even in his madness, but whose dawning madness tinges the first manifestations of his kingly power? As well suppose that he had met a Caliban. Shakespeare's mind contained, but it had not received, his characters. In that play so marvellously full of thought, Troilus and Cressida, perhaps the most thoughtful of his works, Ulysses rises to the full height of our idea of the wandering Ithacan. Whence came this Ulysses? Not from Homer's brain; for although Homer tells us that the King of Ithaca was "divine" and " spear-renowned," and "well skilled in various enterprise and counsel," the deeds and words of the hero, as represented by the Greek poet, hardly justify these epithets. Here we see that Shakespeare was even wiser than the Homeric ideal of human wisdom. For this Shakespeare made our Ulysses. It was but his name and his reputation that had come down from antiquity. It was the character that corresponded to and justified these that Shakespeare supplied in this instance, as in many others. He did not restore a limb, or even supply a head; but as if catching and filling the outline of a shadow vanished for centuries, he surmounted with the speaking substance of that shadow an inscribed and empty pedestal.

Shakespeare thus used the skeletons of former life that had drifted down to him upon the stream of time, and were cast at his feet, a heap of mere dead matter. But he clothed them with flesh and blood, and breathed life into their nostrils; and they lived and moved with a life that was individual and self-existent after he had once thrown it off from his own exuberant intellectual vitality. He made his plays no galleries of portraits of his contemporaries, carefully seeking models through the social scale from king to beggar. His teeming brain bred lowlier beggars and kinglier kings than all Europe could have furnished as subjects for his portraiture. He

found in his own consciousness ideals the like of which, for beauty or deformity, neither he nor any other man had ever looked upon. In his heart were the motives and the passions of all humanity; in his mind the capability, if not the actuality, of all human thought. Nature, in forming him, alone of all the poets, had laid that touch upon his soul, which made it kin with the whole world, and which enabled him at will to live throughout all time, among all peoples. Capable thus, in his complete and symmetrical nature, of feeling with and thinking for all mankind, he found in an isolated and momentary phase of his own existence the law which governed the life of those to whom that single phase was their whole sphere. From the germ within himself he produced the perfected individual as it had been or would have been developed. The eternal laws of human life were his servants by his Heaven-bestowed prerogative, and he was yet their instrument. Conformed to them because instinct with them, obedient to, yet swaying them, he used their subtle and unerring power to work out from seemingly trivial and independent truths the vast problems of humanity; and standing ever within the limits of his own experience, he read and reproduced the inner life of those on the loftiest heights or in the lowest depths of being, with the certainty of the physiologist, who from the study of his own organization recreates the monsters of the ante-human world, or of the astronomer who, not moving from his narrow study, announced the place, form, movement, and condition of a planet then hidden from earthly eyes in the abyss of space.

It is a vain notion, put forth by some who should know better, that much study, reflection, and earnest endeavor are required to understand Shakespeare rightly. Culture, and discipline, and natural powers of analysis

are doubtless demanded for the explanation of the motives and characteristic traits of Shakespeare's personages, and for the unravelling of some of his involved passages, (which are very few,) or the following of some of his highest flights of fancy. But almost all of us must have something of Shakespeare latent in our souls, voiceless and unexpressed; else we should be incapable of that sympathetic comprehension of his thoughts and his characters, the existence of which among ever increasing multitudes for many generations is the only possible condition of his peculiar and enduring fame. Some men, it is true, will never understand him in some passages; and some happily for the world, very few will not be able to understand him at all by any study or reflection of which they are capable. This from no proneness of the poet to paradox, or to eccentric or sentimental views of life, or to over-subtlety of thought. For although of all poets he is most profoundly psychological, as well as most fanciful and most imaginative, yet with him philosophy, fancy, and imagination are penetrated with the spirit of that unwritten law of reason which we speak of as if it were a faculty

mon sense.

com

His philosophy is practical, and his practical views are fused with philosophy and poetry. He is withal the sage and the oracle of this world. Subjects which are essentially, and in other hands would seem, prosaic and almost sordid, are raised by him into the realms of poetry, and yet in language so clearly expressive of their essential character as to be adopted as shrewd maxims by the worldly wise.

In this constant presence and rule of reason in his most exalted flights, we recognize again a trait of the English origin and character of his genius - a trait which is at the foundation of its eminence even in the realm of imagination, but at which other peoples often

jeer. Even in our passions we will ask, Why, and say, Because. "Voilà," cries the French maid in one of the few passages of insight in Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife, "Voilà un vrai Anglais! Il est amoureux, et cependant il veut raisonner."

Many people have given themselves serious concern as to the moral influence of Shakespeare's plays; and critics of great weight, fulfilling their function, have gone down far, and staid down long, in the attempt to fathom the profound moral purpose which they were sure must be hidden in the depths of these grand compositions. But the direct moral influence of Shakespeare is nothing, and we may be sure that he wrote with no moral purpose. He sought only to present life; and the world which he shows us, like that in which we live, teaches us moral lessons according to our will and our capacity. Johnson, meaning censure of "his first defect," wrote Shakespeare's highest praise in this respect, in saying of him that "he carries his persons indifferently through right or wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and leaves their example to operate by chance." That word "indifferently" is Shakespeare's eulogy. He gives the means of study, and leads insensibly to reflection. Men resent, or turn away from, conviction at the lips of others, which they will receive and lay to heart if they hear it from the lips of the inward monitor. And even children see through and despise the shallow device which makes goodness always lead to happiness, and flout the stories which conduct them through artificial paths to bring them out upon a moral. Man, however gifted, can never teach more than life and nature; and among gifted men there has been only

Shakespeare who could teach as much. The moral unity which distinguishes his plays is not, as some would have it, especially among the Germans, the result of a moral purpose deliberately planned and well worked out, but of the fact that those dramatic poems were the spontaneous manifestation of one great symmetrical mind in complete and intimate accordance with nature. Shakespeare is able to teach as much as nature nay, even more than unmitigated nature for two , reasons. One is, that he presents us something which is not nature, but is a perfect reflex of nature. It is strange, but true as strange, that imitation always interests us more than reality. The very reflection of a beautiful landscape in a mirror wins our attention more, nay, seems more beautiful, than the landscape itself. Seen in a Claude glass it becomes a picture, a quasi work of art, which we study, over which we muse, and to which we again and again recur; while the scene itself, if we see it often, may become to us an unnoticed part of our daily life, like the rising of the sun, that daily miracle. And so the mirror which, following his own maxim, Shakespeare holds up to nature, is more studied by us than Nature herself, and by means of it nature is better understood. The phenomena are brought by him within the range of our mental vision. Reduced in their dimensions, but kept perfect in proportion and true in color, they are transferred to and fixed upon his pages; and we can take down from our shelves these specimens of thought and passion, and muse and ponder over them at leisure. This is measurably true of all imaginative writing; but it is preëminently true of Shakespeare's.

But the chief reason of Shakespeare's ability to teach us as much as nature, is a breadth of moral sympathy, a wide intellectual charity, which makes him as impartial