by piling up eulogies which often prove nothing more than that their authors wanted discrimination, and were determined that the world should know it.

It was no fault of Shakespeare's certainly, but he has been the occasion of more nonsense than almost any other writer, either ancient or modern. Aristotle indeed had ten thousand commentators, who, as Swift suggests, knew as little of him as he did of them.

From the date of Rowe's edition, 1709, down to the publication of Malone's Shakespeare' by Boswell in 1821 there appeared numerous elaborate editions, accompanied by a formidable array of notes and prefaced for the most part with extravagant eulogies. The eighteenth century may in fact be regardeḍ as a Shakespeare era, the very perihelion of the poet's fame, during which many able critics sought to outdo each other in the servility of their admiration. Rowe, indeed, confines his praise within modest limits; sometimes underrating the merits of Shakespeare, as where he tells us that the parasite and the vainglorious in Parolles is as good as anything of that kind in Plautus or Terence. What he says of Shakespeare's treatment of the supernatural is well expressed: The greatness of this author's genius. does nowhere so much appear as where he gives his imagination an entire loose, and raises his fancy to a flight above mankind and the limits of the visible world.'

When Pope nineteen years later undertook to point out Shakespeare's great qualities he exhibited as little regard for truth as he did for his own reputation. His knowledge of antiquity, notwithstanding his Homeric studies, was very limited, though he desired to be thought a great proficient in that kind of learning.

'If ever any author,' he says, 'deserved the name of an original, it was Shakespeare. Homer himself drew not his art so immediately from the fountains of nature; it proceeded through Egyptian strainers and channels, and came to him not without some tincture of the learning or some cast of the models of those before him.'

Mr. Gladstone in his learned and admirable picture of the Homeric age, and of the ages immediately preceding it, is at some pains to show that the belief in the Unity of God reached Hellas from the East; but he knows nothing of those 'strainers and channels' through which Pope imagines Homer to have derived his knowledge of the poetical art. The Arabs of Tyre and Sidon no doubt imported some knowledge with their merchandise into Greece and other European countries, but the Greeks knew too little of Arabic, and the Arabs of Greek, to render the transmission of poetic ideas and refinement possible. Pope proceeds: The poetry of Shakespeare was inspiration indeed: he is not so much an imitator as an instrument of Nature, and it is not so just to say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks through him.' As Pope has made himself an object of admiration to us by many of his own writings, and still more by his translation of Homer, it is a matter of regret that he should have put forward so many erroneous opinions respecting Shakespeare, whom he really understood less than many writers inferior in other respects to him. Possessed by a sort of mania for saying striking things, he lost sight of truth, and, as his authority in literature was very great, may be said to have set the fashion of elevating Shakespeare into an object of idolatry. His aim was, however, much less to eulogise

Shakespeare than to shine himself, which may be affirmed with equal truth of his friend Warburton, one of the ablest and most unamiable men who have written on Shakespeare. Each succeeding editor, with the exception of Steevens, seems to have looked upon it as a religious duty to exceed all his predecessors in the force and fervour of devotion, which may be said. to have culminated in the phrase: He came out of Nature's hand, like Pallas out of Jove's head, at full growth and mature.' In this style critics went on to the time of Coleridge, who closed the list of able writers of the apotheotic class. Exaggeration could be carried no further; the public grew weary of idolising Shakespeare, though writers of mean intellect, urged by some instinct, in spite of Nature and their stars, to write, go on still harping on the same string. It is time, however, to have done with adulation and yield to the influence of truth. But whither will this lead us? Not certainly to disparage Shakespeare, but to hold up, if possible, such a mirror as shall reflect faithfully both the man and his writings. There is nothing to be gained by considering him worse or better than he is, truer or less true to nature, completer or less complete in his art, wiser or less wise in his philosophy. If I often differ from other critics, it is through no desire to confute them, but only because my studies have forced me to different conclusions. Thought is free, and if in the hurry of its movements it sometimes falls in and incorporates itself with error, the remedy is at hand in a new and more diligent consideration of the subject.

At first sight it would be no disparagement to Shakespeare to place 'Philaster' side by side with his best tragedy. Throughout the works, indeed, of these

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celestial twins there is so much beauty, so rich a store of imagery, so many touching passages and incidents, so constant a recurrence of exquisite descriptions, that to a real lover of sweet imaginative literature they would supply reading for a whole life.

Hazlitt says of Coleridge that he had a knack of preferring the unknown to the known, which, though the habit deserted him in the case of Shakespeare, may account for the preference he accords to the Gothic rather than to the Greek literature. Shakespeare entertained no such preference. Nothing but the scantiness of his knowledge prevented him from diving more deeply into antiquity, and bringing forth from its depths a still larger array of exquisite imageries than those which adorn his plays. His finest thoughts are cast in the very mould of antiquity, he invents as Hellas invented, his imagination sat with Sophocles all night on the banks of the Ilissus and heard the gurgling of the stream mingle with the song of the nightingale. This to me, at least, is one of his greatest charms, because he is never fuller of fancy, never more happy in his conceptions, never sways more resistlessly the powers of our inner nature, than when he invokes the hidden soul of some Greek mythus, or presents us with dewy flowers from the gardens of the Hesperides:

Violets dim,

But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes

Or Cytherea's breath.2

If there be nothing of this in the mythology, there ought to have been, since it contains no thought or image more beautiful.

Beaumont and Fletcher.

2 The Winter's Tale, act iv. sc. 3.

If it does not fall to the lot of anyone who speaks truth to judge in the same spirit of all Shakespeare's dealings with antique themes, this is the poet's own fault, or rather misfortune. He should have studied more carefully the topography of his inventions. If he has not done this we may lament the fact, but are under no necessity of denying it. Shakespeare had a genius which would have enabled him under proper conditions to invest with all the colours of life and truth an additional episode of the Trojan War; it was within his competence to revivify the great misanthrope of Athens, and to surround him with circumstances in strict accordance with history, which in this case is only another word for nature; he might have done the same thing for the war of Coriolanus, for the extinction of the republic, for the dalliance and death of the grossest of the Triumvirs, with his shameless partner in licentiousness. But no one who respects himself and cherishes a stern reverence for truth will venture to affirm that Shakespeare fulfilled the conditions which he imposed upon himself when he undertook to write his Greek and Roman plays.

While following the current of Shakespeare's thoughts, through the whole extent of his genuine works, all readers probably experience a desire to ascertain what on many great questions his real opinions were: for example, on religion, on spirit, on matter, on politics, on women, on ethics, and generally on the relations of social life. By a prolonged and careful study, I have sought to arrive at something like a probable conclusion on those subjects, though I by no means flatter myself that I have succeeded in all, or even in most cases.

If language, as has been said, was given to man to