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To feed for aye her lamp and flame of love,
To keep her constancy in plight and youth,
Out-living beauties out-ward, with a mind
That doth renew swifter than blood decays.
Or, that persuasion could but thus convince me,
That my integrity and truth to you

Might be affronted with the match and weight
Of such a winnow'd purity in love;

How were I then uplifted! But alas,

I am as true as Truth's simplicity,

And simpler than the infancy of Truth."

These passages may not seem very characteristic at first sight, though we think they are so. We will give two, that cannot be mistaker, Patroclus says to Achilles,

"Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid

Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane
Be shook to air.”

Troilus, addressing the god of day on the approach of the morning that parts him from Cressida, says with much scorn,

"What! proffer'st thou thy light here for to sell?
Go, sell it them that smallé selés grave.”

If nobody but Shakspeare could have written the former, nobody but Chaucer would have thought of the latter. Chaucer was the most literal of poets, as Richardson was of prose writers.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA.

THIS is a very noble play. Though not in the first order of Shakspeare's productions, it stands next to them, and is, we think, the finest of his historical plays, that is, of those in which he made poetry the organ of history, and assumed a certain tone of character and sentiment, in conformity to known facts, instead of trusting to his observations of general nature, or to the unlimited indulgence of his own fancy. What he has added to the history is upon an equality with it. His genius was, as it were, a match for history as well as nature, and could grapple at will with either. This play is full of that pervading comprehensive power by which the poet always seems to identify himself with time and circumstances. It presents a fine picture of Roman pride and Eastern magnificence: and in the struggle between the two, the empire of the world seems suspended, "like the swan's down-feather,

** That stands upon the swell at full of tide,
And neither way inclines **

The characters breathe, move, and live. Shakspeare does not stand reasoning on what his characters would do or say, but at once becomes them, and speaks and acts for them. He does not present us with groups of stage puppets or poetical machines making set speeches on human life, and acting from a calculation of ostensible motives, but he brings living men and women on the scene, who speak and act from real feelings, according to the ebbs and flows of passion, without the least tincture of the pedantry of logic or rhetoric. Nothing is made out by inference and analogy, by climax and antithesis, but every. thing takes place just as it would have done in reality, according

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to the occasion. The character of Cleopatra is a master-piece. What an extreme contrast it affords to Imogen! One would think it almost impossible for the same person to have drawn both. The Egyptian is voluptuous, ostentatious, conscious, boastful of her charms, haughty, tyrannical, fickle. Her luxurious pomp and gorgeous extravagance are displayed in all their force and lustre, as well as the irregular grandeur of the soul of Mark Antony. Take only the first four lines that they speak as an example of the regal style of love-making.

"CLEOPATRA. If it be love indeed, tell me how much?
ANTONY. There's beggary in the love that can be reckon❜d.
CLEOPATRA. I'll set a bourn how far to be belov'd.

ANTONY. Then must thou needs find out new heav'n, new earth."

The rich and poetical description of her person, beginning—

"The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,

Burnt on the water; the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were love-sick "-

seems to prepare the way for, and almost to justify the subse-
quent infatuation of Antony when, in the sea-fight at Actium, he
leaves the battle, and "like a doating mallard" follows her fly-
ing sails.

Few things in Shakspeare (and we know of nothing in any other author like them) have more of that local truth of imagi nation and character than the passage in which Cleopatra is represented conjecturing what were the employments of Antony in his absence. "He's speaking now, or murmuring-Where's my serpent of old Nile?" Or again, when she says to Antony, after the defeat at Actium, and his summoning up resolution to risk another fight-"It is my birth-day; I had thought to have held it poor; but since my lord is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra." Perhaps the finest burst of all is Antony's rage after his final defeat, when he comes in, and surprises the messenger of Cæsar kissing her hand

"To let a fellow that will take rewards,
And say, God quit you, be familiar with,

My play-fellow, your hand; this kingly seal,
And plighter of high hearts."

It is no wonder that he orders him to be whipped; but his low condition is not the true reason: there is another feeling which lies deeper, though Antony's pride would not let him show it, except by his rage; he suspects the fellow to be Casar's proxy.

Cleopatra's whole character is the triumph of the voluptuous, of the love of pleasure and the power of giving it, over every other consideration. Octavia is a dull foil to her, and Fulvia, a shrill-tongued shrew. What a picture do those lines give of her

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy

The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies."

What a spirit and fire in her conversation with Antony's messenger, who brings her the unwelcome news of his marriage with Octavia! How all the pride and beauty of high rank breaks out in her promised reward to him

- “ There's gold, and here My bluest veins to kiss!"

She had great and unpardonable faults, but the beauty of her death almost redeems them. She learns from the depth of de spair the strength of her affections. She keeps her queen-like state in the last disgrace, and her sense of the pleasurable in the last moments of her life. She tastes a luxury in death. After applying the asp, she says with fondness-

**Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,

That sucks the nurse asleep?

As sweet as baim, as soft as air, as gentle
Oh Antony "**

It is worth while to observe that Shakspeare has contrasted the extreme magnificence of the descriptions in this play with pictures of extreme suffering and physical horror, not less strik

ing-partly, perhaps, to excuse the effeminacy of Mark Antony, to whom they are related as having happened, but more to preserve a certain balance of feeling in the mind. Cresar says,

hearing of his conduct at the court of Cleopatra,

-"Antony,

Leave thy lascivious wassels. When thou once
Wert beaten from Mutina, where thou slew'st
Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel

Did famine follow, whom thou fought'st against,
Though daintily brought up, with patience morc
Than savages could suffer. Thou did'st drink
The stale of horses, and the gilded puddle

Which beast would cough at. Thy palate then did deign
The roughest berry on the rudest kedge,

Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets,
The barks of trees thou browsed'st. On the Alps,
It is reported, thou did'st eat strange flesh,
Which some did die to look on: and all this,
It wounds thine honor that I speak it now,

Was borne so like a soldier, that thy cheek
So much as lank'd not."

The passage after Antony's defeat by Augustus, where he is made to say—

"Yes, yes; he at Philippi kept

His sword e'en like a dancer; while I struck
The lean and wrinkled Cassius, and 't was I
That the mad Brutus ended "—

is one of those fine retrospections which show us the winding and eventful march of human life. The jealous attention which has been paid to the unities both of time and place, has taken away the principle of perspective in the drama, and all the interest which objects derive from distance, from contrast, from privation, from change of fortune, from long-cherished passion; and contracts our view of life from a strange and romantic dream, long, obscure, and infinite, into a smartly contested three hours' inaugural disputation on its merits by the different candidates for theatrical applause.

The latter scenes of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA are full of the

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