beauty, and that to move among them is to be, as it were, rapt into the seventh heaven. That Shakespeare was in the habit of enjoying this delight we may infer from the words of Prospero, who bids Ariel— that is, one of his ideas to which he had given a nameappear before him invested with all the loveliness of a nymph of the sea. It is within the competence of all creative minds to ascend when they list to those celestial regions where everything that is sweet and beautiful resides, and to revel there amid divine forms and types of splendour which know no reflections in the sphere of the outer world. Here is Olympus, here are the courts of Jove, here alone Apollo's lute, strung with his hair, sounds for ever, and here Shakespeare found those images and fancies which he spent his whole life in endeavouring to shower forth through language upon mankind. To enter here is to be in the private apartments of Nature, where nothing unholy can ever be found, but instead, Truth unveiled, ready to be embraced by all who dare aspire to become her worshippers. Shakespeare, it cannot be doubted, did so aspire, and held converse with her out of hearing of the world.

To emerge from these cycles of thought, and accommodate itself to the coarse, rough business of life, is regarded by the mind in certain moods almost as a profanation. Yet Shakespeare often found himself on the steep declivity, leading to still worse results. He had to say what he did not believe, to do, perhaps, many things which he condemned as evil, to stand bareheaded before men whom Nature had formed to be his servitors, to bend his will, originally it may be stubborn in such matters, to the will of others, who willed what no sophistry could reconcile with the

strict law of rectitude. His inborn idiosyncrasies were cast in the fairest mould of refinement itself, yet the necessities of his position may have constrained him occasionally to tolerate ethical lapses which he despised; for misery, he tells us, acquaints us with strange bedfellows.

Stung by self-reproach, in this way, perhaps, generated, he sadly exclaimed:

O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide

Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand:
Pity me then and wish I were renew'd.

And what did he work in? And what were his harmful deeds? As he has supplied us with no answers to these questions, they must remain unanswered for ever. In the matter of opinion it is in some degree at least different, since, if we cannot arrive at absolute certainty, we may make some approaches to it. In the turbulent society by which Shakespeare was surrounded, there were two antagonistic principles at work-the monarchical and the republican, and while energy was secretly ebbing out of the one, it was in the same degree flowing into the other.

To these momentous processes Shakespeare's attention could not be otherwise than directed, partly because they bore upon the very existence of the theatre, but chiefly because they deeply influenced the whole political and social economy of the world. In practice, though not perhaps in theory, Shakespeare was an Epicurean, and, in spite of the grandeur of his genius,

could not persuade himself that greater happiness may be enjoyed with truth in a garret than with vice and error in a palace. Like other sceptics of his time, he had little faith in the professors of wisdom:

Was never yet philosopher

That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods

And made a push at chance and sufferance.

The purchase of houses and lands at Stratford supplies the best commentary upon this passage; he had no taste for sitting with Diogenes in his tub, or for wrapping himself with Epictetus in his servile gaberdine :

Video meliora proboque,

Deteriora sequor.

Hence many of the apparent contradictions in the plays. To thrive, the writer found it necessary to restrain his sympathy for the system of things to come, which could bring him no profit, and appear to sympathise with the things that were, which could. At the summit of human affairs, as they then existed, sat Despotism enthroned; Elizabeth herself was no less jealous of her absolute authority than James; and therefore, when the poet ventured to

tell sad stories of the death of kings,

he found it incumbent on him to guard strictly against the suspicion that in his secret soul he looked with extreme indifference at their fate. Coleridge observes that while the republican principle is predominant in Massinger, and the doctrine of Divine right in Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare's leanings are towards aristocracy. In this case, however, he makes between him and Massinger a distinction without a

difference, since the aristocratic principle is as completely republican as the democratic.

Whatever form of civil polity may have appeared best to Shakespeare, it certainly was not the monarchical, which, as often and as openly as he dared, he held up to public scorn, not indeed where the question was directly under consideration, but after the theatrical manner by innuendoes and asides. Many of his kings are usurpers, some of them murderers, nearly all of them despots or knaves. If he was as great a proficient as I suppose, in the art of looking into the seeds of time, and determining which of them should grow and which should not, he must have foreseen the utter blight and mildew of many which to the common eye seemed likely to flourish. Without anticipating the advent of a Utopia, Shakespeare's convictions were profoundly revolutionary, and, as far as they exerted any influence on the minds of those who studied him, paved the way to those great convulsions that almost immediately followed.

A prince is seldom chosen for the speaker when the object is to inculcate democratic principles; yet instead of selecting any inferior character, by whose lips to express his own opinions, Shakespeare puts forward as his representative in this matter one of the haughtiest members of the regal caste in Europe. Standing before the caskets at Belmont as a suitor for Portia's hand, and reading in the inscription on that of silver,

Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves,

the Prince of Arragon exclaims,

And well said too; for who shall go about

To cozen fortune and be honourable

Without the stamp of merit ?

that is, who shall presume to wear honours bestowed by the 'fool multitude' without deserving them? Yet, looking abroad in the world, in how few cases do we observe the merit proportioned to the honour!

O, that estates, degrees and offices

Were not derived corruptly, and that clear honour
Were purchased by the merit of the wearer!
How many then should cover that stand bare!
How many be commanded that command!

How much low peasantry would then be glean'd

From the true seed of honour! and how much honour

Pick'd from the chaff and ruin of the times

To be new-varnish'd!

Harry Vane, or Pym, or Hollis, might for the sentiments have written this passage, in which the grandees of the seventeenth century might perceive in what light they were regarded by one of the greatest thinkers of the time.

Farther on in the same play, law, theology, and beauty might learn what the 'player man' thought of them :

The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt
But, being season'd with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil?

Seasoned with the same gracious voice, evil was perhaps quite as often made to assume the show of good, as when, bribed by the present of an estate, a foul murderer was pronounced innocent, while to please the Court the noblest man then living was immured by law during a large portion of his life in the Tower.

We discover by the mummies that long ere Memnon fell before Troy, 'beauty's dead fleece' was employed to make another gay; so we can feel no surprise that the ladies of Venice and London in Shakespeare's