PREFACE. A few years ago, the author visited Stratford-on-Avon, fulfilling all the obligations of a tourist by sitting in Shakspeare's chair, viewing his signet-ring, and strolling through woods wherein are oaks "whose boughs are mossed with age and high top bald with dry antiquity." While enjoying all this levity, the thought forced itself upon me that it would be much better and wiser to tour through the works of the Dramatist, as greater knowledge would be gained by following in the footsteps of his mighty mind than in fitting our shoes into his historic pathways. This resolution I followed, and the sequence is this volume, bearing on him who was more than a Warwick, for he was a king-maker of immortal sovereigns, whose least subjects have the full sympathy of the power that fashioned them. Yes, Shakspeare, with the charity of his greatness, in truth, hated sin, but loved the sinner. From the fierce energy of Richard III. to Pistol, fierce only in name, and whose brag (9) and bluster were blank cartridge,- from Hamlet, with his cold thought, to Bardolph, incapable of thinking, and whose warm frame was topped off with a nose so purple that Falstaff on his deathbed declared that a flea in one of its dents looked like a black soul in hell,- from the innocent simplicity of Ophelia, like a frail crystal vase, to the earthen grossness of Caliban,—all the beings of Shakspeare's creation, be they wise, foolish, or monstrous, have the gentle sympathy of their mighty creator. 'Pity" sanctifies the verse" of the Master. ever 66 I send, then, into the world of letters this work, like Hamlet's father, "with all its imperfections on its head," believing that, if it serve no other purpose, it will be, in its smallness, a term of contrast to pronounce the greatness of him whom " neither man nor Muse can praise too much." |