owners and occupants to correspond - think of carefully built gardens from the beautiful but sophisticated gardening art at its best, with walks and bowers and artificial lakes, and appropriate statue-groups and the finest cultivated roses and lilies and japonicas in plenty and you have the tally of Shakspere. The low characters, mechanics, even the loyal henchmen - all in themselves nothing - serve as capital foils to the aristocracy. The comedies (exquisite as they certainly are) bringing in admirably portray'd common characters, have the unmistakable hue of plays, portraits, made for the divertisement only of the elite of the castle, and from its point of view. The comedies are altogether non-acceptable to America and Democracy. But to the deepest soul, it seems a shame to pick and choose from the riches Shakspere has left us to criticise his infinitely royal, multiform quality to gauge, with optic glasses, the dazzle of his sun-like beams. WHITMAN, WALT, 1888, Novem

ber Boughs, p. 56.

For my part, I believe that Shakespeare wrote his plays, like the conscientious playwright that he was, to fill the theatre and make money for his fellow-actors and for himself; and I confess to absolute scepticism in reference to the belief that in these dramas Shakespeare's self can be discovered (except on the broadest lines), or that either his outer or his inner life is to any discoverable degree reflected in his plays; it is because Shakespeare is not there that the characters are so perfect, the smallest dash of the author's self would mar to that extent the truth of the character, and make of it a mask. — FURNESS, HORACE HOWARD, 1890, ed. New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, As You Like It, Introduction, p. viii.

So large a space did the great dramatist fill in the delightsome journey we were to make together, down through the pleasant country of English letters, that he seemed not so much a personality as some great British stronghold, with outworks, and with pennons flying - standing all athwart the Elizabethan Valley, down which our track was to lead us. From far away back of Chaucer, when the first Romances of King Arthur were told, when glimpses of a King Lear and a Macbeth appeared in old chronicles - this great monument of Elizabethan times loomed high in our front; and go far as we may down the current of English letters, it will not be out of sight, but loom up grandly behind us. And now that we are fairly abreast of it, my fancy still

clings to that figure of a great castle - brimful of life with which the lesser poets of the age contrast like so many out-lying towerss that we can walk all round about, and measure, and scale, and tell of their age, and forces, and style; but this Shakesperean hulk is so vast, so wondrous, so peopled with creatures, who are real, yet unreal — that measure and scale count for nothing. We hear around it the tramp of armies and the blare of trumpets; yet these do not drown the sick voice of poor distraught Ophelia. We see the white banner of France flung to the breeze, and the English columbine nodding in clefts of the wall; we hear the ravens croak from turrets that lift above the chamber of Macbeth, and the howling of the rainstorms that drenched poor Lear; and we see Jessica at her casement, and the Jew Shylock whetting his greedy knife, and the humpbacked Richard raging in battle, and the Prince boy apart in his dim tower piteously questioning the jailer Hubert, who has brought “hotirons" with him. Then there is Falstaff, and Dame

Quickly, and the pretty Juliet sighing herself away from her moonlit balcony. These are all live people to us; we know them; and we know Hamlet, and Brutus, and Mark Antony, and the witty, coquettish Rosalind; even the poor Mariana of the moated grange. MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1890, English Lands Letters and Kings, From Elizabeth to Anne, p. 57.

Herein Chaucer stands at the opposite pole from Shakspeare. The work of the latter abounds in coarse allusions, in filthy conceits, in double meanings. But these passages in the great dramatist's writings are supremely uninteresting. They are as tedious as they are vile. They cannot be called innocent, but they are innocuous, owing to the saving grace of stupidity. When Shakspeare appeals to the lower nature, he does it largely through the agency of verbal quibbles, which are, if pos sible, more execrable intellectually than they are morally. To trace the allusions contained in them, to unravel the obscurities inwrapped in them, involve a degree of labor which few are willing to bestow, or a previous acquaintance with human nastiness that few have qualified themselves to possess. The result is that these things are constantly passed over unnoticed. There is little attrac

tion in the pursuit of knowledge peculiarly difficult to acquire, and with which, when obtained, the acquirer is more disgusted than pleased. - LOUNSBURY, THOMAS R., 1891, Studies in Chaucer, vol. III, p. 364.

I seldom refer to Shakespeare in these lectures, since we all instinctively resort to him as to nature itself; his text being not only the chief illustration of each phrase that may arise, but also, like nature, presenting all phases

in combination. It displays more of clear and various beauty, more insight, surer descriptive touches, above all, more human life, than that of any other poet; yes, and more art, in spite of a certain constructive disdain,

the free and prodigal art that is like nature's own. Thus he seems to require our whole attention or none, and it is as well to illustrate a special quality by some Yet if there is one gift

poet more dependent upon it. which sets Shakespeare at a distance even from those who approach him on one or another side, it is that of his imagination. As he is the chief of poets, we infer that the faculty in which he is supereminent must be the greatest of poetic endowments. Yes: in his wonderland, as elsewhere, imagination is king. There is little doubt concerning the hold of Shakespeare upon future ages. I have sometimes debated whether, in the change of dramatic ideals and of methods in life and thought, he may not become outworn and alien. But the purely creative quality of his imagination renders it likely that its structures will endure. . . . Shakespeare's imagination is still more independent of discovery, place, or time. It is neither early nor late, antiquated nor modern; or, rather, it is always modern and abiding.-STEDMAN, EDMUND CLARENCE, 1892, The Nature and Elements of Poetry, pp. 229, 230.

Shakespeare is the first among the great English poets since the Old English period in whom the Teutonic spirit again overpoweringly asserts itself, and presses into its service all those elements of foreign culture which were assimilated by the national character. In him we find again that soul-stirring note of deep feeling, that simple boldness of poetic expression, which plunges us, without preparation or mediation, apparently without any effort

at artistic effect, - into the very heart of the subject; in short, he has that genuineness of sentiment which is a chief characteristic of Germanic poesy. - TEN BRINK, BERNHARD, 1892-95, Five Lectures on Shakespeare, tr. Franklin, p. 33.

Shakespeare loved his England and so sounded her praises. The imagination of the poet seized upon the skeleton of the chroniclers and clothed them with flesh and blood. From King John to Henry VIII., from Magna Charta to the Reformation, whether conscious or not of the splendid scope of his achievement, the poet historian has sung an immortal epic of the English nation, having for its dominant note the passing of feudalism and the rise of the common people. The germ of this development has never died out of the souls of that hardy race whose forefathers crept across the gray waste of the German ocean in their frail boats of wood and hide, to grapple with unknown foes upon unknown shores, and to lay the cornerstone of that great and free nation, of whose best life Shakespeare was the poet, chronicler, and seer. -WARNER, BEVERLEY E., 1894, English History in Shakespeare's Plays, p. 15.

Probably no dramatist ever needed the stage less, and none ever brought more to it. There have been few joys for me in life comparable to that of seeing the curtain rise on Hamlet, and hearing the guards begin to talk about the ghost; and yet how fully this joy imparts itself without any material embodiment! It is the same in the whole range of his plays: they fill the scene, but if there is no scene they fill the soul. They are neither worse nor better because of the theatre. They are so great that it