and fashion and utilitarianism oppose such a one. They fare as servants; he is sought after, and entertained as an angel. The ages esteem visions more than bread. Centuries hence, men will be touched-the more powerfully, the more they are advanced— by this artist and his art. His is the ceaseless fertility of the great Mother, the universal Love which was the prayer of his life, of which all loves are but the frail and fleeting blossoms:

'So all the world by thee at first was made,
And dayly yet thou doest the same repayre;
Ne ought on earth that merry is and glad,
Ne ought on earth that lovely is and fayre,
But thou the same for pleasure didst prepayre:

Thou art the root of all that joyous is:

Great God of men and women, queene of th' ayre,
Mother of laughter, and welspring of blisse,

O graunt that of my love at last I may not misse!'

SHAKESPEARE.

Mellifluous Shakespeare.-Heywood.

The thousand-souled.-Coleridge.

His thoughts, passions, feelings, strains of fancy, all are of this day as they were of his own; and his genius may be contemporary with the mind of every generation for a thousand years to come -Prof. Wilson.

Biography.-Born in Stratford, in 1564; removed from school at an early age by the reverses of his father, once a prosperous tradesman and official, now on the verge of ruin; applied himself, in a desultory manner, to business; to keep up the reputation of his little town, took part in scrapes and frolics; at eighteen, married a farmer's daughter, Anne Hathaway, aged twenty-six, to whom he was to bequeath only his 'second best bed with furniture'; quit home for London, fell into theatrical society, and became an actor and a playwright, serving an apprenticeship in the revision of dramas; six years later, was applauded by the gifted and the noble; added to the trades of player and author those of manager and director of a theatre; acquired shares in the Blackfriars and the Globe; invested in land, farmed tithes, bought the finest house in Stratford, where his wife and three children continued to live; finally retired to his native village,

like a country gentleman and a landlord with a good rent-roll; wrote for the stage, took an active interest in the public welfare, made an occasional visit to the metropolis, lent money, managed his fortune, lived like a cheerful shop-keeper, and, without the care or the time to collect and publish his works, died on the anniversary of his birth-day, April 23, 1616.

Meanwhile, he had projected himself into all the varieties of human character; had mingled with men of vigorous limbs, strong appetites, impetuous passions, and keen intellect; had felt the fascinations of the stormy and irregular Marlowe; in the company of fashionable young nobles, had fed his senses on examples of Italian pleasures and elegances; had tasted misery, felt the thorn of care and discredit; had seen himself undervalued, named, along with Burbage and Greene, as one of 'His Majesty's poor players'; had said in the bitterness of humilia

tion:

And again:

'Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motley to the view,

Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear.'

'When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Happily I think on thee,- and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembred, such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.'

One of his daughters married a physician, the other a wine merchant. The second could not write her name. His only son, Hamnet, died when eleven years of age. So few are the

recorded incidents in the outward career of the best head in the universe. Like Plato, he drew up the ladder after him; and the new age has sought in vain for a history of his house-andstreet life. His biography, like Plato's, is internal; and the psychologist sheds the light of which the antiquary despairs, which it most imports us to have.

Writings.-The poems of Shakespeare are Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim, and Sonnets. His plays, to several of which his title is disputed, are in number thirtyseven, and, according to the sources from which the dramatist drew his materials, may be grouped as,

In these performances, he exhausts all human experience, and

imagines more; searches the heart, lays bare its strength and

weakness, its excesses and its rages; divines the secret impulses of humanity; depicts all manners and conditions, high and low, such as the world will always find; shines, like the sun, on the evil and the good; runs without effort the round of human ideas, records his convictions on the questions that knock at the gate of every brain, on life, love, trial, death, immortality, freedom, fate, the ends of existence and the means. In so vast a field, we must select. Nor, amid so many portraitures, in so great variety of moods, in such profusion of sentiments, can the critic choose more than fragments, entreating the reader to divine the rest. The importance of this wisdom and this beauty sinks form, chronology, analytic completeness, out of notice.

Nowhere is the wonderful range of power more visible than in the varied types of female characters. Some are but babblers,— each the representative of a species; vulgar minds that forget and spare nothing, ignorant that conversation is but a selection, that every story is subject to the laws of dramatic poetry,-festinat ad eventum. Thus Mrs. Quickly reminds Falstaff of his promise of marriage:

Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Whitsun week, when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, come in then and call me gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar; telling us she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst desire to eat some."

She is held in thraldom to the order and circumstances in which her perceptions were originally acquired. Better still is the example of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, a never-ending gossip, smelling of the kitchen, impudent, immoral, but faithful and affectionate like a dog. The involuntary associations of her thoughts are imperative. She would advance, but repeats her steps; or, struck with an image, wanders from the point. She brings Juliet news of her lover:

'Nurse. I am aweary, give me leave awhile:

Fie, how my bones ache! what a jaunt have I had!
Jul. I would thou hadst my bones and I thy news.

Nay, come, I pray thee, speak; good, good nurse, speak.
Nurse. Jesu, what haste? can you not stay awhile?
Do you not see that I am out of breath?

Jul. How art thon out of breath when thou hast breath
To say to me that thou art out of breath?

1 Henry IV, Part II.

The excuse that thou dost make in this delay
Is longer than the tale thou dost excuse.
Is thy news good or bad? answer to that;
Say either, and I'll stay the circumstance:
Let me be satisfied, is't good or bad?

Nurse. Well, you have made a simple choice; you know not how to choose a man: Romeo! no, not he; though his face be better than any man's, yet his leg excels all men's; and for a hand, and a foot, and a body, though they be not to be talked on, yet they are past compare: he is not the flower of courtesy, but, I'll warrant him, as gentle as a lamb. Go thy ways, wench: serve God. What, have you dined at home?

Jul. No, no: but all this did I know before.

What says he of our marriage? what of that?

Nurse. Lord, how my head aches! what a head have I!
It beats as it would fall in twenty pieces.

My back o' t'other side,-0, my back, my back!

Beshrew your heart for sending me about,

To catch my death with jaunting up and down!

Jul. I'faith, I am sorry that thou art not well.

Sweet, sweet, sweet nurse, tell me, what says my love?

Nurse. Your love says, like an honest gentleman, and a courteous, and a kind, and a handsome, and, I warrant, a virtuous,-Where is your mother?

Jul. Where is my mother! why, she is within;

Where should she be? How oddly thou repliest!
"Your love says, like an honest gentleman,

Where is your mother?"

But his heroines are of finer mould. They are the possible of the female mind, seen, for the first time, as in a dream, yet-unlike Spenser's warm breathing realities. They are all charming or fascinating. Rosalind, sprightly but modest, coquettish and voluble, like a warbling and pretty bird, her tongue running 'With wanton heed and giddy cunning.'

When Orlando promises to love her 'for ever and a day,' she says, with pretended cruelty:

Say a day without the ever, no, no, Orlando, men are April when they woo, December when they wed: maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives: I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen; more clamorous than a parrot against rain; more new-fangled than an ape; more giddy in my desires than a monkey; I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are disposed to be merry; I will laugh like a hyen, and that when you are inclined to sleep.'

'But will my Rosalind do so?'-"By my life, she will do as I do.' Or, What would you say to me now, an I were your very, very Rosalind?' Miranda, whose soul shines upon Ferdinand through her innocent eyes, and he asks in a rapture of wonder:

'I do beseech you

(Chiefly that I might set it in my prayers)

What is your name?'

1 Tempest.