era.

quivered like the reflection of sunlight from water. But Shakespeare not only thought and spoke as an Englishman, and so was always truly national,* (although of his plots not historical only one is English,) he thought and spoke only as an Englishman could think and speak in the Elizabethan Before that period our forefathers were too rude, and since we have become, on both sides of the water, too lettered a folk, though not too learned, for such an utterance. Who can conceive of Hamlet or King Lear or the Merchant of Venice being written by a contemporary of John Skelton, by a dramatist of the Restoration, by one of the wits of Queen Anne's reign, or by either king or subject in Johnson's realm of letters? Had any man been moved to write them at either of those periods, the public would not have listened to them, produced as new compositions. In the style and

Nation has come to mean the people under one government. As, for instance, the British nation is composed of English, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish people; and the nation which is called most improperly, but it would seem inevitably, American, is composed of the same peoples, with a still greater predominance of the English element, to which within the last twenty years there has been a considerable addition of Germans. Owing to peculiar political, social, and material conditions, the assimilation of the minor elements goes on much more rapidly here than in the mother country; and the English or Anglo-Saxon race, stubbornly preserving its own characteristics, as it ever has done, absorbs here those who flee to it for refuge, as in the mother country it absorbed its nominal conquerors. But there is no other word than "national" suited to the sentence above written: "ethnical" will not serve the purpose.

in the vocabulary of the so-called Augustan age of English literature, or in the Johnsonian period, such writing would have been impossible. Yet bearing thus plainly the mark of the time as well as of the race which produced them, these writings have as their chief distinction, that whatever they possess of beauty is beautiful, and whatever they tell of truth is true to all mankind forever. The attempt to explain such an intellectual phenomenon seems indeed presumptuous. We may rightly admire what we cannot fully understand; we may apprehend what we cannot comprehend, and comprehend that which we cannot express; and I own that I shrink back as I essay to measure with my little line and fathom with my puny plummet the vast profound of Shakespeare's genius.

Individual organization determines preference; but organization and circumstances together determine choice, which is preference moved by will, or preference in action. Happily both these joined to make a dramatist of Shakespeare. Circumstances took him to London to earn his bread; circumstances made the theatre the aptest field for his labor; and his organization fitted him supremely for the dramatic function. Yet, had he been born in the present day, it may at least be questioned whether he would have chosen the drama as his profession; for in contemporary Eng

lish literature, indeed upon our very stage, there is no indigenous drama. One great cause of this, however, is the fact, that Shakespeare has so entirely covered the field that there is neither room for new dramatic literature nor need of it; only for intrigue, incident, by-play, the scene-painter, and the tailor. Perhaps he might have chosen journalism, but more probably trade; for competency was the sole object of his exertion. It is clear from what we know of him, that he would have made an influential journalist, or a first-rate merchant. But living in the reign of Elizabeth, he went to London to become an actor and write plays for a London audience.

Never, perhaps, did imaginative works, written to please the public of a great city, have less of a town air, of that urban quality which, for instance, is so striking in Pope's poems, in Addison's essays, and in the plays of their period and of Dryden's, than is to be found in Shakespeare's dramas. They have local allusions, it is true, but these are comparatively few; and were they many, this would not touch the point. They are so free from city taint, that in this respect they might have been written at a country-seat by one who had never passed its boundaries or made himself acquainted with the tone of the metropolis. Yet it was only in London that those plays could have been written. London had only just before Shakespeare's day made its metropolitan suprem

acy felt, as well as acknowledged, throughout England. As long as two hundred years after that time the county of each member of Parliament was betrayed by his tongue; but then the speech of the cultivated people of Middlesex and its vicinity had become for all England the undisputed standard. Northumberland, or Cornwall, or Lancashire, might have produced Shakespeare's mind; but had he lived in any one of those counties, or in another, like them remote in speech as in locality from London, and written for his rural neighbors instead of the audiences of the Blackfriars and the Globe, the music of his poetry would have been lost in sounds uncouth and barbarous to the general ear, and the edge of his fine utterance would have been turned upon the stony roughness of his rustic phraseology. His language would have been a dialect which must needs have been translated to be understood by modern English ears, with the loss of that heavy discount which is always paid at the desk of the broker in literary exchange. For us of after days, and so for the perpetuity and diffusion of Shakespeare's fame, he appeared at a most propitious period of the history of our race, not only as to its language, but as to its political and social condition. As to language, there was then a freedom from critical and scholastic restraint which has never since existed, united to a copiousness of vocabulary, which, except in the direction of philosophy and

science, has not been materially enlarged. The English language, even the English of London, although Chaucer and Spenser had used it, was regarded then in England itself as unfit for the use of scholars. English literature held no admitted place in the realm of letters; and the English people were of small consideration in Europe. Andrew Borde, a physician of Henry the Eighth's time, in his Book of the Introduction of Knowledge, says: "The speche of Englande is a base speche to other noble speches, as Italion, Castylion, & Frenche; howbeit the speche of Englande of late dayes is amended." And Lilly, Shakespeare's contemporary, makes his Euphues, in describing England, speak of "the English tongue, which is, as I have heard, almost barbarous."

We are accustomed to think of London as the capital of a great kindred empire, which is in letters as well as in arms and commerce one of the five or six great powers of the civilized world. We measure its importance by the fact of its being the time-honored literary metropolis of the great kingdom and the great republic whose tongue it speaks. But at the time of Shakespeare's arrival there, although that time was the glorious reign of Queen Elizabeth, London was only the chief city of the southern part of a little island which then contained the whole English race, a race which had not yet taken its