Again, in the grave-digging scene in Hamlet, we see the same fascinated familiarity of the imagination with all that pertains to churchyards, coffins, and the corruption within them.

"Hamlet. Pr'ythee, Horatio, tell me one thing.

Horatio. What's that, my lord?

Hamlet. Dost thou think Alexander looked o' this fashion i' the earth? Horatio. E'en so.

Hamlet. And smelt so? Pah! (Throws down the skull.)

Horatio. E'en so, my lord!

Hamlet. To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?

Horatio. 'Twere to reason too curiously to consider so.

Hamlet. No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it. As thus-Alexander died; Alexander was buried; Alexander returned to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam whereto he was converted might we not stop a beer-barrel?

Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay,
May stop a hole to keep the wind away;
O that that flesh that kept the world in awe
Should stop a hole to expel the winter's flaw!"

Observe how Shakespeare here defends, through Hamlet, his own tendency "too curiously" to consider death. To sum up all, however, let us turn to that unparalleled burst of language in the Tempest, in which the poet has defeated time. itself by chivalrously proclaiming to all time what time can do:

"And, like the baseless fabric of a vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself—
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this unsubstantial pageant, faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made of; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

This, we contend, is no mere poetic phrensy, inserted because it was dramatically suitable that Prospero should so express himself at that place; it is the explosion into words of a feeling during which Prospero was forgotten, and Shakespeare swooned into himself. And what is the continuation of the passage but a kind of postscript, describing, under the guise of Prospero, Shakespeare's own agitation with what he had just written?

To our imagination the surmise is that Shakespeare here laid down his pen, and began to pace his chamber, too agitated to write more that night.

In this extreme familiarity with the conception of mortality in general, and perhaps also in this extreme sensitiveness to the thought of death as a matter of personal import, all great poets, and possibly all great men whatever, have to some extent resembled Shakespeare. For these are the feelings of our common nature on which religion and all solemn activity have founded and maintained themselves. Space and Time are the largest and the outermost of all human conceptions; to stand, therefore, incessantly upon these extreme conceptions, as upon the perimeter of a figure, and to view all inwards from them, is the highest exercise of thought to which a human being can attain. Accordingly, in all great poets there may be discerned this familiarity of the imagination with the world, figured as a poor little ball pendent in space, and moving forward out of a dark past to a future of light or gloom. But in this respect Shakespeare exceeds them all; and in this respect, therefore, no poet is more religious, more spiritual, more pro-, foundly metaphysical than he. Into an inordinate amount of that outward pressure of the soul against the perimeter of sensible things, infuse the peculiar moral germ of Christianity, and you have the religion of Shakespeare. Thus :-—

"And our little life

Is rounded with a sleep."-Tempest.

Here the poetic imagination sweeps boldly round the universe, severing it as by a soft cloud-line from the infinite Unknown.

"Poor soul! the centre of my sinful earth,

Fooled by those rebel powers that lead thee 'stray !"-Sonnet 146. Here the soul, retracting its thoughts from the far and physical, dwells disgustedly on itself.

"The dread of something after death

The undiscovered country, from whose bourne
No traveller returns."-Hamlet.

Here the soul, pierced with the new and awful thought of sin, wings out again towards the Infinite, and finds all dark.

"How would you be,

If He which is the top of judgment should

But judge you as you are?"-Measure for Measure.

Here the silver lamp of hope is hung up within the gloomy sphere, to burn softly and faintly for ever!

And so it is throughout Shakespeare's writings. Whatever is special or doctrinal is avoided; all that intellectual tackling, so to speak, is struck away that would afford the soul any relief whatever from the whole sensation of the supernatural. Although we cannot, therefore, in honest keeping with popular language, call Shakespeare, as Ulrici does, the most Christian of poets, we believe him to have been the man in modern times, who, breathing an atmosphere full of Christian conceptions, and walking amid a civilization studded with Christian institutions, had his whole being tied by the closest personal links to those highest generalities of the universe which the greatest minds in all ages have ever pondered and meditated, and round which Christianity has thrown its clasp of gold.

Shakespeare, then, we hold to have been essentially a meditative, speculative, and even, in his solitary hours, an abject and melancholy man, rather than a man of active, firm, and worldly disposition. Instead of being a calm, stony observer of life and nature, as he has been sometimes represented, we believe him to. have been a man of the gentlest and most troublesome affections; of sensibility abnormally keen and deep; full of metaphysical longings; liable above most men to self-distrust, despondency, and mental agitation from causes internal and external; and a prey to many secret and severe experiences which he did not discuss at the Mermaid tavern. This, we say, is no guess; it is a thing certified under his own hand and seal. But this being allowed, we are willing to agree with all that is said of him, by way of indicating the immense variety of faculties, dispositions, and acquirements of which his character was built up. Vast intellectual inquisitiveness, the readiest and most universal humour, the truest

sagacity and knowledge of the world, the richest and deepest capacity of enjoying all that life presented-all this, as applied to Shakespeare, is a mere string of undeniable commonplaces. The man, as we fancy him, who of all others trod the oftenest the extreme metaphysic walk which bounds our universe in, he was also the man of all others who was related most keenly by every fibre of his being to all the world of the real and the concrete. Better than any man he knew life to be a dream ; with as vivid a relish as any man he did his part as one of the dreamers. If at one moment life stood before his mental gaze, an illuminated little speck or disc, softly rounded with mysterious sleep, the next moment this mere span shot out into an illimitable plain, whereon he himself stood—a plain covered with forests, parted by seas, studded with cities and huge concourses of men, mapped out into civilizations, overcanopied by stars. Nay, it was precisely because he came and went with such instant transition between the two extremes, that he behaved so genially and sympathetically in the latter. It was precisely because he had done the metaphysic feat so completely once for all, and did not bungle on metaphysicizing bit by bit amid the real, that he stood forth in the character of the most concrete of poets. Life is an illusion, a show, a phantasm; well then, that is settled, and I belong to that section of the illusion called London, the seventeenth century, and woody Warwickshire! So he may have said; and he acted accordingly. He walked amid the woods of Warwickshire, and listened to the birds singing in their leafy retreats; he entered the Mermaid tavern with Ben Jonson, after the theatre was over, and found himself quite properly related, as one item in the illusion, to that other item in it, a good supper and a cup of canary. He accepted the world as it was; rejoiced in its joys, was pained by its sorrows, reverenced its dignities, respected its laws, and laughed at its whimsies. It was this very strength, and intimacy, and universality of his relations to the concrete world of nature and life, that caused in him that spirit of acquiescence in things as they were, that evident conservatism of temper, that indifference, or perhaps more, to the specific contemporary forms of social and intellec

tual movement with which he has sometimes been charged as a fault. The habit of attaching weight to what are called abstractions, of metaphysicizing bit by bit amid the real, is almost an essential feature in the constitution of men who are

remarkable for their faith in social progress. It was precisely, therefore, because Shakespeare was such a votary of the concrete, because he walked so firmly on the green and solid sward of that island of life which he knew to be surrounded by a metaphysic sea, that this or that metaphysical proposal with respect to the island itself occupied him but little.

How, then, did Shakespeare relate himself to this concrete world of nature and life in which his lot had been cast? What precise function with regard to it, if not that of an active partisan of progress, did he accept as devolving naturally on him? The answer is easy. Marked out by circumstances, and by his own bent and inclination, from the vast majority of men, who, with greater or less faculty, sometimes perhaps with the greatest, pass their lives in silence, appearing in the world at their time, enjoying it for a season, and returning to the earth again; marked out from among these, and appointed to be one of those whom the whole earth should remember and think of; yet precluded, as we have seen, by his constitution and fortune, from certain modes of attaining to this honourthe special function which, in this high place, he saw himself called upon to discharge, and by the discharge of which he has ensured his place in perpetuity, was simply that of expressing what he felt and saw. In other words, Shakespeare was specifically and transcendently a literary man. To say that he was the greatest man that ever lived is to provoke a useless controversy and comparisons that lead to nothing, between Shakespeare and Cæsar, Shakespeare and Charlemagne, Shakespeare and Cromwell; to say that he was the greatest intellect that ever lived, is to bring the shades of Aristotle and Plato, and Bacon and Newton, and all the other systematic thinkers grumbling about us, with demands for a definition of intellect, which we are by no means in a position to give; nay, finally, to say that he is the greatest poet that