as nature. His mirror tinges with no color of its own the scene which it reflects. The life-giving rain of his genius falls equally upon the just and the unjust; and as the sunshine and the shower develop both tares and wheat according to their kind, so he never seeks to modify the nature, or the seeming, of that which he quickens into life; and he is never more impartial than when he is most creative.

It was this quality of universal sympathy in Shakespeare's mental constitution which enabled him to unite to his knowledge of man and of truth that knowledge of men and of things which is called knowledge of the world. He seems to have had this latter knowledge in as great a degree as that more abstract knowledge which made him a great dramatic and philosophical poet, and to have been the most perfect man of the world whose name appears upon the roll of literature. All that we know of his life shows him in full possession of this great qualification of the perfect social man, so rarely found in poets; and his works are pervaded with its exhibition. Consider well such characters as Angelo, Parolles, Faulconbridge, Polonius, Jaques, Falstaff, such gentlemen as Bassanio, Mercutio, Prince Henry, Cassio, Antony (in Julius Cæsar), and see what knowledge, not only of the human heart, but of society, of manners, of actual life, in short, -to return to the accepted phrase, - of knowledge of the world, these characters display. It is this knowledge, this tact, which enables him to walk so firmly and so delicately upon the perilous edge of essential decency, and not fall into the foul slough below, where the elegant dramatists of the last century lie wallowing. This he does notably, for instance, in Faulconbridge and Falstaff - Falstaff, a gentleman by birth and breeding, yet coarse, gross, mean, and selfish, a degraded castaway, yet with con

summate tact and exquisite art, never allowed to be vulgar or repulsive, and whose matchless humor makes his company delightful.

It has been objected to the assertion of the amplitude of Shakespeare's mind and to the generosity of his character, that he always represents the laborer and the artisan in a degraded position, and often makes his ignorance and his uncouthness the butt of ridicule. The charge is brought by reformers and philanthropists of such narrow views that they cannot see that art is not the pioneer, but the landscape-gardener, of society. Shakespeare, although he thought as a philosopher, wrought as an artist; and art has to do with the facts of the world before it, idealizing them, but not changing their nature. Three hundred years ago, the husbandman and the mechanic were degraded in the world's eyes; and Shakespeare, the healthiness of whose understanding is as remarkable as any trait of his genius, knew that the world's appreciation is generally right of men in mass, and that these hard-handed men had all the consideration that was their due, though not all the rights or the advantages. It is always so. Individual men may fail to receive a just appreciation; but, as surely as water finds its level, classes of men always command the standing that they can maintain. It is because the working man, whether his labor be rude or skilled, has raised himself, has, in fact, become another man, that the world now awards him a consideration which he did not receive in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare, although he represented the world as he saw it, was no panegyrist of things as they were, no mere laudator temporis acti. He was no sycophant to power. Whatever might have been the faults of others in this regard (and they seem to have been fewer and less in the mother country in those days than

in the present), Shakespeare did not hesitate to tell kings and nobles all the truth, and even to put it into their own mouths.

The personal opinions and inclinations of Shakespeare are so little traceable in his works, that we can only judge of his feeling toward the wretched and oppressed by the intimate sympathy which he shows with their privations, their sufferings, and their lowly pleasures. In King Lear, Edgar's disguising himself as an Abraham-man, gave Shakespeare an opportunity, which so thrifty a householder as he was might well have seized, to hold up those tramping pests of our forefathers to condemnation, or, at least, to ridicule. But his picture presents the sufferer's side of the case, and tells us how he "eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall newt, and the water, swallows the old rat and the ditch dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool, who is whipped from tything to tything, and stocked, punished, and imprisoned." Shakespeare must have well known the ways of the begging impostor; but he chose to show us, in this most touching manner, the dreadful extremities and sufferings of the vagrant pauper.

The little that remains to be said is of a general nature. Shakespeare's art was not simple, its manifestation was not serene. Simplicity and serenity are the highest ideal in the arts of design. The Greeks attained it in their sculptures and their temples, Raphael in his Madonnas; and even in landscape art, the highest style is that which, rising above the representation of phenomenal effects, presents the ideal of Nature in her wonted phases. But this limitation does not hold in literature, especially in dramatic literature, in which

action, complication, intensity, and variety approaching incongruity, are compatible with, if not essential to, the attainment of the highest excellence. Grecian architecture is simple and serene, but not, therefore, the highest type of architecture; and Shakespeare's genius may be well compared-and, I believe, the comparison is not new- - to a Gothic cathedral, vast, grand, and solemn in its general aspect, and single in its general impression, yet on closer view seen to bear the stamp of various periods, and to be filled with airy, light, upspringing columns, and minutely decorated with delicate tracery, and with grotesque, humorous, and even indecorous details, correspondent to each other, yet all unlike, though seeming like, and, to an eye capable of the great whole, blending into rich harmony.

But may not the time arrive when the world will say, We have had enough of Shakespeare? May not men become pardonably weary of hearing of this one matchless man, and so ostracize him for his very excellence? It might possibly be so if men lived forever; but generation succeeds to generation, and to each one he is new, and so will be new as long as the tongue in which he wrote is spoken. To each new reader Shakespeare brings more than one life can exhaust, and those who have studied him longest are they who are best assured that no man ever laid his head so close upon the great heart of Nature, and heard so clearly the throb of her deep pulses.

All that I have so inadequately said is true; and yet it is no less true that Shakespeare revealed to the world no new truth in ethics, in politics, or in philosophy. He was not an intellectual discoverer. If the plague had not spared him in his cradle, the great movements of the world would have been deprived of no direct impulse coming from his mind. They would have gone on with

out, much as they have gone on under the influence of his writings. No social or political development of his race or of mankind would have been checked, except in so far as a diffusion of intellectual and moral culture and refinement might have been retarded. For man's knowledge of himself would have been very much more limited, because of the lack of those works which afford at once the most alluring temptations to the study of human nature and the best field and school for its pursuit. The English, or, if we choose to call it so, the Anglo-Saxon race, both in Europe and in America, would have lacked a certain degree of that general elevation of mental and moral tone and that practical wisdom which distinguish it among the peoples. A source of pleasure more exquisite and more refining than is elsewhere to be found, of instruction more nearly priceless than any except that which fell from the lips of Jesus of Nazareth, would not have been opened. Thus, although Shakespeare exercised no direct influence upon the world's progress, that which he has exercised indirectly is large, and is constantly increasing; and it will increase with the diffusion of our race, its language, and a knowledge of its literature.

It has been before remarked that the dramatists of Shakespeare's time, writing only to please the people, had only to consult the general taste, and were free from any restraint, except that imposed by their own judg ment. Some of them did attempt to work, measurably at least, according to classical formulas; and these failed entirely to attain the ends which they had in view — popularity and profit. Of the rest, all, with one or two exceptions, being without a trusty monitor, external or internal, fell into monstrous extravagance, coarseness, conceit, and triviality. But Shakespeare, save for his conformity to mere outside fashion, was entirely unlike his