of the great satirist to whom we owe the 'Absolom and Achitophel' is to be associated with Shakespeare's, it can be done with a better grace, where he writes to Sir Godfrey Kneller in acknowledgement, as is believed, of a copy of the Chandos portrait :—

'Shakespeare, thy gift, I place before my sight;
With awe I ask his blessing ere I write;
With reverence look on his majestic face;
Proud to be less, but of his god-like race.'

It was not till the eighteenth century that Nicholas Rowe, the first textual critic of the Shakespearean drama, appeared; and but for the bitter wars of Pope and the dunces,—with Warburton, Johnson, Steevens, Malone, and all the learned brood of commentators following,-- Shakespeare might have long been left to the mercy of such playwrights as D'Avenant and Dryden in the seventeenth, and Garrick and Cibber in the eighteenth century. Yet let it never be thought, as has too frequently been assumed, that Shakespeare is only now for the first time adequately appreciated; or, as others even more grossly affirm, that it was not till German critics had revealed his power, that English readers learned how great a poct their own Shakespeare is. However notorious the failure of his friends and literary executors, Heminge and Condell, may have been as editors, and had they executed their task in the way it was in their power to have done, with original manuscripts, stage copies, the memories of living actors, and the texts of earlier quartos, to appeal to,

the race of commentators would have had no pretext for textual recension;-yet in high estimation of their author's works, it is not easy for any later critic to surpass them. There, too, in the same folio, where their appreciative preface proves that Shakespeare was a true hero even to his fellow players, surly Ben Jonson, forgetting all his old irascibilities, writes of his 'star of poets'

"Soul of the age.

The applause! delight! the wonder of the stage!
My Shakespeare.'

Another contemporary, Leonard Digges, in laudatory verses of inferior power, but no less sincerity, prefixed to a spurious edition of Shakespeare's poems published in 1640, bears witness to the delight with which his plays were welcomed before all others. His 'Cæsar' could ravish the audience, when they would not brook Jonson's tedious Catiline.' His Othello and Falstaff, his Beatrice, Benedick, and Malvolio, that cross-garter'd gull,' would crowd cock-pit, galleries, and boxes, till scarce standing-room remained; when even the choicest of Ben Jonson's plays, 'The Fox and subtil Alchymist,' could only at long intervals command their merited ovation; and so he concludes with the comparison of 'his wit-fraught book' to old coined gold, which by virtue of its innate worth will pass current to succeeding ages. Shakespeare's writings are indeed a mine of wealth, from which the more they are studied the less it will surprise us to draw forth treasures new and old; and here, in his

Caliban, we recover a piece of 'old coin'd gold,' with its Elizabethan mint-mark, but with a value for us such as Shakespeare himself was unconscious of: like some rarest numismatic gem, whose worth in the artistic beauty of its die, far exceeds all its weight of sterling gold.

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, TORONTO,

July 3, 1872.

CHAPTER I.

IN THE BEGINNING.

'We do but learn to-day what our better-advanced judgments will unteach us to-morrow; and Aristotle doth but instruct us, as Plato did him: that is, to confute himself.'-Religio Medici.

IN

N the 'Medley' of the Poet-Laureat, when the tale of the Princess is closed, with its mock-heroics, its bantering burlesque, and its real earnestness, and the little feud begins

'Betwixt the mockers and the realists,'

Lilia joins entirely with the latter. The sequel of the tale had touched her,' she sate absorbed, perplexed in thought, till

Last she fix't

A showery glance upon her aunt, and said,

You tell us what we are; who might have told,
For she was cramm'd with theories out of books;'

but that the crowd, who had been making a sport of science, were swarming at the sunset to take leave; and ere all was quiet again, the stillness gave its fitter response to the question, unanswerable by 'theories out of books.'

'So they sat,

But spoke not, rapt in nameless reverie,

Perchance upon the future man; the walls

Blacken'd about us, bats wheel'd, and owls whoop'd,

And gradually the powers of the night,

That range above the region of the wind,

Deepening the courts of twilight, broke them up

Through all the silent spaces of the worlds,

Beyond all thought, into the Heaven of heavens.'

B

And eddied into suns, that, wheeling, cast
The planets; then the monster, then the man:
Tattoo'd or woaded, winter-clad in skins,

Raw from the prime.'

On the other hand, if the ancient maxim holds good, that nothing can come out of nothing, it seems not less but more scientific to start with the preoccupation of the mighty void with the Eternal Mind. The conception of such a Supreme Divine Intelligence seems to commend itself to finite reason. It is easier to conceive of the eternity of God than of His coming into being. But if 'first mind, then matter,' be thus the order of the universe, how are we to reconcile with it the inductions of modern science, in such a total reversal of this order in the process of creation of mind as is implied in the development of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual elements of man, through the same natural selection by which his physical evolution is traced, step by step, from the very lowest organic forms?

He

The contrast which this hypothesis presents to older theories of evolution, is nowhere better shown than in the musings of the old sage of Norwich. In his 'Religio Medici' he deals, after his own quaint fashion, with the oracles of antiquity, the supernatural of popular belief, and the spiritual beings set forth in revelation. For angelic natures he entertains a reverent regard undreamt of in our age of positivisms and spiritualisms. doubts not that 'those noble essences in heaven bear a friendly regard unto their fellow-natures on earth;' and therefore he believes that those many prodigies and ominous prognostics which forerun the ruin of states, princes, and private persons, are the charitable premonitions of good angels.' It was due, no doubt, to such calm philosophisings, that, in the very crisis of England's and Charles the First's fate, he left the state and its