ideals, the like of which for beauty or deformity neither he nor any other man had ever looked upon. In his heart were the motives, the passions, of all humanity; in his mind, the capability, if not the actuality, of all human thought. Nature, in forming him alone of all the poets, had laid that touch upon his soul which made it akin with the whole world, and which enabled him to live at will throughout all time, among all peoples. Capable thus, in his complete and symmetrical nature, of feeling with and thinking for all mankind, he found in an isolated and momentary phase of his own existence the law which governed the life of those to whom that single phase was their whole sphere. From the germ within himself he produced the perfected individual, as it had been or might have been developed. The eternal laws of human life were his servants by his heaven-bestowed prerogative, and he was yet their instrument. Conformed to them because instinct with them, obedient to, yet swaying them, he used their subtle and unerring powers to work out from seemingly trivial and independent truths the vast problems of humanity; and standing ever within the limits of his own experience, he read and reproduced the inner life of those on the loftiest heights or in the lowest depths of being, with the certainty of the physiologist who from the study of his own organization recreates the monsters of the ante-human world, or of the astrono

mer who, not moving from his narrow study, announced the place, form, movement, and condition of a planet then hid from earthly eyes in the abyss of space.

Shakespeare thus suffered not even a temporary absorption in his personages; he lost not the least consciousness of selfhood, or the creator's power over the clay that he was moulding. He was at no time a murderer at heart because he drew Macbeth, or mad because he made King Lear. We see that, although he thinks with the brain and feels with the soul of each of his personages by turns, he has the power of deliberate introspection during this strange metempsychosis, and of standing outside of his transmuted self, and regarding these forms which his mind takes on as we do; in a word, of being at the same time actor and spectator.

This wonderful duality in unity is perhaps most striking in Shakespeare's representation of insanity. It is comparatively easy to understand how the normal action of one mind is taken on by another; because sane men think and act in accordance with known and unchanging laws. The union in the dramatist of a thorough knowledge of human nature with the dramatic faculty insures, therefore, a natural development of character in his personages. But in the creation of a personage whose faculties are supposed to be deranged, and thus absolved from the opera

tion of the laws of our common nature, how is the dramatist to keep true to that which itself has no keeping? Attempts to represent insanity usually produce only a repulsive extravagance of word and action, which neither provokes mirth nor excites sympathy. But Shakespeare seems not to have found even this limit to his power of thinking and feeling with the creatures of his imagination. He has portrayed insanity in nearly every form in which it is known to the students of psychological pathology; and so true do they find him to nature, even in disorganization, their analysis only discovering that his intuition has been beforehand, that they, like all other observers of mankind, from testing him by nature have come to studying nature in him. With delicate and unerring discrimination he distinguishes between the various kinds of mental derangement, and even follows the disorder in its advancing stages from the first unsettling of the reason until the mind lies wrecked before us,

as in Ophelia, a sweet flower crushed and perfumeless, or in Lear, a grand and awful ruin.

Our inability to follow or to comprehend the working of Shakespeare's mind in no way diminishes our capacity of apprehending or appreciating its creations. Man conceives, or receives, the very idea of God, because there is in him some Divine capacity; and his god, that which he worships, is ever the measure of his moral and intellectual

elevation. This axiom is of general application. But most especially in his appreciation of so lofty and universal an intelligence as Shakespeare's does a man show the elevation or the meanness, the richness or the poverty, the purity or the foulness, of his own soul. It is a vain notion, put forth by some who should know better, that much study, reflection, and earnest endeavor are required to understand Shakespeare rightly. Culture and discipline and natural powers of analysis are doubtless demanded for the explanation of motives and characteristic traits of Shakespeare's personages, and to the unravelling of some of his involved passages (which are very few), or following of some of his highest flights of fancy. But almost all of us must have something of Shakespeare latent in our souls, voiceless and unexpressed; else we should be incapable of that sympathetic comprehension of his thoughts and his characters, the existence of which among ever-increasing multitudes for many generations is the only possible condition of his peculiar and enduring fame. Some men, it is true, will never understand him in some passages, and some, happily for the world very few, will not be able to understand him at all by any study or reflection of which they are capable. This from no proneness of the poet to paradox, or to eccentric or sentimental views of life, or to over-subtlety of thought. For although of all poets he is most profoundly psychological, as well

sense.

as most fanciful and most imaginative, yet with him philosophy, fancy, and imagination are penetrated with the spirit of that unwritten law of reason which we speak of as if it were a faculty, common His philosophy is practical, and his practical views are fused with philosophy and poetry. He is withal the sage and the oracle of this world. Subjects which are essentially, and in other hands. would seem, prosaic and almost sordid, are raised by him into the realms of poetry, and yet in language so clearly expressive of their essential character as to be adopted as shrewd maxims by the worldly wise.

In this constant presence and rule of reason in his most exalted flights, we recognize again a trait of the English origin and character of his genius, a trait which is at the foundation of its eminence, even in the realm of imagination, but at which other people often jeer. Even in our passions we will ask, "Why?" and say, "Because." "Voila," cries the French maid in one of the few passages of insight in Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife,-"Voila un vrai Anglais ! Il est amoureux, et cependant il veut raisonner."

Many people have given themselves serious concern as to the moral influence of Shakespeare's plays; and critics of great weight, fulfilling their function, have gone down far and stayed down. long in the attempt to fathom the profound moral