d this young person
was very kind to me. He advised me what to read--which was principally his
own writings; and on my telling him I wished to study history, he said
nobody cared for it now, and that all the history he knew was in
Shakspeare's plays. This Shakspeare was a great writer long ago, who
turned all the histories of his country into dramatic scenes; and they are
acted on grand occasions before the Queen and her court at this very day.
When I enquired of the young person how his countrymen preserved the
memory of events which had happened since the death of the great
Shakspeare, he said there were other people as clever perhaps as
Shakspeare, who embalmed important incidents in immortal verse, but whom a
brutal public did not sufficiently appreciate; and he offered to read to
me a poem of his own called the Napoleonad, giving an account of a great
war that happened some time ago--and which had been published, he said,
week after week, in the Bath and Bristol Literary Purveyor. He read it to
me, and it was very fine; but I did not gain much information. I read
various parts of English history in Shakspeare; but from the specimens he
gives of the kings that reigned long ago in England, I fear they were a
very cruel and barbarous race of men. One of the name of Lear gave up the
kingdom to his three daughters, and two of them treated him very cruelly,
turned him out of doors on a stormy night, put out his followers' eyes,
and behaved very ill indeed. Another was called John--a bad man. Three
Henries--the first two great fighters, and one of them a common highway
robber in conjunction with a fat old gentleman who was a great coward, but
boasted he killed the chief warrior of the enemy--and the other Henry, a
weak old man, who was murdered by another very bad king called Richard.
There was another Henry who sent away his wife--a fat, bloated, villanous
kind of man; and after that no mention is made of any of the English kings
in Shakspeare's history. And when I asked the young person if there had
been any kings since, he said he had never heard of any except George the
Third, grandfather of the present Queen. I demanded of him if all the
plays in England were forced to be histories? and he said, no. And when I
further enquired what they represented, and of what use they were, he said
they were to hold a mirror up to nature, and to be the abstract and brief
chronicle of the time; by which he afterwards explained to me he