Macbeth. The emphasis implies a real distinction corresponding; and this distinction must be a scarcity of the quality so prized, by what our law logicians call a "negative pregnant." So that the pregnancy in this case must be owned a fecund proof of the opposition already noted in point of manners between the races. As to the fact, it is notorious that, with the English as with the Americans, the term "gentleman" is thus emphatical, and more a dignity than appellation; while its equivalent would, in that sense, be an offence in France at least. Who has not heard of "the English gentleman" in the more starch and modern form, and of the "fine old English gentleman," whose type is vanished with the age of temperance. There is no people, perhaps, in the world of whose gentlemanly qualities so much is talked by themselves and so little by other nations. Is it that nature would make up by protestation for want of practice, as in the Celt she builds up air-castles, since he will not take the land ones. The principle is simple and of universal prevalence. Whenever nations are heard habitually parading their "gentlemen," their "liberty," their “institutions," or any special mode of eminence, they may be held with almost certainty to be deficient in that particular. For with the facts on a scale so large, if they existed they would be evident, and so there would be no occasion to keep repeating them to others. Nay, they would be, like the atmosphere, insensible to those within them, who would be led to recognize them but by privation or corruption. In short, to sum up with the proverb: "A good wine can need no bush." The other term used by the incomparable poet to tint his contrast of the races is still more curiously refined. It

sense.

is no other than the name scholar, in the peculiarly English The word is never found at all in the play of Macbeth. It is among the highest distinctions in that of Hamlet, and with all ranks. The officer Marcellus, on the appearance of the Ghost, says: "Thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio." The critics, it is true, explain the term in this instance as alluding to a popular condition for addressing ghosts. But this they probably inferred from the case itself interpreted, thus playing themselves the trick of turning effect into cause. They should, besides, have known the origin of such a superstition could have been but the distinction of the scholar above the vulgar; for the latter are those who always had the privilege of seeing ghosts. Marcellus, therefore, is led to designate Horatio, from himself and fellows, in the same spirit that a group of peasants, if accosted by a well-dressed stranger, will make the personage among them who has some "scholaring" their spokesman. There can, at all events, be no escape from Hamlet's own appeal of honour to his companions, as "friends, scholars, soldiers." And even of Hamlet himself, the enamoured Ophelia can say no higher than "the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword." Indeed, the tongue is the felicitous distinction of the "scholar" in the English acceptation, irrespective of the thought; at most, the tongue with that "garnish of brains" called the memory." But such is largely the professorial philosophy of Germany. The English "scholar" is accomplished when he halts on Greek anapasts: and so, the universities have made this faculty too common for a title of distinction in the manner of the word gentleman. But in America, where things are otherwise, and by a union that tests the prin

ciple, the highest eulogium paid a statesman, were he President of the Republic, is to say that he is a “scholar and a gentleman." It is, however, being more particular than the mother country when parading George IV. as the “first gentleman of Europe." What either compliment would sound in France, with the race of reasoning and courtesy, is best inspected in the language, that faithful cast of the national intellect. Imagine, then, a grave magistrate panegyrized as un écolier; which on the contrary, when applied other than to school-boys, means contempt.

In fine, however, it does not follow that the race of Reasoning is that of reason, or that the Teuton may not pretend to be the race of " common sense." This sort of sense is, in fact, the reason of the race of individualism—what is subjectively common to the several members of the body ; and the instinct retains here so much the animal intensity, is so uniform in its objects and so vigilant in its action, as to give to the concurrences an air of preconcertion. The reason proper, on the contrary, in compensation of its enlarged range, can apply but to the relatively common, the comprehensive, the unselfish, the abstract, and therefore often the visionary. It is equally at home in arraying the verbal battalions of the memorable warfare of the Omoiousion and Omoousion, as when it opened to Aristotle the theory of its own procedure. The distinction is immortalized in the apothegm of a poet who, like the women that provoked its satire, could belong but to the race of reasoning:

Raisonner est l'emploi de toute ma maison ;

Et le raisonnement en bannit la raison.1

1 Molière, Les Femmes Savantes.

CHAPTER V.

SHYLOCK,

AS TYPE OF THE HEBREW RACE.

1. THIS famous character is still alone, in the long gallery of Shakespeare, to be fully recognised as the expression of a race. Yet the portraiture-though far more perfect, as will presently appear, than has been hitherto conceived-is not more like than several others. It is only that the subject was more simple and less familiar. The narrow confines of the Jewish sympathies, and intellect, and action, left the discernment proportionably less distracted by multiplicity; and then the fewness and insulation of this people throughout Europe gave the additional aid of marking them to common observation. With the Teutons and the Celts it was quite otherwise in detail. They were, the narrowest of them, far more complex in range of faculties and phases, and too familiar with each other, as with themselves, for nicer judgment. The rudest peasant may admire the cow and cottage of a Dutch painter. The very birds were lured to peck at the tinted fruit of the Greek artist. The simple characterization lay, in both, on the exterior, and

was contrasted with the nature of the spectators respectively. The grapes were visibly unlike the birds, the cow was visibly unlike the peasant; the Jew was strikingly unlike the Christian, whether Celtic or even Teutonic. But most mankind would gaze for ever on a cartoon of Raphael, without perceiving more than ordinary men and women in quainter costumes, or suspecting the vast interior which wrapt the meaning of the picture.

The Hebrew character-this Dutch subject of the Raphael of poetry-may be conveniently unfolded by the now-known tests of the Teutonic. For the Hebrews and Semites generally were a race of personality, with its effects of war, commerce, religiosity, in a word, selfishness. This analogy is indeed the cause of Teuton sympathies with Hebrew records, while the Celts revert in preference to Græco-Roman civilization. The Semites were the liberators of primeval humanity from the paternal and religious despotism of the East, just as the Teutons were the liberators of the West from the Roman : not by design in either case, but through destruction and rapacity. The religion of the Hebrews was a revolt of Personalism against the reigning Naturalism of the family or physical worship; its definition is the Protestantism of heathen theology. Exactly so, the Teuton protest against Roman idolatry might be defined the Judaism of Christian theology. The Hebrews hated Egypt no less fiercely than the Teutons Rome. They hated all the world save for purposes of gain, and wanted but an island in a sequestered position to have become the "chosen people" of trade and "liberty," as well as God. The preaching of the Teutons is the prophetism of the Jews; the philosophy of the Germans