The Sun.
London, England, 1864-06-22 00:00:00

a permanent condition of man. Be represents the discom-
fort of the soul in a lire which is not sufficiently adapted to
it. He represents the shoe that pinches and stops our
walking; the shoe is the body. Shakespeare frees Lim
from it, and he is right. Hamlet—prince if you like, but
king never—Hamlet is incapable of governing a people, he
lives too much in a world beyond. On the other hand, he
does better than to reign ; he is. Take from him his family,
his country, his ghost, and the whole adventure at Elsinore,
and even in the form of an inactive type, he remains
strangely terrible. That is the consequence of the amount
of humanity and the amount of mystery that is in him.
Hamlet is formidable, which does not prevent his being
ironical. He has the two profiles of destiny.

In all which there is, as wa take it, much of
subtle criticism. As there is also, abundantly dis-
cernible in other portions of the work, in which the
greet French poet descants upon divers other among
the marvellous creations cf the Great Poet not of
England merely, not of motion Europeans even, but
of the vast and countless race of Humanity. Othello,
for example, and Cordelia—Falstaff and Macbeth—
Portia and lago—with the rest, not alike, but in
the widest imaginable way dissimilar. Ina
asnauch as the book will, doubtless, ac-
complish its primary object, it may be
pronounced successful. It will, without doubt,
verve to lie the general attention both here in Eng-
land and yonder in France, upon the dawning
literary exploit of the author's accomplished son,
namely, the latter's translation (for the first time
worthily) of the immortal works of William Shak-
spere. Otherwise, the book here under con-
sideration is little better than a superb failure.
It is so wondrous in art, and yet so flawed
and incomplete, that it is more unsatisfactory than
a torso just issued as a torso from the hand of some
consummate sculptor. It is as if a Praxitilea had
presented to the world quite newly from his atelier,
just fresh from his wonder-working chise►,aTneseus
as marred in form, and yet as marvellous in
anatomy (what there is of it) as the Theseus of
the Elgin Marbles I No hands—mere stumps !
No feet—egain mere stumps of limbs l Here
and there the wondrous surface jagged and
splintered. 'The heroic visage itself—noseless !
As faulty, yet as noble,in its outline is this august,
yet, at the same time, this grotesquely incomplete
elfigtes of Shakspere. We read it at once provoked
and delighted. It seems at one and the same
moment—all through—to captivate our imagination
and to outrage our judgmeet. And it is significative
of the unsatisfactory bearing of the whole of this
oratorical rhapsody in honour of Shakspere and of
a good many others besides Shakspere, that it closes
the enumeration of the great names the author
therein especially desires to eulogize by the mention
of one so holy and so divine, that the mere allusion
to it here among. those who, in spite of their won-
drous genius, are, after all, the mereest mortals,
sounds to us, reads to us, startles us, torments us
like nothing less than a flagrant and certainly a
wholly uncalled-for profanity.