characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest. of the world; by the peculiarities of studies. or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions; they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets, a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakspeare, it is commonly a species.

It is from this wide extension of design that so much instruction is derived. It is this which fills the plays of Shakspeare with practical axioms and domestic wisdom. It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept; and it may be said of Shakspeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and economical prudence. Yet his real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenor of his dialogue; and

he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.

Upon every other stage the universal agent is love, by whose power all good and evil is distributed, and every action quickened or retarded. But love is only one of many passions; and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the drama of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him. He knew that any other passion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity.

Characters thus ample and general were not easily discriminated and preserved; yet perhaps no poet ever kept his personages more distinct from each other.

'Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and a dwarf; and he that should form his expectations of human affairs from the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakspeare has

no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion: even where the agency is supernatural, the dialogue is level with life. Other writers disguise the most natural passions and most frequent incidents; so that he who contemplates them in the book will not know them in the world; Shakspeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he represents will not happen, but, if it were possible, its effects would probably be such as he has assigned; and it may be said, that he has not only shown human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials to which it cannot be exposed.

This, therefore, is the praise of Shakspeare, that his drama is the mirror of life; that he who has mazed his imagination in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious ecstacies, by reading human sentiments in human language; by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.

GEORGE IV., KING OF ENGLAND.

PASSING by the intermediate genealogies of the House of Brunswick through the course of the middle ages, it will only be necessary very briefly to show in what way the proximity of blood came, which in the early part of the last century caused the Brunswick line to be called to the throne of these kingdoms.

Elizabeth, daughter of James I. married. Frederic, Elector Palatine, afterwards King of Bohemia. By this prince she had a daughter, Sophia, married to Ernestus, Elector of Hanover, and representative of the Houses of Brunswick, Hanover, Lunenburgh, Wolfenbuttel, Zelle, &c. whose posterity, by virtue of the act of settlement, now fill the throne of Great Britain.

His Majesty was born August 12, 1762. The birth of this prince diffused a general joy through the nation, and loyal addresses were voted to their Majesties by both houses of Parliament, by the city of London, the two Universities, and all the other great

bodies corporate in the kingdom. A few days after his birth he was created Prince of Wales, by letters patent. The mode of conferring this dignity is by investiture with a cap, coronet, gold verge, and ring, and by issue of letters patent under the great seal. In 1765 he was elected a knight companion of the Order of the Garter, and installed at Windsor, July 25, 1771.

The education of the Prince of Wales was conducted on a plan perfectly well calculated to render him a respectable scholar and an accomplished gentleman, but ill calculated to make him a prudent prince. It was so austere, perhaps we should not use too harsh a word if we were to say repulsive, that the moment of his Royal Highness's emancipation, was that of a prisoner from confinement. Debarred from pleasures so natural to youth, he plunged into all the felicities of society with the avidity of one who had never tasted of joy.

Dr. Markham, the late Archbishop of York, was appointed preceptor to his Royal Highness. The sub-preceptor was Dr. Cyril Jackson, who was offered the primacy of Ireland, but refused it. Dr. Markham,