No. XCIII, Tuesday, Septembor 25. 1753

Irritat, mulcet, falfis terroribus implet
Ut Magus; & modo me Thebis, modo ponit Athenis.

'Tis he who gives my breast a thousand pains,
Can make me feel each passion that he feigns;
Enrage, compose, with more than magic art,
With pity, and with terror tear my heart;
And snatch me, o'er the earth, or thro' the air,
To Thebes, to Athens, when he will and where.

HOR

POPE.

WRITERS of a mixed character, that abound in tranfcendent beauties and in gross imperfections, are the most proper and most pregnant subjects for criticifm. The regularity and correctness of a Virgil or Horace, almost confine their commentators to perpetual panegyric, and afford them few opportunities of diverfifying their remarks by the detection of latent blemishes. For this reason, I am inclined to think, that a few observations on the writings of Shakespeare, will not be deemed deemed useless or unentertaining, because he exhibits more numerous examples of excellencies and faults, of every kind, than are, perhaps, to be discovered in any other author. I shall, therefore, from time to time, examine his merit as a poet, without blind admiration, or wanton invective.

As Shakespeare is sometimes blameable for the conduct of his fables, which have no unity: and fometimes for his diction, which is obfcure and turgid; fo his characteristical excellencies may possibly be reduced to these three general heads: "his lively creative ima"gination; his strokes of nature and passion; and his " preservation of the confistency of his characters." These excellencies, particularly the last, are of so much importance in the drama, that they amply compensate for his tranfgrefsions against the rules of Time and Place, which being of a more mechanical nature, are often strictly observed by a genius of the lowest order; but to portray characters naturally, and to preserve them uniformly, requires such an intimate knowledge of the heart of man, and is so rare a portion of felicity, as to have been enjoyed, perhaps, only by two writers Homer and Shakespeare.

Of all the plays of Shakespeare, the Tempest is the most striking instance of his creative power. He has there given the reins to his boundless imagination, and has carried the romantic, the wonderful, and the wild, to the most pleasing extravagance. The scene is a defolate island; and the characters the most new and fingular that can well be conceived: a prince who practises magic, an attendant spirit, a monster the son of a witch, and a young lady who had been brought to this folitude

folitude in her infancy, and had never beheld a man except her father.

As I have affirmed that Shakespeare's chief excellence is the consistency of his characters, I will exemplify the truth of this remark, by pointing out fome master-strokes of this nature in the drama before us.

The poet artfully acquaints us that Profpero is a ma gician, by the very first words which his daughter Miranda speaks to him:

If by your art, my dearest father, you have

Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them :

which intimate that the tempest described in the preceding scene, was the effect of Profpero's power. The manner in which he was driven from his dukedom of Milan, and landed afterwards on this solitary island, accompanied only by his daughter, is immediately introduced in a short and natural narration.

The officers of his attendant Spirit, Ariel, are enumerated with amazing wildness of fancy, and yet with equal propriety: his employment is said to be,

-To tread the ooze

Of the falt deep :

To run upon the sharp wind of the north;
To do business in the veins o' th' earth,

When it is bak'd with froft;
--to dive into the fire; to ride
On the curl'd clouds.

In describing the place in which he has concealed the Neapolitan ship, Ariel expresses the fecrecy of its fituation

tion by the following circumstance, which artfully glances at another of his services;

In the deep nook, where once

Thou call'st me up at midnight, to fetch dew
From the still-vext Bermudas.

Ariel, being one of those elves or spirits, whose paf" time is to make midnight mushrooms, and who re " joice to listen to the folemn curfew;" by whose assistance Profpero has bedimm'd the fun at noon-tide,

And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault,
Set roaring war;

has a set of ideas and images peculiar to his station and office; a beauty of the same kind with that which is so justly admired in the Adam of Milton, whose manners and sentiments are all Paradisaical. How delightfully and how fuitably to his character, are the habitations and pastimes of this invisible being pointed out in the following exquisite song !

Where the bee fucks, there suck I :
In a cowflip's bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat's back I do fly,

'After sun set merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now,
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

Mr. Pope, whose imagination has been thought by fome the leaft of his excellencies, has, doubtless, .conceived and carried on the machinery in his "Rape of " the Lock," with vast exuberance of fancy. The images, customs, and employments of his Sylphs, are exactly adapted to their natures, are peculiar and appropriated, are all, if I may be allowed the expression, Sylphish. The enumeration of the punishments they were to undergo, if they neglected their charge, would, on account of its poetry and propriety, and especially the mixture of oblique satire, be superior to any circumstances in Shakespeare's Ariel, if we could suppose Pope to have been unacquainted with the Tempest, when he wrote this part of his accomplished poem.

-She did confine thee

Into a cloven pine; within which rift
Imprison'd, thou didst painfully remain
A dozen years: within which space she dy'd,
And left thee there; where thou didit vent thy

groans,

As fast as mill-wheels strike.

If thou more murmur'st, I will rend an oak, And peg thee in his knotty entrails, 'till Thou'st howl'd away twelve winters.

For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps, Side-ftitches that shall pen thy breath up: urchins Shall, for that vast of night that they may work, All exercise on thee; thou shalt be pinch'd

As thick as honey-combs, each pinch more sting

ing

Than bees that made 'em.