of his wondrous originality. In the same prologue he says: 'So from old Shakespeare's honoured dust, this day Shakespeare who, taught by none, did first impart But it is in a very peculiar and exceptional sense that we can appeal to Nature in testing such impersonations of contemporary belief as either Ariel or Caliban. They are creations conceived by the most original genius, though fashioned in perfect harmony with the beliefs of his age. To this they owe their peculiar charm. In them, as in others of his rare imaginings, his supernatural seems so natural, that we only realise to how large an extent it is the work of his own fancy, when we test it by comparison with that of his most gifted contemporaries. It is the triumph of the poet thus to mirror the thoughts of his age. He does not startle it with what is strange, but with what seems most familiar to it. Yet with all the seeming familiarity of those exquisite embodiments of popular belief, and their consistency with the folk-lore of the time, they are as purely fancywrought as the visions that haunt unbidden the gay romance of dreams. They were Shakespeare's own creations, but they seemed so thoroughly to realise what already commanded universal credence, that the charmed onlooker regarded them as no more than the mirroring of his own vaguest fancies. The imaginative power thus displayed in giving corporeal seeming and a consistent individuality to such 'airy nothings' will be best appreciated by the reader who has already familiarised himself with the supernatural beings that figure in F the verse of Marlow, Jonson, Fletcher, and even of Milton. They are no less Shakespeare's own creations than his Othello, or Hamlet, his Portia, Imogen, Ophelia, or Lady Macbeth. He wrought indeed with the current thought of his age, but of none of them can it be said, that he merely produces the portraiture of what was already familiar to it; and least of all could this be affirmed of Caliban. He is in a peculiar sense a supernatural character, lying as much beyond the bounds of human experience as any fairy, ghost, or spirit of the creed of superstition, either in that age or our own: earth-born, and fashioned on the ideal of the brute, yet so distinct from anything hitherto seen or known on earth, that only now, two centuries and a half after its production on the English stage, has it entered into the mind of the scientific naturalist to conceive of such a being as possible. CHAPTER V. THE THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 'Arise, and fly The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; In Memoriam. HE innate and seemingly instinctive aptitude of the human mind to conceive of the supernatural is so universal, and so intimately interwoven with that other conception of a spiritual life, the successor of this present corporeal existence,-which, far more than any supposed belief in a Supreme Being, seems the universal attribute of man,-that Shakespeare's whole conception of the supernatural may fitly come under review as a sequel to the more limited subject specially occupying our consideration. But it is sufficient for the present to bear in mind the originality and prolific powers revealed in his supernatural imaginings, in order the more clearly to appreciate the one portraiture of a being which, though in no sense spiritual, is so far as all experience goes, thoroughly supra-natural. "Tis strange, my Theseus,' says Hippolyta to her ducal lover, as the fifth act of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' opens opens in a hall of his palace at Athens, where they hold discourse on the themes that lovers speak of. The previous scenes have been ripe with the sportive creations of the poet's fancy, with his Oberon, Titania, and all their fairy train; and now, in true dramatic fashion, he claims the shadowy beings as his own. 'More strange than true,' Theseus replies: I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends;' and then, after quaintly coupling the lover and the lunatic as beings 'of imagination all compact,' he adds this other picture of the poet's fantasies: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination.' As to the actual belief in the beings so dealt with, among the men of that generation, it was vague and indeterminate as themselves. When, indeed, the poet glanced to earth, and called up on the blasted heath, near by the scene of Macbeth's great victory over the Norweyan host, those wild and withered hags, that 'looked not like the inhabitants o' the earth, and yet were on't,' he idealised a very harsh and deep-rooted belief of his age. When again he glanced from earth, not to heaven, but to that intermediate spirit-world, with all the ghostly or airy habitants with which fancy or superstition had favoured it, he wrought with materials that had fashioned the creed of many generations. He had, himself, believed in fairies; and doubtless still regarded ghosts with becoming awe. They had held mastery over his youthful imagination; constituted the fancies and the terror of his childhood; and were in his maturer years translated into those supernatural beings which have proved so substantial to other gene rations. But the poet's own age had been familiarised with ideal beings of a wholly different kind, the reality of which seemed scarcely to admit of question. Of the new world of the West which Columbus had revealed, there was, at any rate, no room for doubt; and yet when, nearly a century after its discovery, Spenser refers, in his 'Faerie Queen,' not only to the Indian Peru and the Amazon, but to that 'fruitfullest Virginia of which his friend Raleigh had told him many a wondrous tale, it is obvious that to his fancy America was still almost as much a world apart as if his Shepherd of the Ocean' had sailed up the blue vault of heaven, and told of the dwellers in another planet on which it had been his fortune to alight. He is defending the verisimilitude of that Fairyland in which Una and the Red Cross Knight, Duessa, Belphoebe, Orgoglio, Malecastaes and so many more fanciful impersonations disport themselves, with King Arthur and the Faerie Queen herself: and he argues that since Peru, Virginia, and all the wonders of that new-found hemisphere prove to be real, what marvel if this Fairyland of his fancy be no less substantial a verity. For even now, of the world the least part is known to us; and daily through hardy enterprise new regions are discovered, as unheard-of as were the huge Amazon, the Indian Peru, or other strange lands now found true : 'Yet all these were, when no man did them know, |