reach of thought, so unites the extremes, that, whilst he has kept the theatre now for three centuries, and, like a street-bible, furnishes sayings to the market, courts of law, the senate, and common discourse, he is yet to all wise men the companion of the closet. The student finds the solitariest place not solitary enough to read him; and so searching is his penetration, and such the charm of his speech, that he still agitates the heart in age as in youth, and will, until it ceases to beat.

his

Young men of a contemplative turn carry sonnets in the pocket. With that book, the shade of any tree, a room in any inn, becomes a chapel or oratory in which to sit out their happiest hours. Later they find riper and manlier lessons in the plays.

And secondly, he is the most robust and potent thinker that ever was. I find that it was not history, courts and affairs that gave him lessons, but he that gave grandeur and prestige to them. There never was a writer who, seeming to draw every hint from outward history, the life of cities and courts, owed them so little. You shall never find in this world the barons or kings he depicted. 'Tis fine for Englishmen to say, they only know history by Shakspeare.

The palaces they compass earth and sea to enter, the magnificence and personages of royal and imperial abodes, are shabby imitations and cari catures of his, — clumsy pupils of his instruction. There are no Warwicks, no Talbots, no Bolingbrokes, no Cardinals, no Harry Fifth, in real Europe, like his. The loyalty and royalty he drew were all his own. The real Elizabeths, Jameses and Louises were painted sticks before this magician.

The unaffected joy of the comedy,

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he lives in a gale, contrasted with the grandeur of the tragedy, where he stoops to no contrivance, no pulpiting, but flies an eagle at the heart of the problem; where his speech is a Delphi, — the great Nemesis that he is and utters. What a great heart of equity is he! How good and sound and inviolable his innocency, that is never to seek, and never wrong, but speaks the pure sense of humanity on each occasion. He dwarfs all writers without a solitary exception. No egotism. The egotism of men is immense. It concealed Shakspeare for a century. His mind has a superiority such that the universities should read lectures on him, and conquer the unconquerable, if they can.

There are periods fruitful of great men; others, barren; or, as the world is always equal to itself, periods when the heat is latent, — others when it is given out.

year

They are like the great wine years, the vintage of 1847, is it? or 1835?-which are not only noted in the carte of the table d'hôte, but which, it is said, are always followed by new vivacity in the politics of Europe. His birth marked a great wine when wonderful grapes ripened in the vintage of God, when Shakspeare and Galileo were born within a few months of each other, and Cervantes was his exact contemporary, and, in short space before and after, Montaigne, Bacon, Spenser, Raleigh and Jonson. Yet Shakspeare, not by any inferiority of theirs, but simply by his colossal proportions, dwarfs the geniuses of Elizabeth as easily as the wits of Anne, or the poor slipshod troubadours of King René.

In our ordinary experience of men there are some men so born to live well that, in whatever company they fall, high or low, they fit well, and lead it! but, being advanced to a higher class, they are just as much in their element as before, and easily command: and being again preferred to selecter companions, find no

obstacle to ruling these as they did their earlier mates; I suppose because they have more hu manity than talent, whilst they have quite as much of the last as any of the company. It would strike you as comic, if I should give my own customary examples of this elasticity, though striking enough to me. I could name in this very company-or not going far out of it - very good types, but in order to be parlianientary, Franklin, Burns and Walter Scott are examples of the rule; and king of men, by this grace of God also, is Shakspeare.

The Pilgrims came to Plymouth in 1620. The plays of Shakspeare were not published until three years later. Had they been published earlier, our forefathers, or the most poetical among them, might have stayed at home to read them.