ingenious and elaborate collation of passages of the player's works, set forth certain religious principles and sentiments derived from the Bible as Shakespeare's. But by a like process just the opposite might have been shown with equal certainty. In this regard, as in all others, what Shakespeare wrote was the outgrowth of character and circumstance. Religious subjects could not be treated with more solemnity than by some of his personages, as the reader of Henry the Eighth, Richard the Second, and Measure for Measure will remember; nor, on the other hand, could the most imposing dogmas of divinity be touched with more daring or more disrespectful hands than are laid upon them in King Henry the Fourth, Cymbeline, Macbeth, and Much ado about Nothing.

It is thus upon every question.

Because a usurper, wishing to build up in himself a belief that he rules by the grace of God, says,

"There's such divinity doth hedge a king

That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will,"

it no more follows that Shakespeare believed in the absolute and divine right of kings, than, because one of Jack Cade's followers lays it down that the command, labor in thy vocation "is as much to say as let the magistrates be laboring men, and therefore should we be magistrates," it follows that he was a radical democrat. For

he made both the usurper and the demagogue. Shakespeare's entire absorption in his personages, and his substitution of their consciousness for his own, are perhaps most remarkable in Antony and Cleopatra, in which the passion of the queen for her new lover is manifested with a feminine consciousness of sex which approaches the miraculous. In the fourth scene of the second act of this play Cleopatra addresses to a messenger from Italy a few words which, although but an eager demand for his news, are of such intense sexuality that in these days the passage, although really harmless, is not quite quotable out of its setting. Her sex and that of him of whom she is enamored are constantly in this woman's mind and on her tongue. And here I will remark that in this tragedy there is not one worthy character; which is evidently by the author's design. Shakespeare's dramatic instinct kept even Octavia more out of sight than she is in the story which he followed, because he knew that otherwise Cleopatra might become despicable, and so lose all her interest. He meant that we, no less than Antony, should abandon ourselves entirely to the fascinations of the serpent of old Nile, and that we should sympathize with his wanton queen in her sneer at "the married woman," and resent her "still conclusion." I confess that, when I read Antony and Cleopatra, I look with cold aversion upon Octavia,- Octavia, beautiful, wronged, and noble. In her uneasy jealousy of

speare's disregard of that unity. For although one is at Rousillon and the other at Paris, Bertram and Parolles appear in both; the latter's entrance before the King in his palace being separated by only seven short speeches from his exit at Rousillon to accompany Bertram on his journey. But of how small importance is such discrepancy! No dramatic interest is broken by it; no essential propriety violated. It would be open to no objection in a story; and in regard to their construction English plays are only acted stories. But in fact Shakespeare, as we have just seen, was put to shifts in common with the merest journeyman playwright that ever wrote to-day to get him bread to-morrow. Yet these straits only ministered occasion to his genius. He went to his work like a faithful servant; but he did it like a king. The very superfluous scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor, just cited, one of the least important its author wrote, bears unmistakable marks of his hand, and for its character and humor will always be read with pleasure.

Hardly less remarkable than Shakespeare's vigorous and vivid style of dramatic portraiture are the range of his subjects and the variety of his characters. He left no department of his art untried, and sounded the dramatic lyre from its lowest note to the top of its compass. The same hand that struck from it the woes of Lear and the troubled harmonies of Hamlet's soul drew