Troilus begins:

"Call liere, my varlet; I'Ujunarm again:

hy should I war without the walls of Troy, That, find such cruel battles here within? lLa.cn. Trojan that is master of his heart, Let him to field; Troilus, alas, hath none."

r\nd tYie play is Troilus and Cressida:

"She's hitter to her country

For every false drop in her bawdy veins
A Grecian's life hath sunk; for every scruple
Of her contaminated carrion weight '. . 1

A Trojan hath been slain: since she could speak,
She hath not given so many good words breath,
As for her Greeks and Trojans suffer'd death."

Antony and Cleopatra is as typical of the strife of passion •with eternal law as is Samson and Delila; though what a contrast to Milton's high Greekish religious patriot in Samson Agonistes; for neither is there in Shakespeare anything of such direct referring to a religious law.

And this play does not declare in set ferms with Le Cid,

"L'mour n'est qu'um plaisir; l'honneur est un devoid."

Far from it. No more than does Romeo sing:

"I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour, more."

In Othello, indeed, we hear the words of the general of the
Venetian State, whom Iago most falsely said was Antony:

"And heaven defend your good souls, that you think
I will your serious and great business scant,
For she is with me; no, when light wing*d toys
Of feather'd Cupid seel with wanton dulness
My speculative and offic'd instruments,
That my disports corrupt and taint my business,
Let housewives make a skillet of my helm,
And all indign and bsse adversities
Make head against my estimation."

Yet, for all that, what is the interest of Othello? Is the state question, the public question, the duty to things public, or to things religious as clashing with private interest—are these things before one's mind hardly at all? To see how differently the subject might be treated, more publicly, see Zaire, the play Voltaire made out of Othello.

"In my sense, 'tis happiness to die," that is the end here; and we know not how far to love or to blame him—"rash," but "most unfortunate." Then, lord governors are appointed, and reports are to be made to the State. But,

"Good bye, proud world: I'm going1 home."

As far as the stage of this life is concerned, I am nothing. In Bossuet's words: "Je ne suis venn que pour faire nombre, encore n'avait-on que faire de moi; et la comedie ne serait pas moins bien jouee, quand je serais demenue derrie le theatre."

Of Antony it is said, at the outset, by Cleopatra:

"He was dispos'd to mirth, but on the sudden
A Roman thought hath struck him."

Yet at the end:

"All is lost

O, this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,
Whose eye beck'd forth my wars and call'd them home,
Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end,—
Like a night gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss."

For, if the play is not a treatise on patriotism, no more is it the sensual folly of The World Well Lost for "Love." Still, the fact remains of what is lost, though ill. And when the statesman protests "there's more in it than fair visage," we think how we have read of another

"face that launch'd ten thousand ships, And fir'd the topless towers of Ilium."

And Julius Casar. The more one thinks about it, the more strange it seems, this judgment of Mr. Swinburne's, that all the interest in Julius Casar is public; that so the figure of Portia is hardly seen in the background; Brutus, as implied, being but "a patriot," and the play being a treatise on sublime atheistic republicanism. That is according to the Mr. Swinburne of greener age, he who was so taken with Gloucester's remark of despair,

"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport,"

that he took it as the motto of King Lear as a whole, this play of retribution—which finally decides, by the same Gloucester,

"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us"—

and so tYms pleased his sort of anti-religious violence. But those are wanton, or at least not thoughtful judgments. Fere W*atet homines id quod volunt credunt. And each such judgment makes one suspicious as to the critic's judgment in the other. A.nd for Julius Casar these suspicions have much ground. It is this Brutus with himself at war, his state of man suffering the nature of an insurrection; Brutus praying the gods to make him worthy of his noble wife; so gentle with the boy, his servant, whose youtVi Vie pitied, whose sleep he would not break; then so mistaken in men like Antony, "given to sports, to wildness, and much company," as Brutus allows, yet judged by him to be "a ■wise and valiant Roman," when once he appeals to Brutus' believing heart. And so, Brutus with Cassius; not only in the first scenes, but in that wonderful scene of their quarrel; whose warm glow of personal feeling spreads itself, even as night creeps on, over •whatever coldness our first readings might have fancied, in this play, whose public interest is all faded, as the words are a-saying concerning one of the men we have felt with, that "the sun of Rome is set."

Still, we are far from being left with any sentimentalizing over the collapse of things in general: "'tis but a man gone." As each Shakespearean tragedy closes, men make arrangements for carrying on the business. Our chief interest has passed. So it is with those who matter most with us. So with ourselves. "The man who threatens the world is always ridiculous; for the world can easily go on without him, and in a short time will cease to miss him." But there stands

"this main miracle,
That I am, I, with power on mine own self,
And on the world."

And, to use the language of high and holy imaginings, "Survey some populous town; crowds are pouring through the streets—some on foot, some in carriages—while the shops are full, and the houses too, could we see into them. Every part of it is full of life. Hence we gain a general idea of splendor, magnificence, opulence and energy. But what is the truth? Why, that every being in that great concourse is his own center, and all things about him are but shades—but 'a vain shadow in which he walketh and disquieteth himself in vain.' He has his own hopes and fears, desires, judgments and aims; he is everything to himself, and no one else is really anything. No one outside of him can really touch him, can touch his soul—his immortality; he must live with himself for ever. He has a depth within him unfathomable—an infinite abyss of existence; and the scene in which he bears part for the moment is but a gleam of sunshine upon its surface."

There the truth impressed by Shakespeare is carried into another sphere. But one truth fits into another; there are complements but not contradictions in truth; and natural and supernatural, they form a harmony, not without the discords unresolved below.

Now, Shakespeare does not pass beyond this natural world to the Cuitas Dei, either here or hereafter. He is not religious as a Greek dramatist is; he is not, so Wordsworth noted, as religious as mortal men seeking the why and the whence instinctively are. Yet neither is he preaching an absorption in the present, of pleasure, or of work, of art or of statecraft. Let a man study, Bacon says, but in such a way as not to forget his mortality; to which Thomas a Kempis himself has but to add, and not to offer opposition. And this forgetting of mortality is on no page of Shakespeare, be he speaking through cynic, or jester, patient sufferer, honest workman, heroic wife, or outraged friend, lover, or son.

What we mean to press forward in proof of, is the interest in these plays, taken in things as they really are; with the limitations to this world, in a way; but with the strong sense, built by reflection, by common sense, by humor, by imagination, that to be altogether of the world is to be no man: it is the patriotism of the den, of the theater, of the market place.

And passing, in this freer world, from the Roman to the English historical plays, we leave Coriolanus, the great aristocrat, the despiser of the poor, the proud scorner of their unreason and weakness, the would-be ruler with no sympathy for the needs of the governed, with their failings, or their follies. We do not so much blame him for his lack of patriotism, or praise him for his judgment on the Romans, as we watch a proud spirit breaking in shame at yielding to wife and mother, and in heathen haughtiness finding disgrace in being overcome.

Henry V is "the mirror of all Christian Kings;" and therefore, both as a chief character in one of this Shakespeare's plays, and is a Christian, he cannot find in his country's cause any standard of right and. wrong; nor shall we find in the English plays the state and. the outward show to be the resting place where we shall forget men.

Corio\anus, indeed, might be fitted to become a Caesar of "Caesarism," a setter-up of the Leviathan, with power over body, and sou\ also, sceptre in one hand, crosier in the other, to violate conscience, to assert the temporal over the spiritual, state over Church, emperor over Pope, or just our country, regardless whether it mean might over right, or right over might; to scout

"the law that is above the law, And purifies the hearts of men,"

while indeed, as Coleridge has now put it, the man who squares his conscience by the law is but another name for the wretch without any conscience at all.

"But Henry claims to be "no tyrant but a Christian King," and the true patriot "King-becoming graces" imply duties rather than rights:

"Justice, verity, temperance, stableness,
Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness,
Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude."

From the first, the basis of the play of Henry V is firmly laid, that Henry's cause is just for him, that he believes in it, nor would stir one foot towards France, unless France were rightly his.

Henry may irritate some, in some moods. Still he escapes being bourgeois; and he more than escapes being a hypocrite; and while about to rouse him in his throne of France he is modest, anxious to learn, willing to be advised, condescending to all, kind to the suffering, considerate to the weak; and even when terrible, careful to judge justice according to what is right and wrong, not by reason of what wrongs may be done to him alone.

England's cause is just for Henry; and so the chorus mourns the treachery of Englishmen:

"0 England!—model to thy inward greatness,
Like little body with a mighty heart,—
What might'st thou do, that honour would thee do,
Were all thy children kind and natural." /