human probability and all human interest. It is a sublime poem, Manfred; but it is the sublime of monstrosity. The sublime of the Prometheus of Æschylus is a very different thing: it is the sublime, in the first place, not of an unnatural man, but of a god; and, in the second place, it is the sublime of a soul inspired by ill-regulated philanthropy, not by unchastened passion. I presume there are few things finer in the English language than that midnight soliloquy in the third act of Manfred, when the Count, looking forth from his lonely tower on the stars and the snow-shining mountains, recalls a night spent amid the ruins of the Colosseum, and the palace of the Cæsars in Rome--a soliloquy which certainly will lose nothing by a detailed comparison with the strikingly similar monologue in the fourth act of Goethe's great poem; but the misfortune is, when admiration has been spent on particular passages, one can take no general impression away from the work except this, that the poet wrote under the influence of some sad disease of morbid sublimity, and his heroes were made in Titanic proportions, after his own likeness. In every view, therefore, except in regard to the power of one or two individual passages, the study of Manfred can only tend to raise in the mind of the reader a most profound admiration for the more healthy tone, the more ripe wisdom, the more rich material, and the more skilful treatment, of the German writer. With Shakespeare's great work it is quite otherwise. Hamlet unquestionably has many striking points of similarity with Faust. The same moody melancholy, and tendency to contemplation of suicide; the same lofty discontent with his environment, and misanthropic contempt for the humanity with which he stood in direct relationship; the same communion with the unseen world, though in a different form; the same feebleness and indecision of character in the hero, with occasional blind plunges into strokes that hurry himself and others into ruin. In his morbid state of mind the ghost acts according to the same law on the hero of our great English tragedy that Mephistopheles does on the German doctor; but the ghost in the one case for the Devil, in the other--though both incarnated creations of a diseased mind--indicates in the strongest possible way the diverse character of the disease. Hamlet is an essentially noble character sunk into melancholy by the abnormal character of the immediate social element in which it was his destiny to move; the moody contemplation of the social wrongs which were rife round about him generated the idea of revenge, or taking the moral law into his own hand; and of this rash idea of revenge the ghost is dramatically the voice and the spur. But, though plunging himself and his environment into misery by following out his bloody suggestions, Hamlet never forfeits our respect. He is never selfish; and suffers more from excessive sensibility to the sins of others than from any faults that may be