are there: the lovers and warriors, the priests and prophetesses of the old heroic and kingly times of Greece; the Athenians of the days of Pericles and Alcibiades; the proud patricians and turbulent commonality of the earliest period of republican Rome, – Cæsar and Brutus, and Cassius and Antony, and Cleopatra, and the other splendid figures of that later Roman scene; the kings and queens and princes and courtiers of barbaric Denmark and Roman Britain, and Britain before the Romans, and those of Scotland in the time of the English Heptarchy; those of England and France at the era of Magna Charta; all ranks of the people of almost every reign of our subsequent history from the end of the fourteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century; not to speak of Venice and Verona and Mantua and Padua and Illyria and Navarre, and the forest of Arden, and all the other towns and lands which he has peopled for us with their most real inhabitants.

"Not even in his plays is Shakespeare a mere dramatist. Apart altogether from his dramatic power he is the greatest poet that ever lived.

"His sympathy is the most universal, his imagination the most plastic, his diction the most expressive ever given to any writer. His poetry has in itself the varied power and excellence of all other poetry. While in grandeur and beauty and passion and sweetest music, and all the other higher gifts of song, he may be ranked with the greatest,—with Spenser and Chaucer and Milton and Dante and Homer, he is at the same time more nervous than Dryden and more sententious than Pope, and more sparkling, and of more abounding conceit, when he chooses, than Donne or Cowley or Butler.

"In what handling was language ever such a flame of fire as it is in his? His wonderful potency in the use of this instrument would alone set him above all other writers."

It has been stated that in the English language the number of words in ordinary use does not exceed three thousand. A rough calculation, founded on Mrs. Clarke's concordance, gives about twenty-one thousand as the number to be found in the plays of Shakespeare, without count

ing inflectional forms as distinct words. Not more than seven thousand are given for Milton, making, by a fair estimate, his vocabulary not more than half as copious as the Shakespearian.

The revolution that Shakespeare wrought upon the English drama is clearly shown by comparing his earliest plays with the best the language possessed before his time. Characters in which polished manners and easy grace are as predominant as wit, reflection, or fancy, were then as unknown to the stage as to actual life, and are simply the creations of his genius. The honor of creating the English drama itself is indeed not claimed for Shakespeare; but by refining its rudeness, and giving it grace and elevation, he regenerated and wholly transformed it. His comedies have been aptly termed "meteors of wit, filled with a humor that finds the kernel of the ludicrous in everything." What other dramatist could have created for us a Slender, a Dogberry, a Launcelot, a Touchstone, and a Launce, and last but not least, that rare embodiment of wit and humor, huge Falstaff, "larding the lean earth as he walks along"?—a character "whose very vices," it has been said, "seem made for our delight, since he is a liar, a glutton, a braggart, and a coward more for the amusement of others than for the gratification of himself." Justice Shallow is to him "a man made after supper from a cheese-paring." "If to be fat," quoth he, "is to be hated, then Pharaoh's lean kine are to be loved."

Some of Shakespeare's clowns and fools are but mere poetical creations; yet many of them are to be met with in real life, and are familiar as sunshine. Of this sort is Launce, in the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," and those "hempen homespuns," the Athenian clowns, met by moonlight in the fairy-haunted wood to rehearse their grand tragedy of "Pyramus and Thisbe," proposed by them

as a part of the festivities attending the marriage of the Duke of Athens. It has been justly affirmed that of all poets we must accord to Shakespeare the most unbounded range of fanciful invention. Who like him has "given to airy nothing a local habitation and a name"? How his Ariel, dainty as the down of a thistle, "drinks the air before him"! How perfectly he does his spiriting, "be 't

to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, or to ride on the curled clouds"! Like a "singing gossamer" he floats in the air, warbling,

"Where the bee sucks, there suck I;

In a cowslip's bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

On the bat's back I do fly

After summer, merrily:

Merrily, merrily, shall I live now,

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough."

Even that strange monster Caliban, moved by concord of sweet sounds, is charmed by this creature of ethereal essences; thus he discourses to the tipsy Trinculo, when startled by Ariel's invisible music, which he calls "the tune of Our Catch, played by the picture of Nobody,” ·

"Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,

That if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again: and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that when I waked

I cry'd to dream again."

It has been noted that "Shakespeare has drawn off from Caliban the elements of whatever is ethereal and refined to compound them in Ariel, thus finely contrasting

the gross and the delicate;" and what a creature he is! "Hag-seed," says Prospero,

"Which any print of goodness would not take,
Being capable of all ill." . . .

"A thing most brutish, whose vile nature had

That in 't which good natures could not abide
To be with."

Critics have considered the character of Caliban one of Shakespeare's master-pieces. His deformity of body and mind is redeemed by the power and truth of the imagination displayed in his creation, and by that rare embodiment of the very essence of grossness without a particle of vulgarity. One of Shakespeare's German critics has observed that "Caliban is a poetical character, and always speaks in blank verse;" and it will be remembered that he first appears in the play with this rhythmical malediction on his lips :

"As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed

With raven's feather from unwholesome fen,
Drop on you both! A south-west blow on ye,
And blister you all o'er."

"In contrast with Trinculo and Stephano, the vulgar drunken sailors, with their coarse sea-wit, the figure of Caliban," says Hazlitt, "acquires a classical dignity."

"What have we here?" says Trinculo (Shakespeare's admirable prototype of the "dime showman") "A man, or a fish? Dead, or alive? A fish: a strange fish. Were I but in England now (as once I was), and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver: any strange beast there makes a man: when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian."

Who but Shakespeare could have given us Puck,-funny little Puck? The Ariel of the "Midsummer Night's

Dream," he has been called; yet in the main, how unlike is he to the "sprite of Prospero"! Ariel is tender and human, and touched with pity for those upon whom he brings ill. Puck is a wanton Troll, innately delighting in mischief, and heartily enjoying the discomfiture of his victims. "Lord," he exclaims, "what fools these mortals be!"

"He bootless makes the breathless housewife churn."
"Misleads night-wanderers, laughing at their harm."

"The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale [he boasts],
Sometimes for three-foot stool mistaketh me;

Then slip I from her, and down topples she."

When he has culled for Oberon the little western flower, "purple with love's wound," and the Fairy King having squeezed upon the sleepy lids of perverse Titania its charmed juice, she is constrained by that potent liquid to dote insanely on ass-headed Bottom, whose "angelic braying wakes her from her flowery bed," with what infinite relish Puck brings the scandal to Oberon! We seem to hear an ethereal chuckle as he declares, —

"When in that moment (so it came to pass),

Titania wak'd and straitway loved an ass!"

And Titania and her train, how exquisite are they, floating like very flower-petals in the summer moonlight! Daintily they sprite it—

"Over hill, over dale,

Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,

Thorough flood, thorough fire."

When the Fairy Queen couches upon that bank "where the wild thyme blows," how softly the attendant fairies sing her to sleep! Hear the chorus of their song, steeped