men.

diversity of composite subject and conflicting interest which disturbs the unity of action, there is a singleness of spirit, a general unity or concord of inner tone, in marked contrast to the utter discord and discrepancy of the several sections of the Two Noble KinsWe admit, then, that this play offers us the single instance of a style not elsewhere traceable in Shakespeare; that no exact parallel to it can be found among his other plays; and that if not the partial work it may certainly be taken as the general model of Fletcher in his tragic poetry. On the other hand, we contend that its exceptional quality is explicable as a tentative essay in a new line by one who tried so many styles before settling into his latest; and that, without far stronger, clearer, and completer proof than has yet been or can ever be advanced, the question is not solved but merely evaded by the assumption of a double authorship.

By far the ablest argument based upon a wider ground of reason or of likelihood than this of mere metre that has yet been advanced in support of the theory which would attribute a part of this play to some weaker hand than Shakespeare's is due to the study of a critic whose name—already by right of inheritance the most illustrious name of his age and ours-is now for ever attached to that of Shakespeare himself by right of the highest service ever done and the noblest duty ever paid to his memory. The untimely death which removed beyond reach of our thanks for all he had done and our hopes for all he might do the man who first had given to France the first among foreign poets-son of the greatest Frenchman and translator of the greatest Englishman-was only in this not untimely, that it forbore him till the great and wonderful work was done which has bound two deathless names together by a closer than the common link that connects the names of all sovereign poets. Among all classic translations of the classic works of the world, I know of none that for absolute mastery and perfect triumph over all accumulation of obstacles, for supreme dominion over supreme difficulty, can be matched with the translation of Shakespeare by François-Victor Hugo, unless a claim of companionship may perchance be put in for Urquhart's version of Rabelais. For such success in the impossible as finally disproves the right of "that fool of a word" to existenceat least in the world of letters-the two miracles of study and of sympathy which have given Shakespeare to the French and Rabelais to the English, and each in his habit as he lived, may take rank together in glorious rivalry beyond eyeshot of all past or future competition.

Among the essays appended to the version of Shakespeare which they complete and illustrate, that which deals with the play now in question gives as ample proof as any other of the sound and subtle insight brought to bear by the translator upon the object of his labour and his love. His keen and studious intuition is here as

always not less notable and admirable than his large and solid knowledge, his full and lucid comprehension at once of the text and of the history of Shakespeare's plays; and if his research into the inner details of that history may seem ever to have erred from the strait path of firm and simple certainty into some dubious byway of theory or conjecture, we may be sure at least that no lack of learning or devotion, of ardour or intelligence, but more probably some noble thought that was fathered by a noble wish to do honour to Shakespeare, has led him to attribute to his original some quality foreign to the text, or to question the authenticity of what for love of his author he might not wish to find in it. Thus he would reject the main part of the fifth act as the work of a mere court laureate, an official hack or hireling employed to anoint the memory of an archbishop and lubricate the steps of a throne with the common oil of dramatic adulation; and finding it in either case a task unlike unworthy of Shakespeare to glorify the name of Cranmer or to deify the names of the queen then dead and the king yet living, it is but natural that he should be induced by an unconscious bias or prepossession of the will to depreciate the worth of the verse spent on work fitter for ushers and embalmers and the general valetry or varletry of Church and State. That this fifth act is unequal in point of interest to the better part of the preceding acts with which it is connected by so light and loose a tie of convenience is as indisputable as that the style of the last scene savours more strongly than ever of Fletcher's most special and distinctive qualities, or that the whole structure of the play if judged by any strict rule of pure art is incomposite and incongruous, wanting in unity, consistency, and coherence of interest. The fact is that here even more than in King John the poet's hands were hampered by a difficulty inherent in the subjeet. To an English and Protestant audience, fresh from the passions and perils of reformation and reaction, he had to present an English king at war with the papacy, in whom the assertion of national independence was incarnate; and to the sympathies of such an audience it was a matter of mere necessity for him to commend the representative champion of their cause by all means which he could compel into the service of his aim. Yet this object was in both instances all but incompatible with the natural and necessary interest of the plot. It was inevitable that this interest should in the main be concentrated upon the victims of the personal or national policy of either king; upon Constance and Arthur, upon Katherine and Wolsey. Where these are not, either apparent in person on the stage, or felt in their influence upon the speech and action of the characters present, the pulse of the poem beats fainter and its forces begin to flag. In King John this difficulty was met and mastered, these double claims of the subject of the poem and the object of the poet were satisfied and harmonized, by the effacement of John and

the substitution of Philip as the champion of the national cause and the protagonist of the dramatic action. Considering this play in its double aspect of tragedy and history, we might say that the English hero becomes the central figure of the poem as seen from the historic side, while John remains the central figure of the poem as seen from the tragic side; the personal interest that depends on personal crime and retribution is concentrated on the agony of the king; the national interest which, though the eponymous hero of the poem, he was alike inadequate as a craven and improper as a villain to sustain and represent in the eyes of the spectators was happily and easily transferred to the one person of the play who could properly express within the compass of its closing act at once the protest against papal pretension, the defiance of foreign invasion, and the prophetic assurance of self-dependent life and self-sufficing strength inherent in the nation then fresh from a fiercer trial of its quality, which an audience of the days of Queen Elizabeth would justly expect from the poet who undertook to set before them in action the history of the days of King John. That history had lately been brought upon the stage under the hottest and most glaring light that could be thrown on it by the fire of fanatical partisanship; The Troublesome Reign of King John, weakest and most wooden of all wearisome chronicles that ever cumbered the boards, had in it for sole principle of life its power of congenial appeal to the same blatant and vulgar spirit of Protestantism which inspired it. In all the flat interminable morass of its tedious and traceless verse I can find no blade or leaf of living poetic growth, no touch but one of nature or of pathos, where Arthur dying would send a last thought in search of his mother. From this play Shakespeare can have got neither hint nor help towards the execution of his own; the crude rough sketch of the Bastard as he brawls and swaggers through the long length of its scenes is hardly so much as the cast husk or chrysalid of the noble creature which was to arise and take shape for ever at the transfiguring touch of Shakespeare. In the case of King Henry VIII. he had not even such a blockish model as this to work from. The one preceding play known to me which deals professedly with the same subject treats of quite other matters than are handled by Shakespeare, and most notably with the scholastic adventures or misadventures of Edward Prince of Wales and his whipping-boy Ned Browne. A fresh argument might be raised by the critics who deny the unity of authorship in King Henry VIII., on the ground that if Shakespeare had completed the work himself he would surely not have let slip the occasion to introduce one of the most famous and popular of all court fools in the person of Will Summers; who might have given life and relief to the action of many scenes now unvaried and unbroken in their gravity of emotion and event.

Shakespeare, one would say, might naturally have been expected to take up and remodel the well-known figure of which his humble precursor could give but a rough thin outline, yet sufficient it should seem to attract the tastes to which it appealed; for this or some other quality of seasonable attraction served to float the now forgotten play of Rowley through several editions. The central figure of the huge hot-headed king, with his gusts of stormy good humour and peals of burly oaths which might have suited "Gargantua's mouth" and satisfied the requirements of Hotspur, appeals in a ruder fashion to the survival of the same sympathies on which Shakespeare with a finer instinct as evidently relied; the popular estimate of the bluff and brawny tyrant "who broke the bonds of Rome" was not yet that of later historians, though doubtless neither was it that of the writer or writers who would champion him to the utterance. Perhaps the opposite verdicts given by the instinct of the people on "bluff King Hal" and "Bloody Mary" may be understood by reference to a famous verse of Juvenal. The wretched queen was sparing of noble blood and lavish of poor men's lives-cerdonibus timenda; and the curses under which her memory was buried were spared by the people to her father, Lamiarum cæde madenti. In any case, the humblest not less than the highest of the poets who wrote under the reign of his daughter found it safe to present him in a popular light before an audience of whose general prepossession in his favour William Shakespeare was no slower to take advantage than Samuel Rowley.

The two plays we have just discussed have one quality of style in common which has already been noted; that in them rhetoric is in excess of action or passion, and far in excess of poetry. They are not as yet perfect examples of his second manner, though far ahead of his first stage in performance as in promise. Compared with the full and living figure of Katherine or of Constance, the study of Margaret of Anjou is the mere sketch of a poet still in his pupillage: John and Henry, Philip and Wolsey, are designs beyond reach of the hand which drew the second and third Richard without much background or dramatic perspective. But the difficulties inherent in either subject are not surmounted throughout with absolute equality of success; the very point of appeal to the sympathy and excitement of the time may have been something of a disturbing force in the composition of the work— a loadstone rock indeed, of tempting attraction to the patriot as well as to the playwright, but possibly capable of proving in some measure a rock of offence to the poet whose ship was piloted towards it. His perfect triumph in the field of national drama, coincident with the perfect maturity of his comic genius and his general style, was yet to show itself as the crowning sign of his great second period. A. C. SWINBURNE.

THE RELATIONS OF WESTERN POWERS WITH THE EAST.

Our

We were lately told, by the Times, that "Our concerns with the vast and still almost unknown empire of China, are of more real importance to the British Empire than Continental disputes about a province or a river. And every one acquainted with those regions is possessed by the conviction that there the next generation, if not the present, will witness one of the greatest revolutions of humanity." This last, as a speculative opinion on the future of Eastern Asia, is open to question, but the first is matter of demonstration. The utterances of the journals on our relations with China, Burmah, and the Malay Peninsula, have recently been bewildering in their number, no less than in the variety of opinions conveyed. Two months ago there seemed to be a lull, and some hope of a breathing time being allowed, during which it might be possible to digest the mass of crude matter forced upon public attention. Sufficient at least to permit a deliberate judgment to be formed on the actual position of affairs in the Eastern World. minister at Peking had telegraphed to the Foreign Office that the terms of a settlement had been agreed upon, and that the English members of the commission of inquiry into the Yunnan outrage, were actually on their way. But scarcely had we congratulated ourselves on this apparent commencement of a peaceful settlement in China, than another series of telegrams followed each other in hot haste, announcing the murder of Mr. Birch, our resident at Perak, and an outbreak in the Malay Peninsula. The unpleasant surprise occasioned by this intelligence, as unexpected as it was unwelcome, had not passed away, when the announcement of another and more pressing danger appeared. The "Eastern Question," we were assured, "was advancing, was indeed upon us," despite all efforts to stave off, to another and more convenient season, a final solution. The Turkish Government had declared itself bankrupt. The Egyptian finances were suspected to be in no better position, and Egyptian scrip went down 20 per cent. Lastly, there burst upon the political and financial world, the news that the British Government had bought the Khedive's shares in the Suez Canal for £4,000,000, and by that act, it was supposed, declared its determination to hold a material stake in Egypt, and secure at all costs the shortest line of communication with India and the Eastern seas. With this culminating news, the field of Eastern interests suddenly widened, and all Asia was seen in the distance, looming on the political horizon. It was no