Strange that the misprint here should not have attracted attention. "In lieu of this?" In lieu of what? The ring? Irrespective of the tameness and want of point in such an assertion, it is not true, in the sense in which Nerissa addresses it to Gratiano; for she had had the ring on her finger ever since dinner time on the previous day; and although she had not been to bed during the "last night which she speaks of, Gratiano did not know it.

"the doctor's clerk,

In lieu of thee, last night did lie with me."

Read:

"Grat. Why this is like the mending of highways In summer, where the ways are fair enough."

There can be hardly a doubt that Shakespeare wrote,

"In summer, when the ways are fair enough,"

as one of the correctors of Mr. Collier's folio conjectured.

"Grat. Well, while I live, I'll fear no other thing

So sore as keeping safe Nerissa's ring."

A correspondent in Notes and Queries, No. 167, p. 45, asks whether Gratiano does not make "a covert allusion to the story first told by Poggio in his Facetic, then by Ariosto, then by Rabelais, then by La Fontaine, and finally by Prior in his Hans Carvel." The query seems quite superfluous. There is surely little covertness in the allusion;

and to understand it, a knowledge of Poggio's story is by

no means necessary.

One chief and peculiar charm in the Merchant of Venice, is the gentle, placid beauty of the last Act, in which the excited passions of the fourth Act, where Comedy treads so closely upon the heels of Tragedy, subside, and are lulled into sweet repose by the soothing influences of those love passages between the three pairs of lovers in Portia's garden;-that enchanted garden, canopied by a sky "inlaid with patines of bright gold," and the air in which is filled with the music of orbs, "still quiring to the young eye'd cherubins." But convenience, or a modest supposition that Shakespeare did not understand stage effect as well as we do now-a-days, has determined that this Act is a superfluity; and it is now remorselessly amputated,—the necessary explanation between Portia and Nerissa and their husbands being huddled up at the close of the fourth Act, and the curtain dropping upon the discomfited malice of Shylock, instead of the tender joy which filled the hearts of those who went to rest in Belmont! For such a barbarous procrusteanism there is no imaginable excuse. The fact that the last part of the Scene contains certain expressions which are not fit for the ears of modern audiences, is no justification for this mutilation of the dramatic design. of the author. Let the text be pruned of these excrescences; but let them not be made the excuse for lopping off one of the finest members of the play,-one of the most beautiful productions of Shakespeare's genius.

AS YOU LIKE IT.

For the delicacy of its wit, the pregnant quaintness of its humor, the keenness of its satire, and, above all, the profound and subtle knowledge of human nature shown in the moulding of its characters, this sylvan comedy is remarkable even among the plays of Shakespeare. To these traits it adds a healthy, rural, inartificial air, which is grateful to pure sympathies. Its events pass amid trees and rocks and running brooks; and its characters show the influence of their surroundings. They do not talk like sentimental citizens on an excursion, determined to be becomingly romantic; but they drink in wholesome exhilaration from the open air, and yet do not lack that sober thoughtfulness proper to those who dwell beneath "the shade of melancholy boughs." We find in no other language so fresh and true a picture of sylvan life. The English boasts one glorious gallery of views equal to it the forest scenes in Ivanhoe. The very songs scattered through the play seem to be the spontaneous utterance of frank yet thoughtful natures, under the spell of forest influences.

:

ACT I. SCENE 1.

“Oliver. And what wilt thou do, beg, when that is spent?"

This is pointed thus in all the editions:

"And what wilt thou do? beg, when that is spent."

a punctuation which does not bring out the sense of the question. Oliver obviously does not need to ask Orlando what he will do when he gets the thousand crowns, but what he will do when they are spent. The question is double; and in their natural order the queries would stand thus:

"And what wilt thou do when that is spent? beg?"

But the two are united by making the last parenthetical in the first; and there should therefore be no interrogation point except at the close of the whole sentence.

On the very threshhold of the drama we have a remarkable instance of the nice and intuitive discrimination of Shakespeare in the delineation of a secondary character. Oliver, the elder brother of Orlando, would be drawn by any but a great master of the human heart, as an unmitigated villain; and so, indeed, he is invariably misrepresented on the stage. Oliver, speaking of Orlando in the first Scene, says:

"I hope I shall see an end of him; for my soul, yet I know not why, hates nothing more than he."

Here the speech closes, on the stage: but Shakespeare makes Oliver go on, and say of his young brother :

"Yet he's gentle; never schooled, and yet learned; full of noble device; of all sorts enchantingly beloved; and, indeed so much in the heart of the world, and especially of my own people, who best know him, that I

am altogether misprised. But it shall not be so, long; this wrestler shall clear all nothing remains, but that I kindle the boy thither, which now I'll go about."

With what wonderful knowledge is here depicted the effect of moral excellence upon a man envious in temper and domineering in spirit, yet capable of appreciating that which is good in others, and even of desiring it for himself! He is not a mere brutal, grasping elder brother: but being somewhat morose and moody in his disposition, he first envied and then disliked the youth who, although his inferior in position, is so much in the heart of the world, and especially of his own people, that he himself is altogether misprised. The very moody disposition which makes him less popular than his younger brother, led him to nourish this envious dislike, till it became at length the bitter hate which he shows in the first Scene of the play. Had Oliver been less appreciative of the good in others, and less capable of it himself, he would not have turned so bitterly against Orlando. It is quite true to nature that such a man should be overcome entirely, and at once, by the subsequent generosity of his brother, and instantly subdued by simple, earnest Celia. But his sudden yielding to sweet and noble influences is not consistent with the character of the coarse, unmitigated villain whom we see upon the stage, and who is the monstrous product, not of Shakespeare, but of those who garble Shakespeare's text.

I notice this, because it is an example of the wrong done to Shakespeare as a dramatist by the preparers of the acting copies of his plays; a wrong from which this comedy especially has suffered. Shakespeare was not only the greatest of poets, but an actor, and the successful manager of a theatre; and it is more than probable that he knew, not only what was necessary to the development of his conceptions of character, but what was suited to the tastes