The Sun. — 1834-01-07 (London, England)

LONDON, 1834.  Mr. Valpy has here brought his edition of Shakspeare to a close—and cheap and complete it is, profusely illustrated with outline engravings, and having the rare recommendation of a copious index. The present volume contains Shakspeare's Minor Poems, which are well known by name ; but, we suspeCt, have been little read by the community. Of these the longest, the most impassioned, and the most poetic, is " Venus and Adonis," which contains, here and there, passages of such transcendent beauty as our great dramatist scarcely surpassed even in his happiest plays. We may mention, as among the most brilliant of these, the description of the horse— inferior only to that sublime sketch of the charger in Job—the coming on of evening, with the farewell kiss of Venus to Adonis ; the highly-wrought comparison between love and lust ; and the lamentation of the goddess over her dead favourite. The subjoined lines are exquisitely tender and felicitous in expression :  " She looks upon his lips, and they are pale ; She takes him by the band, and that is cold ; She whispers in his ears a heavy tale, As if he heard the woeful words she told ; She lifts the coffer lids that close each eye, Where, lo ! two lamps, burnt out, in darkness lie."  It is a curious thing that all the editions we have ever seen (the present among the number) give the closing couplet in the above passage, as follows :  " She lifts the coffer-lids that close his eyes, Where, lo I two lamps, burnt out, in darkness lies— thus making Shakspeare mar the beauty of the stanza by a glaring violation of the very first principle of grammar. We have taken the liberty of making the poet write at least correctly, and we hope we have not much injured his description by our amendment. " The Rape of Lucrece," as a whole, reads heavily, and has one strange defect, namely, that it is too didactic and moralizing. Tarquin discusses matters with Lucrece, previously to his effecting " his diabolical purpose" (to borrow a newspaper phrase) with as much collectedness and parade of logic as if he were discussing the doctrine of original sin ; and she replies with all the point and force of a Madame de Stael. This is the only work of Shakspeare which wears the aspect of pedantry, and, as such, is an undoubted curiosity. The " Sonnets" are many of them exquisite productions ; but some few are remarkable for nothing but quaint, fantastic trifling. Still the young poet who desires to accomplish himself in his art, will do well to read them with a ucntiun, for they abound in happy turns of expression, and bhow what forcible, picturesque power a well-chosen epithet possesses in the hands of a master-mind. Shakspeare's epithets are nowhere more characteristic or felicitous than in his Sonnets. They light up a whole stanza like a burst of sunshine. You never find them misplaced. We will instance a few :—" All-eating shame"—"Winter's ragged hand"--" gracious light of day"— " pupil pen of youth" " easy-cushioned age,"—most expressive of Shakspeare's social turn of thought—" now stand you on the top of happy hours"—" maiden gardens"—our great poet is fond of associating his ideas with images of love and beauty—" gold complexion of the sun"—" antique pen of time"—" love's fine it"—" tanned antiquity"—" coward conquest of a murderer's knife," &c. We might multiply instances of' apt, pictural epithets like these, till our " line stretched to the crack o' doom," but we content ourselves with giving merely a whet to the reader's appetite, in the hope that he will procure the book, and finish the dainty repast that Valpy has here set before him, at leisure.  A COLLECTION of DECISIONS in the COURTS for REVISING the LISTS of