the terrible truth breaks upon them, the force of what we call instinct exerts itself, but at the same time reveals the truth that it is not nature but custom that directs the currents of human thought, as well on this as on every other subject. No mind acts and thinks independently, but is swayed by antecedent thought, which invests itself with the sacred character of nature, and its voice when it speaks is constantly mistaken for the voice of God. Shakespeare suffered his ideas to be bewildered for awhile by the subtle intricacies of this question, but at length escaped from them and co-ordinated his speculations more in harmony with truth.

ESSAY XIII

PHILOSOPHY: COUNTRY LIFE-OLD AGE-DISTRIBUTION OF HAPPINESS

IN physical philosophy Shakespeare might perhaps have held a high place had he chosen to withdraw his observation from the moving and living world to fix it on unsentient nature. But his mission was to deal with man, his actions, his passions, and that ocean of thought through which he has to make his way towards the objects of his aim in life. the great sophist of antiquity, to have represented to himself man as the measure of all things, which, whatever may be urged to the contrary, he is to himself, since everything lying beyond the range of his thought and experience has no existence for him.

He seems, like

Our relations to the outward world-that is, to all things external to ourselves-are so completely involved in mystery as to have led in some minds to the belief that they have no real being, but exist exclusively in the sphere of our ideas. This notion, however, was altogether foreign to Shakespeare, though, as I have already observed, he contrived to unite with belief in the ultimate evanescence of matter the persuasion that whatever we feel and see is real. Hence the singular charm of his poetry. The agents about us are all flesh and blood, the scene on which they live and move is substantial, solid, unequivocal matter; as you hear and

see them, so you perceive distinctly the theatre in which they act and suffer.

Many look upon Shakespeare as a lively, jovial Epicurean who, though he could occasionally close his eyes upon the sunshine and cultivate a familiarity with the night side of nature, held generally with Democritus that the world is rather a comedy than a tragedy, a thing to be laughed at, not mourned over. This view, however, is scarcely borne out by experience. The more familiar you become with his thoughts, the stronger will be your conviction that the life he lived had not proved satisfactory to himself, and that although he purchased houses and lands at Stratford, and rose from the rank of yeoman to that of gentleman, he still felt himself altogether out of place in the social system then existing in England. Among the considerations which should reconcile a man of humble rank to death is that he need

Fear no more the frown of the great,

which, with slander and rash censure, he classes with 'the lightning's flash and the all-dreaded thunderstone.' The aim of his moral philosophy is to blunt the edge of disappointment, to show us where the sources of anguish and sorrow lie, and where, if we will take counsel of him, we may escape some at least of the sharp evils that wound us in the world:

Are not these woods

More free from peril than the envious court?

Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,

The seasons' difference, as the icy fang

And churlish chiding of the winter's wind.

He has elsewhere shown what delight is to be extracted from action, from the emulation of soul with

soul, from the struggles of ambition, guiltless or guilty, from the worship of beauty, from the enjoyment of fame; but in the life removed' there is, he insists, a greater sweetness, a more luxurious calm, something more analogous to the deepest and most recondite recesses of our being:

This our life exempt from public haunt

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.

There is pleasure while it lasts in gambling, brawling, intriguing, fighting, which both Raleigh and Southampton would have acknowledged, though on one occasion the gratification may have cost the latter half his beard. Faulconbridge derived pleasure from goading his father's enemy with insults, Constance derived enjoyment from taunting Elinor with the vices of her offspring, while Richard experienced excess of glee as he pushed one of his relatives after another from the stage of life.

But if with the dethroned Duke you stroll leisurely through the Forest of Arden, enjoying the commingled odours of the fresh grass, the mosses, the wild flowers, the falling leaves as they are shaken down by chance, and listen while the nightingale, 'in shadiest covert hid,' pours forth her rapturous notes, you would scarcely envy those who, under canopies of costly state, enjoy the tattle of fashionable society:

World, world, O world!

But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,

Life would not yield to age.

It is age, however, and age warped and soured by the direst afflictions, that judges thus of life. It is not the thing contemplated, but the thing contemplating,

that is subject to those strange mutations which made Lear, in the sickness of his heart, hate the world. The same individual in health and prosperity might have sat at dawn among sand-hills on the sedgy shore and gazed with inexpressible delight on the very type and embodiment of mutation as beneath the creeping light it throws its waves hither and thither in splash and foam.

In England always, and in Shakespeare's time especially, there has been and is a certain amount of irreverence felt for old age, because it is weak, dependent, used up, incapable of giving or receiving pleasure, suspended, as it were, against the wall of life,

Like rusty arms in monumental mockery.

It was not thus in Hellas, especially in the greater states, nor is it thus among the Arabs, where a sheikh with wrinkled forehead and beard of snow is regarded with as much love and awe by his tribe as a sceptred king.

"The heavens themselves are old,' exclaims Lear, writhing under the consciousness, not merely that he is old, but that he wants the wisdom which should accompany age. When Shakespeare desires to make youth, with little else to recommend it, enter at once within the sphere of our sympathies, he sets it before us showing respect for old age. Oliver, invested in nearly all the qualities calculated to inspire disgust, crowns them all by speaking thus; having dismissed his younger brother, he says to Adam:

Get you with him, you old dog.

Adam. Is 'old dog' my reward?

Most true, I have lost my teeth in your service. God be with my old master! he would

not have spoke such a word.