akspeare taught Fletcher to write love; and Juliet and
Desdemona are originals. It is true, the scholar had the softer
soul, but the master had the kinder. Friendship is both a virtue
and a passion essentially; love is passion only in its nature, and
is not a virtue but by accident: good-nature makes friendship, but
effeminacy love. Shakspeare had an universal mind, which
comprehended all characters and passions; Fletcher, a more confined
and limited: for though he treated love in perfection, yet honour,
ambition, revenge, and generally all the stronger passions, he
either touched not, or not masterly. To conclude all he was a limb
of Shakspeare."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: The prose even is, in its music, rude in ordinary folks--or
_artful_, as in Hamlet's admiration of the world.]

THE TOWER OF LONDON.--A POEM.

BY THOMAS ROSCOE.

PART I.

Proud Julian towers! ye whose grey turrets rise
In hoary grandeur, mingling with the skies--
Whose name--thought--image--every spot are rife
With startling legends--themes of death in life!
Recall the voices of wrong'd spirits fled--
Echoes of life that long survived their dead;
And let them tell the history of thy crimes,
The present teach, and warn all future times.

Time's veil withdrawn, what tragedies of woe
Loom in the distance, fill the ghastly show!
Oh, tell what hearts, torn from light's cheering ray,
Within thy death-shades bled their lives away;
What anxious hopes, strifes, agonies, and fears,
In thy dread walls have linger'd years on years--
Still mock'd the patient prisoner as he pray'd
That death would shroud his woes--too long delay'd!

Could the great Norman, with prophetic eye,
Have scann'd the vista of futurity,
And seen the cell-worn phantoms, one by one,
Rise and descend--the father to the son--
Whose purest blood, by treachery and guilt,
On thy polluted scaffolds has been spilt,
Methinks Ambition, with his subtle art,
Had fired his hero to a nobler part.
Yes! curst Ambition--spoiler of mankind--
That with thy trophies lur'st the dazzled mind,
That 'neath the gorgeous veil thy conquests weave,
Would'st hide thy form, and Reason's eye deceive--
By what strange spells still dost thou rule the mind
That madly worships thee, or, tamely blind,
Forbears to fathom thoughts, that at thy name
Should kindle horror, and o'erwhelm