tendency in the substances and conditions here specified, only enhances to our imagination their moral potency; so that they seem more powerful over the soul inasmuch as they are powerless over the body.-The Weird Sisters, indeed, and all that belong to them, are but poetical impersonations of evil influences: they are the imaginative, irresponsible agents or instruments of the devil; capable of inspiring guilt, but not of incurring it; in and through whom all the powers of their chief seem bent up to the accomplishment of a given purpose. But with all their essential wickedness there is nothing gross, or vulgar, or sensual about them. They are the very purity of sin incarnate; the vestal virgins, so to speak, of hell; radiant with a sort of inverted holiness; fearful anomalies in body and soul, in whom every thing seems reversed; whose elevation is downwards; whose duty is sin; whose religion is wickedness; and the law of whose being is violation of law! Unlike the Furies of Eschylus, they are petrific, not to the senses, but to the thoughts. At first, indeed, on merely looking at them, we can hardly keep from laughing, so uncouth and grotesque is their appearance: but afterwards, on looking into them, we find them terrible beyond description; and the more we look into them, the more terrible do they become; the blood almost curdling in our veins as, dancing and singing their infernal glees over embryo murders, they unfold to our thoughts the cold, passionless, inexhaustible malignity and deformity of their nature.

In beings thus made and thus mannered; in their fantastical and unearthly aspect, awakening mixed emotions of terror and mirth; in their ominous reserve and oracular brevity of speech, so fitted at once to overcome scepticism, to sharpen curiosity, and to feed ambitious hopes; in the circumstances of their prophetic greeting, a blasted heath, as a spot deserted by nature and sacred to infernal orgies,the influences of the place thus falling in with the supernatural style and matter of their discourses; in all this we recognise a peculiar adaptedness to generate even in the strongest minds a belief in their predictions.

What effect, then, do the Weird Sisters have on the action of the play? Are their discourses necessary to the enacting of the subsequent crimes? and, if so, are they necessary as the cause, or only as the condition of those crimes? Do they operate to deprave, or only to develope the characters brought under their influence? In a word, do they create the evil heart, or only untie the evil hands? These questions have been variously answered by critics. Not to dwell on these various answers, it seems to me tolerably clear, that the agency of the Weird Sisters extends only to the inspiring of confidence in what they predict. This confidence they awaken in Banquo equally as in Macbeth; yet the only ef fect of their proceedings on Banquo is to try and prove his virtue. The fair inference, then, is, that they furnish the motives, not the principles of action; and these motives are of course to good or to bad, according to the several preformations and prelispositions of character whereon they operate. But

what relation does motive bear to action? On this point, too, it seems to me there has been much of needless confusion. Now moral action, like vision, presupposes two things, a condition and a cause. Light and visual power are both indispensable to sight; there can be no vision without light; yet the cause of vision, as every body knows, is the visual power pre-existing in the eye. Neither can we walk without an area to walk upon; yet nobody, I suppose, would pronounce that area the cause of our walking. On the contrary, that cause is obviously within ourselves; it lies in our own innate mobility; and the area is necessary only as the condition of our walking. In like manner both will and motive are indispensable to moral action. We cannot act without motives, any more than we can breathe without air, yet the cause of our acting lies in certain powers and principles within us. therefore, vision springs from the meeting of visual power with light, so action springs from the meeting of will with motive. Surely, then, those who persist in holding motives responsible for our actions, would do well to remember, that motives can avail but little after all without something to be moved.

As,

One of the necessary conditions of our acting, in all cases, is a belief in the possibility and even the practicability of what we undertake. However ardent and lawless may be our desire of a given object, still a conviction of the impossibility of reaching it necessarily precludes all efforts to reach it. So fully are we persuaded that we cannot jump over the moon, that we do not even wish, much less attempt to do it. Generally, indeed, apprehensions and assurances more or less strong of failure and punishment in criminal attempts operate to throw us back upon better principles of action; we make a virtue of necessity; and from the danger and difficulty of indulging evil and unlawful desires, fall back upon such as are lawful and good; wherein, to our surprise, nature often rewards us with far greater pleasures than we had anticipate from the opposite He who removes those apprehensions and assurances from any wicked enterprise, and convinces us of its safety and practicability, may be justly said to furnish us motives to engage in it; that is, he gives us the conditions upon which, but not the principles from which, our actions proceed; and therefore does not, properly speaking, deprave, but only developes our character. For example, in ambition itself, unchecked and unrestrained by any higher principles, are contained the elements of all the crimes necessary to the successful prosecution of its objects. I say successful prosecution; for such ambition is, from its nature, regardless of every thing but the chances of defeat: so that nothing less than the conviction or the apprehension that crimes will not succeed, can prevent such ambition from employing them.

course.

Mr. Hudson completed his edition of the works of Shakspeare with the eleventh volume, in 1856. In addition to the carefully annotated text, marked by diligent reading, judicious selection of the most intelligent labors of the best commentators, and original deduction, this work is valuable for an elaborate presentation and discussion of all the facts bearing upon the poet's biography in a "Life of Shakspeare, and a painstaking "Historical Sketch of the English Drama before Shakspeare. In the merit of philosophical discrimination and exhaustive analysis of character, Mr. Hudson's edition of Shakspeare, among the many which