plification of the necessity, for thorough manhood, of the warm co-working between the realist and the idealist. This cordial partnership empowered him to give such play to his faculties that their product constitutes him the supreme poet of the world, the highest, most important of Englishmen. Owing to this everpresent ideal in his reality, his pages are overhung by a wide, high, pure, airy heaven, just as the pictures of Rubens are; and there is nothing smothery about the presentations of either open to heaven, they have a boundless breadth of fresh air about them.

Where this ideal power does not make its buoyant atmosphere felt, we suspect a play of having been wronged or badly mutilated before it came into the printer's hands, or of not being but partially by Shakespeare. In the beginning of his career he rewrought the scenes of others; but he would hardly do this towards its close. What, then, shall we think of Timon? His most enlightened commentators place Timon among his latest dramas.

To me Timon is a failure, and therefore but partially Shakespeare's. Not much of his hand is traceable, it seems to me, until the fourth Act. The whole delineation lacks

depth. Rather than the earnestness of tragedy its characterization exhibits the caricature of melodrama. If Timon be not an impossible, he is an uninteresting, character. He is like a youth who, after being spoilt by over-indulgence, is so shallow that he cannot be chastened by misfortune; he is hardened by it into snarling selfishness. To me there is crudeness in the whole play, and a lack of poetry. It is unknit, disjointed. Especially is there no fine blending of the real and ideal, such as there must have been in one of the mighty master's latest finished dramas. Apemantus is right when he tells Timon his is "a poor unmanly melancholy." Timon is a big baby. The spirit of Shakespeare does not shine through the characters. Shakespeare is always warm and always intellectual. In Timon there is only a tepid warmth, and the intellectuality is, therefore, not steeped in deep pools of feeling.

It

On closing Timon, open The Tempest, among the last, if not the very last play he wrote. is like passing suddenly from twilight in a desert to sunlight in the valley of Tempe. In The Tempest we have the most luminous ideal together with the most juicy real, the two so

closely, so healthily interblended, that we almost feel as if heavenly nature were outdone;

possibly she is, for here is an unsurpassed exhibition of what heavenly genius can do. If Hamlet represents Shakespeare in his restless, interrogative, impassioned young manhood, Prospero represents his matured manhood, with its mellowed knowledge, its benignity, its intellectual potency, its moral cheerfulness, its humane wisdom, the grandeur of its spiritual power.

In the death of Falstaff one of those unexpected tender passages one is liable to come upon in Shakespeare - we have another conspicuous illustration of the crowning of realism with the lustrous diadem of the ideal. Who would ever think of hearkening to Dame Quickley to seize some of the most pathetic words ever written. That such words do issue from her mouth is proof of the greatness of Shakespeare's art, which knows how to be natural, and knows that to be as unconventional as nature is the attainment of highest art.

When, at the end of the second part of Henry IV., poor Falstaff is dismissed by the new king with a severe frown and cutting words, we are lifted to the kingly elevation

suddenly reached by a spring which Henry was empowered to make by the strength and loftiness of his nature. As the young king had "turned away his former self," it was fitting that he should turn away "those that kept him company." The memory of how they had flattered his idle, sensual, youthful tendencies added some sternness, no doubt, to his rebuke, especially towards Falstaff, “the tutor and the feeder of his riots." To a young man with the intellectual superiority of Prince Henry, Falstaff was the only one who could have misled him, or, rather, helped him to mislead himself; and this, though "so surfeitswelled, so old and so profane," Falstaff did through the power of wit. His wit made his intellectual ingenuity sparkle with an attractiveness so fascinating to us, as well as to the Prince, that we have an æsthetic enjoyment in his very exhibitions of selfishness. By his creative puissance Shakespeare has imparted to Falstaff a personal magnetism that makes the fat Knight irresistible.

In that withering last address, which must have astounded Falstaff like a thunderclap out of a cloudless sky, the new King says to him: "Know, the grave doth gape

For thee thrice wider than for other men."

Nevertheless, within that mound of superfluous flesh there dwelt a tender human soul; for, this treatment of him by his quondam regal boon companion, "killed his heart." So, he had a heart to break. Mrs. Quickley, Bardolph, and company were not his mere hangers on for the sake of his knighthood and his wit: they loved Sir John. Such as they don't love a heartless man. That, selfish and sensual, he was not utterly hard and incurable, his death-bed also shows. From the touching description of his death by Hostess Quickley some commentators would snatch the most significant flower from the wreath she lays upon his grave, substituting a prosaic phrase for "'a babbled of green fields." By these words, fat, sinful old Jack of Eastcheap is transfigured into innocent little boy Jack of the country, whereby sympathy is awakened to such a degree that our imagination is lured to follow him through his purgation in the after-life. The out-swollen bulk of the loose liver dissolves, and in its place uprises the image of innocence. The soul ever travels back to its primitive pure state, however long and arduous may be the journey. This is the inalienable privilege of its divine birth. Nor