another by mutual influences, and set off each other by mutual contrasts. And not the least wonderful thing in his works is the exquisite congruity of what comes from the persons with all the circumstances and influences under which they are represented as acting; their transpirations of character being, withal, so disposed that the principle of them shines out freely and early on the mind. It is true, his persons, like those in real life, act so, chiefly because they are so; but so perfectly does he seize and impart the gerin of a character, along with the proper conditions of its development, that the results seem to follow all of their own accord. Thus in his delineations every thing is fitted to every other thing; so that each requires and infers the others, and all hang together in most natural coherence and congruity.

To exemplify this point a little more in detail, let us take his treatment of passion. How many forms, degrees, varieties of passion he has portrayed! yet we are not aware that any instance of unfitness or disproportion has ever been successfully pointed out in his works. With but two or three exceptions at the most, so perfect is the correspondence between the passion and the character, and so freely and fitly does the former grow out of the circumstances in which the latter is placed, that we have no difficulty in justifying and accounting for the passion. So that the passion is thoroughly characteristic, and pervaded with the individ uality of its subject. And this holds true not only of dif ferent passions, but of different modifications of the same passion; the forms of love, for instance, being just as various and distinct as the characters in which it is shown. Moreover, he unfolds a passion in its rise and progress, its turns and vicissitudes, its ebbings and flowings, so that we go along with it freely and naturally from first to last. Even when, as in case of Ferdinand and Miranda, or of Romeo and Juliet, he ushers in the passion at its full height, he so contrives to throw the mind back or around upon various

predisposing causes and circumstances, as to carry our sympathies through without any revulsion. Now, in this intuitive perception of the exact kind and degree of passion and character that are suited to each other; in this quick, sure insight of the internal workings of a given mind, and the why, when, and how far, it should be moved; and in this accurate letting out and curbing in of a passion, precisely as the law of its individuality requires; he shows himself far beyond the instructions of all who preceded him.

Nor is this the only direction in which he maintains the fitness of things: he keeps the matter right towards us, as well as towards his characters. It is true, he often lays on us burdens of passion that would not be borne in any other writer. But, whether he wrings the heart with pity, or freezes the blood with terror, or fires the soul with indignation, the genial reader still rises from his pages refreshed. The reason of which is, instruction keeps pace with excitement: he strengthens the mind in proportion as he loads it. He has been called the great master of passion: doubtless he is so; yet he makes us think as intensely as he requires us to feel; while opening the deepest fountains of the heart, he at the same time unfolds the highest energies of the head. Nay, with such consummate art does he manage the fiercest tempests of our being, that in a healthy mind the witnessing of them is always attended with an overbalance of pleasure. With the very whirlwinds of passion he so blends the softening and alleviating influences of poetry, that they relish of nothing but sweetness and health. For while, as a philosopher, he surpassed all other philosophers in power to discern the passions of men; as an artist, he also excelled all other artists in skill "so to temper passion, that our ears take pleasure in their pain, and eyes in tears both weep and smile."

Another point which ought not to be passed by in silence is the perfect evenhandedness of Shakespeare's representa tions. For among all his characters we cannot discover

from the delineation itself that he preferred any one to another; though of course we cannot imagine it possible for any man to regard Edmund and Edgar, for example, or Iago and Desdemona, with the same feelings. It is as if the scenes of his drama were forced on his observation against his will, himself being under a solemn oath to report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He thus uniformly leaves the characters to make their own impression on us he is their mouthpiece, not they his; and because he would not serve as the advocate of any, therefore he was able to stand as the representative of all. With the honour or shame, the right or wrong, of their actions, he has nothing to do: that they are so, and act so, is their concern, not his; and his business is, not to reform nor deprave, not to censure nor approve them, but simply to tell the truth about them, whithersoever it may lead him. Accordingly, he is not wont to exhibit either utterly worthless or utterly faultless monsters; persons too good or too bad to exist; too high to be loved, or too low to be pitied: even his worst characters (unless we should except Goneril and Regan, and even their blood is red like ours) have some slight fragrance of humanity about them, some indefinable touches, which redeem them from utter hatred and execration, and keep them within the pale of human sympathy, or at least of human pity.

Nor does he bring in any characters as the mere shadows, or instruments, or appendages of others. All the persons, high and low, contain within themselves the reason why hey are there and not elsewhere, why they are so and not otherwise. None are forced in upon the scene merely to supply the place of others, and so to be trifled with till the others are ready to return; but each is treated in his turn as though he were the main character of the piece. So true is this, that even if one character comes in as the satellite of another, he does so by a right and an impulse of his own; he is all the while but obeying, or rather executing the law of

his individuality, and has just as much claim on the other for a primary, as the other has on him for a satellite. The consequence is, that all the characters are developed, not indeed at equal length, but with equal perfectness as far as they go; for, to make the dwarf fill the same space as the giant, were to dilute, not develope, the dwarf.

Passing allusion has already been made once or twice to Shakespeare's humour. This is so large and so operative an element of his genius, that something further ought to be said of it. And perhaps there is nothing in his composition of which it is more difficult to give a satisfactory account. For it is nowise a distinct or separable thing with him, acting alone or occasionally, and so to be viewed by itself, but a perfusive and permeating ingredient of his make-up: it acts as a sort of common solvent, in which different and even opposite lines of thought, states of mind, and forms of life are melted into happy reconcilement and co-operation. Through this, as a kind of pervading and essential sap, is carried on a free intercourse and circulation between the moral and intellectual parts of his being; and hence, perhaps, in part, that wonderful catholicity of mind which generally marks his representations.

It naturally follows from this that the Poet's humour is widely diversified in its exhibitions. There is indeed no part of him that acts with greater versatility. It imparts a certain wholesome earnestness to his most sportive moods, making them like the honest and whole-hearted play of childhood, than which human life has nothing that proceeds more in earnest. For who has not found it a property of childhood, to be serious in its fun, innocent in its mischief, ingenuous in its guile? Moreover, it is easy to remark that in Shakespeare's greatest dunces and simpletons and potentates of nonsense there is something that prevents contempt. A fellow-feeling springs up between us and them: our pleasure in them is mainly from what they have in common with us; it is through our sympathetic, not our selfish emotions

that they interest us: we are far more inclined to laugh with them than at them, and even when we laugh at them we love them the more for that which is laughable in them. So that our delight in them still rests upon a basis of fraternal sentiment, and our intercourse with them proceeds under the great law of kindness and charity. Try this with any of the Poet's illustrious groups of comic personages, and it will be found, we apprehend, thoroughly true. What distinguishes us from them, or sets us above them in our own esteem, is never appealed to as a source or element of delectation. So that the pleasure we have of them is altogether social in its nature, and humanizing in its effect, ever knitting more widely the bonds of sympathy.

Here we have what may be called a foreground of comedy, but the Poet's humour keeps up a living circulation between this and the serious elements of our being that stand behind it. It is true, we are not always, nor perhaps often, conscious of any stirring in these latter: what is laughable occupies the surface, and is therefore all that we directly see. But still there are deep undercurrents of earnest sentiment moving not the less really that their movement is noiseless. In the disguise of sport and mirth there is a secret discipline of humanity going on; and the effect is all the better that it steals into us unseen and unsuspected: we know that we laugh, but we do something better than laugh without knowing it, and so we are made the better by our laughter; for in that which makes us better without our knowledge, we are doubly benefited.

Not indeed but that Shakespeare has characters, as, for example, the Steward in King Lear, which are thoroughly contemptible, and which we follow with contempt. But it is to be observed that there is nothing laughable in Oswald, nothing that we can either laugh with or laugh at: he is but a sort of human reptile, such as life sometimes produces, whom we regard with moral loathing and disgust, but in whose company neither mirth nor pity can find any foothold.