hen, is good cause why the imaginative drama, comic or tragic,
shall delight in high persons. And you see accordingly, that the plays of
Shakspeare, of whatsoever description, move regularly amongst the loftily
born--kings, independent dukes, nobles, gentlemen.

"The Emperor of Russia was my father:"

says the falsely accused Hermione, and you sympathize with her proud
consciousness, and you THE MORE feel her abhorred indignity.

If Spenser could say, that it belongs to gentle blood to sit well on
horseback--much more does the easy and inborn courage and worth of gentle
blood bestride bravely, gracefully, lightly, and well, the careering,
rearing, bounding, plunging, and headlong rushing horses of human
destinies.

The fact, then, is this:--Shakspeare thus views the world; and he frames
his idea of the drama accordingly.

What, then, does Pope mean, when he says that Shakspeare "lays his scene
amongst tradesmen and mechanics?"

Surely he does not include under _tradesmen_, great _merchants_. Not, for
example, the "Merchant of Syracusa," the grave and good old AEgaeon,
condemned to death in the "Comedy of Errors" because Ephesus and Syracusa
have war. He and his fortune are as far away as a king with his--from the
'prentices of London. It is not the Venetian merchant, the princely
Antonio, with his argosies, spice and silk laden, that Pope regards as
letting down the dignity of the sock; nor, we hope, the Jew and usurer,
Shylock; the sublime in indignation, when he vindicates to his
down-spurned race the parity of the human tempering in body and soul; the
sublime in hate, when he fastens like a devil his fangs--or prepares to
fasten--in the quivering, living flesh of his Christian debtor.

No! these are not yet the key to the enigma--"_tradesmen_ and mechanics."

In the "Midsummer Night's Dream," "a crew" of six "rude _mechanicals_,"
"hard-handed men," "that work for bread upon Athenian stalls," enact TWO
scenes wholly to themselves--ONE, which mixes them up with the fairies;
and ONE, in the presence of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and of his fair
warrior-bride Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons; to say nothing of ONE, or
possible TWO fairy scenes, which include one of the said "swaggering
hempen homespuns," transformed by faery.

Is _this_ that "laying" of the "scene amongst tradesmen and mechanics,"
which has afforded our critic his absolute description of Shakspeare's
comedy?

We greatly suspect, that it had too