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wholly free of it by writing his Timon, as Goethe threw off sentimentality by his Werther-confession. He may be pleased to see in the Tempest the poet's farewell to the stage. He may be pleased to say with Prof. Lowell:„The whole play, indeed, is a succession of illusions, winding up with those solemn words of the great enchanter, who had summoned to his service every shape of merriment or passion, every figure in the great tragi-comedy of life, and who was now bidding farewell to the scene of his triumphs. For in Prospero shall we not recognise the Artist himself:—

„That did not better for his life provide

„Than public means which public manners breeds,

„Whence comes it that his name receives a brand“,— who has forfeited a shining place in the world's eye by de- votion to his art, and who, turned adrift on the ocean of life in the leaky carcass of a boat, has shipwrecked on the Fortunate Island(as men always do who find their true vocation), where he is absolute lord, making all the powers of Nature serve him, but with Ariel and Caliban as special ministers? Of whom else could he have been thinking, when he says,

„Graves, at my command.

„Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth,

„By my so potent art?“

He may think that he left his work not hopeless as to the future of his dear Art, that he left his Art, his mar- vellous child Miranda, to the young Fletcher, with his gal- lantry and his beauty, even if he perceives the weak point in Fletchers genius, its want of hardness of fibre, of patient endurance, and of a sense of the solemnity of the service of art“(Dowden, p. 426). He may, therefore, regard the Tempest as Shakespeare's last play.

He who reads a darkening gloom in the characters that he thinks drawn in our poets last period, consequently also in his mind, finds his sentiments well expressed by Ulrici: „Whatever, therefore, may have been the motives which induced Shakespeare to choose this subject(Timon), it always