for the improvement of human character, an indifference to externals in comparison with that which is of the invisible life, and a resolution to judge all things from a purely human standpoint, these grow upon us as habits of thought and feeling, as long as Shakspere remains an influence with us in the building up of character. Such habits of thought and feeling are those which belong more especially to the Protestant ideal of manhood. *

Is Shakspere a religious poet? An answer has been given to this question by Mr Walter Bagehot, which contains the essential truth. "If this world is not all evil, he who has understood and painted it best, must probably have some good. If the underlying and almighty essence of this world be good, then it is likely that the writer who most deeply approached to that essence will be himself good. There is a religion of week-days as well as of Sundays, a religion of 'cakes and ale' as well as of pews and altar cloths. This England lay before Shakspere as it lies before us all, with its green fields, and its long hedgerows, and its many trees, and its great towns, and its endless hamlets, and its motley society, and its long history, and its bold

*See on this subject the able reply to Rio by Michael Bernays in "Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft," vol. i. pp. 220-299. A minute but perhaps significant piece of evidence has been noticed recently by H. von Friesen. In Romeo and Juliet, Act iv. Scene 1, we read, "Or shall I come to you at evening mass?" No Catholic, observes H. von Friesen, could have spoken of "evening mass. "Altengland und William Shakspere (1874)," pp. 286, 87. Staunton had previously noticed the difficulty. But see the paper on this passage by the late Mr R. Simpson, in "Transactions of New Shakspere Society, 1875-76."

exploits, and its gathering power; and he saw that they were good. To him perhaps more than to any one else has it been given to see that they were a great unity, a great religious object; that if you could only descend to the inner life, to the deep things, to the secret principles of its noble vigour, to the essence of character . . . . we might, so far as we are capable of so doing, understand the nature which God has made. Let us then think of him, not as a teacher of dry dogmas, or a sayer of hard sayings, but as

"A priest to us all

Of the wonder and bloom of the world,"

a teacher of the hearts of men and women.' "*

It is impossible, however, that the sixteenth or the seventeenth century should set a limit to the nineteenth. The voyaging spirit of man cannot remain within the enclosure of any one age or any single mind. We need to supplement the noble positivism of Shakspere with an element not easy to describe or define, but none the less actual, which the present century has demanded as essential to its spiritual life and well-being, and which its spiritual teachers-Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Newman, Maurice, Carlyle, Browning, Whitman (a strange and apparently motley assemblage!) have supplied and are still supplying. The scientific movement of the present century is not more unquestionably a fact, than this is a fact. In the meantime to enter with strong and undisturbed comprehension into Shakspere, let us endeavour to hold ourselves strenuously at the Shaksperian standEstimates of some Englishmen and Scotchmen, by Walter Bagehot,

p. 270.

We shall

point, and view the universe from thence. afterwards go our way, as seems best; bearing with us Shakspere's gift. And Shakspere has no better gift to bestow than the strength and courage to pursue our own path, through pain or through joy, with vigour and resolution.

CHAPTER II.

THE GROWTH OF SHAKSPERE'S MIND AND ART.

IN the preceding chapter a brief and partial study was attempted of Shakspere the man, and Shakspere the artist, considered as one element in the great intellectual and spiritual movement of the Elizabethan period. The organism, a dramatic poet, we endeavoured to view in connection with its environment. Now we proceed to observe, in some few of its stages of progress, the growth of that organism. Shakspere in 1590, Shakspere in 1600, and Shakspere in 1610, was one and the same living entity; but the adolescent Shakspere differed from the adult, and again from Shakspere in the supremacy of his ripened manhood, as much as the slender stem, graceful and pliant, spreading its first leaves to the sunshine of May, differs from the moving expanse of greenery, visible a century later, which is hard to comprehend and probe with the eye in its infinite details, multitudinous and yet one, receiving through its sensitive surfaces the gifts of light and dew, of noonday and of night, grasping the earth with inextricable living knots, not unpossessed of haunts of shadow and secrecy, instinct with ample mysterious murmurs, the tree which has a history, and bears in wrinkled bark and wrenched bough memorials of time and change, of hard

ship, and drought, and storm. The poet Gray in a well-known passage, invented a piece of beautiful mythology, according to which the infant Shakspere is represented as receiving gifts from the great Dispensatress :

Far from the sun and summer gale

In thy green lap was Nature's darling laid,
What time, where lucid Avon strayed,
To him the mighty Mother did unveil
Her awful face; the dauntless Child
Stretched forth his little arms and smiled;
This pencil take, she said, whose colours clear
Richly paint the vernal year,

Thine too these golden keys, immortal Boy!
This can unlock the gates of Joy,

Of Horror that, and thrilling Fears,

Or

ope the sacred fount of sympathetic Tears.

But the mighty Mother, more studious of the welfare of her charge, in fact gave her gifts only as they could be used. Those keys she did not entrust to Shakspere until, by manifold experience, by consolidating of intellect, imagination and passions, and by the growth of self-control, he had become fitted to confront the dreadful, actual presences of human anguish and of human joy.

Everything takes up its place more rightly in a spacious world, accurately observed, than in the narrow world of the mere idealist. In bare acquisition of observed fact Shakspere marvellously increased from year to year. He grew in wisdom and in knowledge (such an admission does not wrong the divinity of genius), not less but more than other men. Quite a little library exists, illustrating the minute acquaintance of Shakspere with this branch of information, and with that: "The Legal