formerly belonged to Davenant, and afterwards to Betterton. When in Betterton's possession it was engraved for Rowe's edition of Shakspere's works. It subsequently passed into various hands; during which transit it was engraved, first by Vertue and afterwards by Houbraken. It became the property of the Duke of Chandos, by marriage; and thence descended to the Buckingham family. Kneller copied this portrait for Dryden, and the poet addressed to the painter the following verses as a return for the gift:

"Shakspeare, thy gift, I place before my sight,
With awe I ask his blessing as I write;
With reverence look on his majestic face,
Proud to be less, but of his godlike race.
His soul inspires me, while thy praise I write,
And I like Teucer under Ajax fight:

Bids thee, through me, be bold; with dauntless breast
Contemn the bad, and emulate the best:

Like his, thy critics in the attempt are lost,

When most they rail, know then, they envy most."

Of a portrait, said to have been painted by CORNELIUS JANSEN, an engraving was made by Earlom, and was prefixed to an edition of 'King Lear,' published in 1770, edited by Mr. Jennens. It has subsequently been more carefully engraved by Mr. Turner, for Mr. Boaden's 'Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Portraits of Shakspere.' This portrait has the inscription "Ate 46, 1610;" and in a scroll over the head are the words "Ut Magus." Mr. Boaden says, "The two words are extracted from the famous Epistle of Horace to Augustus, the First of the Second Book; the particular passage this:

'Ille per extentum funem mihi posse videtur
Ire poeta; meum qui pectus inaniter angit,
Irritat, mulcet, falsis terroribus implet,

Ut Magus; et modo me Thebis, modo ponit Athenis.'

6

No man ever took this 'extended range,' more securely than Shakspere; no man ever possessed so ample a control over the passions; and he transported his hearers, as a magician, over lands and seas, from one kingdom to another, superior to all circumspection or confine." The picture passed from the possession of Mr. Jennens into that of the Duke of Somerset.

'MR. WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE'S Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, published according to the True Originall Copies,' is the title of the first collection of our poet's plays, which appeared in a folio volume, in 1623. This volume is "printed by Isaac Iaggard and Ed. Blount;" but the Dedication bears the signatures of "John Heminge, Henry Condell." That Blount and Jaggard had become the proprietors of this edition, we learn from an entry in the Stationers' registers, under date November 8, 1623; in which they claim "Mr. William Shakespeere's Comedyes, Histories, and Tragedyes, soe many of the said copies as are not formerly entered to other men." These copies so claimed as not "formerly entered" are then recited. They are in number sixteen; the whole volume consisting of thirty-six plays. The plays "formerly entered to other men" had, with some exceptions, been previously published, each separately; and some of these went on to several editions, at dates extending from 1597 to 1622. These are what are commonly spoken of as the quarto editions.

John Heminge and Henry Condell were amongst the

"principal actors" of the plays of Shakspere, according to a list prefixed to their edition. In 1608 they were shareholders with Shakspere in the Blackfriars Theatre. In his Will, in 1616, they stand upon equal terms with his eminent friend Burbage, in the following bequest:-"To my fellows, John Hemynge, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell, twenty-six shillings eight-pence apiece, to buy them rings." In 1619, after the death of Shakspere and Burbage, they were at the head of their remaining "fellows." They are entitled, therefore, to speak with authority, and to be regarded with 'deference, both from their intimate connexion with Shakspere, and the responsible position which they held in the company of actors of which his plays had probably become the most valuable possession. In their Dedication to the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Montgomery, they allude to the favour with which these noblemen regarded these productions (which, in the dedicatory language, they call "trifles"), and "their author, living." They further say, "We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his orphans guardians, without ambition either of self-profit or fame; only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare." In their address "To the great variety of readers," the words which they use are still more remarkable:-" It had been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished, that the author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings. But since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he, by death, departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends the office of their care and pain to have collected and published them; and so to have published them, as where, before, you were abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them,even those are now offered to your view cured, and perfect of their limbs; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them; who, as he was a happy imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers."

That the friends, fellows, and editors of Shakspere were held to perform an acceptable service to the world by this publication we may judge, however imperfectly, from some of the verses prefixed to the edition. Ben Jonson's celebrated poem, "To the Memory of my beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us,' follows the preface, and it concludes with these lines:

"Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage,

Or influence, chide, or cheer, the drooping stage;

Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn'd like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume's light."

Another poem in the same volume, by Leonard Digges, is in the same tone:

"Shake-speare, at length thy pious fellows give

The world thy works; thy works by which outlive
Thy tomb thy name must. When that stone is rent,
And time dissolves thy Stratford monument,

Here we alive shall view thee still. This book,

When brass and marble fade, shall make thee look

Fresh to all ages."

We cannot doubt that the publication of this volume was hailed with delight by all readers of taste and judgment; and that, previous to the publication of the second edition, nine years after, hundreds of the countrymen of Shakspere, as well as the young Milton, had become familiar with "the leaves of that "unvalued [invaluable] book." For, if the edition of 1623 had no other claims upon the gratitude of every Englishman, it had secured from that destruction, entire or partial, which would probably have been their fate if they had remained in manuscript, some of the noblest monuments of Shakspere's genius. The poet had been dead seven years when this edition was printed. Some of the plays which it preserved, through the medium of the press, had been written a considerable period before his death. We have not a single manuscript line in existence, written, or supposed to be written, by Shakspere. If, from any notions of exclusive advantage as the managers of a company, Heminge and Condell had not printed this edition of Shakspere, if the publication had been suspended for ten, or at most for fifteen years, till the civil wars broke out, and the predominance of the puritanical spirit had shut up the