Mark Antony and the tribunes in Coriolanus; and on the other hand the contempt of individuals for public opinion, as expressed in the invectives of Flavius and Marullus in Julius Cæsar, of Menenius in Coriolanus, or in the imprecations of Timon after his ruin. He dwells also on the relations and duties of the individual to society; setting forth in Brutus the idea of honour as a motive of action; warning men of great mind, by the example of Timon, of the consequences of excess in liberality, and, by the fate of Coriolanus, of the end of excessive pride; and pointing out, in the conversation between Achilles and Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, the dangers of heroic self-esteem. The conflict

between public duty and private inclination is represented with special force in the history and character of Antony, whose temper, wavering between passion and honour, seems to have been conceived in Shakespeare's imagination with all the vividness of personal sympathy. Equal insight is shown in the elaborate mixture of treachery, fascination, and caprice, manifested in the characters of women like Cressida and Cleopatra, the verisimilitude of which is hardly balanced, on the side of good, by the more abstract figures of Portia and Volumnia. Throughout this group of plays the spirit of reflection prevails over action; and personal experience, intensified and somewhat embittered by suffering, seems to colour the dramatic situation imagined by the poet.

The style, as in some of the Sonnets, becomes so figurative as to be often obscure. The general dialectical tendency of the thought, the metaphorical flights of the diction, and the abruptness of the rhythmical movement, characteristic of this period of composition, are well represented in the following speech of Troilus, which may be taken to express Shakespeare's own view, formed in the fulness of worldly wisdom, of the value of honour as a motive of conduct, even in a cause morally bad :---

I take to-day a wife, and my election
Is led on in the conduct of my will;

My will enkindled by mine eyes and ears,
Two traded pilots 'twixt the dangerous shores
Of will and judgment: how may I avoid,
Although my will distaste what it elected,
The wife I chose? there can be no evasion

To blench from this and to stand firm by honour :
We turn not back the silks upon the merchant
When we have soiled them, nor the remainder viands
We do not throw in unrespective sieve,

Because we now are full.

It was thought meet

Paris should do some vengeance on the Greeks :
Your breath of full consent bellied his sails;
The seas and winds, old wranglers, took a truce
And did him service he touched the ports desired,
And for an old aunt, whom the Greeks held captive,
He brought a Grecian queen, whose youth and freshness
Wrinkles Apollo's, and makes stale the morning.
Why keep we her? the Grecians keep our aunt :
Is she worth keeping? why, she is a pearl,
Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships,
And turned crowned kings to merchants.

If you'll avouch 'twas wisdom Paris went-

As you must needs, for you all cried "Go, go,”-
If you'll confess he brought home noble prize—
As you must needs, for you all clapped your hands,
And cried "Inestimable !"-why do you now
The issue of your proper wisdoms rate,
And do a deed that fortune never did,
Beggar the estimation which you prized

Richer than sea and land? O, theft most base,
That we have stolen what we do fear to keep!
But, thieves, unworthy of a thing so stol'n,
That in their country did them that disgrace
We fear to warrant in our native place.'

I have endeavoured to place before the reader without exaggeration the evidence with which the historian has to deal in interpreting the genius of Shakespeare. About the facts themselves there is little room for dispute. Except in the case of a few plays, scholars are in a substantial agreement as to the approximate dates at which the different dramas were produced. Nor can it, I think, be denied that, if the plays be examined in their chronological order, they fall into distinct groups, exhibiting an ever expanding view of the constitution of nature, man, 1 Troilus and Cressida, Act ii. Sc. 2.

and society, and a corresponding change in the form of dramatic expression. Of the influence of Marlowe and Lyly on the early work of Shakespeare there are abundant traces; and the impersonal equable style of the work of the middle period stands in unmistakable contrast with the emotional sympathy and the passionate forms of diction and versification that characterise all the dramas written after the year 1600.

The causes of these remarkable phenomena must remain a matter of inference, and as far as the personality of Shakespeare is involved, a mystery. No letter, no record of friends, scarcely a tradition, survives to explain how so vast a genius developed itself at this particular time and out of such humble surroundings; and all the industry and research of many generations of critics have discovered of the life of Shakespeare little of importance beyond what was known to his first biographer in the eighteenth century. Our idea of his character must be derived almost entirely from his work, and in my opinion the strongly lyrical spirit permeating all his latest plays, and particularly those written about the time of the publication of the Sonnets (when his popularity as a dramatist was probably on the decline before the growing taste for the plays of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher), gives colour to the opinion of those who hold that the Sonnets are the product of emotions caused by actual and tragic personal experiences.

This view, however, is one that mainly interests the biographer. For the historian the study of Shakespeare's work in chronological order serves to explain the reason of the place universally assigned to him in the judgment of mankind as the greatest of dramatic poets. Other dramatists, like Eschylus, may have risen to more transcendent heights of lyric sublimity; others, like Sophocles, may surpass him in the majestic serenity and perfection. of dramatic structure; but none can compare with him in the breadth of his imaginative sympathy, in the depth of his insight into the springs of human action, in his knowledge of man's relation to the world in all its aspects,

moral, religious, social, and political, in his power of embodying in an ideal form the operation of universal passions. His thought embraces at once the elemental simplicity of Homer and the civil refinement of Dante; and there is no nation, no language, of Europe, in which the speculations of Hamlet and the sufferings of Lear are not found as interesting to-day as when they were first represented on the English stage.

Moreover, the historical examination of Shakespeare's plays explains why they were necessarily the product of the English mind, and of a particular period in the life of the English nation. It was the aim of Shakespeare not only "to hold the mirror up to nature," but to show "the age and body of the time his form and pressure"; his poetical design was at once universal and particular. Two causes external to himself made his dramas possible: the state of English society as contrasted with that of other nations in Europe, and the continuity of tradition on the English stage. England alone presented such social conditions at the close of the sixteenth century as allowed all the great contemporary tendencies of human action to be reflected in the drama. She alone, while preserving the catholic and feudal foundations of society, had given full play to the new impulses of life derived, on the one side, from the Renaissance in Italy, on the other from the Reformation in Germany. Like France and Spain she had developed her institutions round the central principle of Monarchy; but, while she had encouraged every form of enterprise both in speculation and action, she had not obliterated the old traditions of honour and chivalry. Nowhere else could the dramatist find such matter for stirring political situations as in the chronicle histories of England since the reign of King John; nowhere else could he study with equal advantage the effects produced on the lives of men by the contending forces of materialism and religion, or watch so well the struggles of sensuality and ambition, checked by conscience on the one hand and the sense of vanity on the other.

Yet even the genius of Shakespeare might have failed to invent a form of dramatic expression adequate to represent this elemental conflict of principles, if a certain framework had not been supplied to his imagination by the traditions of the English drama, and by the experiments of his immediate predecessors. Unlike the stage in France and Germany, the English drama, from the fourteenth century onwards, had never ceased to modify its structure in conformity with the changing conditions of the time. The Miracle Play had quite naturally transformed itself into the Morality, and the Morality again had reflected with fidelity the gradual revolution of religious faith in the mind and imagination of the people. But it was not capable of expansion beyond a certain point. Marlowe, with daring originality, took advantage of a wide-spread lyrical enthusiasm in the temper of the nation to represent upon the English stage ideas of action based exclusively on the principles of Machiavelli; but these, as being inconsistent with the whole character of English society, could not be approved by its mature judgment. Shakespeare, working from the base suggested to him by Marlowe, and possessing the lyrical genius of that poet in a tenfold degree, combined, by a supreme effort of invention, the romantic enterprise of the new school with the religious and moral principles of the ancient stage, thus reaching that perfection of art, defined by Sir Johsua Reynolds-"an assemblage of contrary qualities mixed in such proportion that no one part is found to counteract the others."