he not only saw, but was. His art is more than imagination, more than fancy, more than philosophy, more than their aggregation. It is their union in one nameless faculty. Indeed, it is only after recurring to Homer and Dante, and to Milton, Virgil, and Horace, that we know how far, how immeasurably far, is the step from the lofty cumulation of all their qualities to Shakespeare's quality. It is almost like that from the finite to the infinite. As we add number to number, until numbers cease to have significance, and then at last spring to the idea of infinite, to which we cannot otherwise approach, so we put together all the qualities of all other poets, and then, seeing our failure to reach the Parnassian summit by heaping Pelions upon Ossas, we break off and leap to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare worked all his wonders with the lordliness of a supreme master; yet, we may be sure, not without labor. Certain men have higher tasks, and for them higher faculties, than others: he, highest. But nothing is attained by human powers, however transcendent, without paying for it man's price, toil. There is no such thing as real impromptu. There is only the ready use on present occasion of the fruits of past exertion; — "Che, seggendo in piuma,

In fama non si vien, nè sotto coltre."*

But may not the time arrive when the world

* Inferno, Canto XXIV. 1. 47.

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 fresh 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. For this reason the man who studies Shakespeare and attempts the unfolding of his characters is not engaged in mere literary criticism, is not a literary parasite; he is dealing with the most hidden and elemental truths of man's knowledge of mankind; and for this reason, too, it is, that he who has really any thoughts of his own upon Shakespeare to give to the world is sure of a kindly disposed audience. For very few, even of the most sensitive souls and penetrating intellects, have felt for themselves and perceived for themselves all the beauty and the strength and the wisdom of those marvellous works that were written with the immediate purpose only of drawing full houses to the Black-friars Theatre in London in the days of Good Queen Bess.

T

All that I have 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 without him, 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 af ford 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, though 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, and an acquaintance with 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 judgment. 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 contemporaries. He is among them, but not of them. Their minds run in the same channel, but do not mingle. The powerful and pellucid current of his thought flows swiftly and clearly side by side with their sluggish and turbid outpourings, leaving them behind, and taking no tint or taint from its surroundings. To him there was gain instead of loss in the disregard of formulas. Creative genius is mostly great, not by means of formulas, but in their despite. Almost inevitably it provokes censure by breaking through established rules; a truth which has at last obtained.

such recognition that defiance of rule is sometimes ignorantly set up as evidence of genius,— of which only individuality and inherent vitality and strength are witnesses. The so-called extravagances of genius establish its claims by themselves becoming formulas for minds of lower rank; and thus schools are formed, of which no one is really great except the founder. Yet the highest order of poets, the seraphs of the art, do not have followers, because they soar too high in the empyrean for the manner of their flight to be observed and imitated. It is the secondrate men, great yet second, who form schools. For their way of working is discernible, comprehensible, imitable. But the supremely divine is ever a mystery. This is especially true of Shakespeare. As he worked in the manner of no school, so he founded none. He adopted the old forms indeed, and he labored with the same artistic motive, as well as the same material objects, as his contemporaries and immediate predecessors and successors. But this produced no living likeness between their offspring. His plays and those of Marlowe, Jonson, Massinger, Marston, Middleton, Ford, and Field have neither in their dramatic nor their poetical traits the least family likeness; none, in fact, except a certain affluence and strength of diction, and certain colloquial tricks of expression, characteristic of the period. The mistakes which have been made upon this subject