there is little straining of the facts of the case in the view that in the discomfiture of that "law" which the Jew invoked, in the signal defeat inflicted on the letter of the bond, there is a suggestion of the conflict between Judaism and Christianity, the literal and the spiritual, the law and that justice with its elements of mercy into which the law develops, which is one of the great phases of historical civilization. Whether Shakespeare put it there is immaterial; but that a modern audience finds it there, and that it was at least dimly present to an Elizabethan audience, is hardly to be questioned. The idea is a simple and ancient one; and in it is to be found whatever ethical meaning the play may have.

But it ought to be always remembered that the primary endowment of Shakespeare was the artistic temperament: he was a poet first, and everything else afterwards. To say this is the same thing with saying though it must be stated briefly — that the ethical principle in him was a necessity of the imagination, not of the understanding; was vision rather than inference; was a part and not the whole. One can no more imagine life truly without ethics than he can

imagine mass without cohesion; a creative genius, consequently, a man of imagination all compact, does not necessarily start from ethics in moulding his works, but it is more likely that the moral principle which his works must contain as a part of their reality will be secondary and derivative. Shakespeare is ethical because he imagined life truly; he did not imagine life truly because he had thought out, in Lord Bacon's manner, the general principles of morals.

SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, AND WORDSWORTH.

SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT appears to have been one of the most agreeable of men. He had not merely high breeding, but humanity of disposition, delightful companionableness, and the refinement that springs from artistic pursuits. Haydon accuses his manners of a want of moral "What courage. his taste dictated to be right, he would shrink from asserting if it shocked the prejudices of others or put himself to a moment's inconvenience," was the fault that this critic had in mind; but this is only to class him with the men who do not think that the truth is always to be spoken in society, and prefer tact to an aggressive ego- · tism. Sir Humphry Davy notices especially that he was a "remarkably sensible man, which I mention because it is somewhat remarkable in a painter of genius who is at the same time a man of rank and an exceedingly amusing companion." Southey

was struck by the apparent happiness of his life, and the absence of any reference to afflictions or anxieties that he might have experienced, and says that he "had as little liking for country sports as for public business of any kind," being absorbed by art and nature; and, to add Scott's kind words of him in his diary, that excellent judge writes, "Sir George Beaumont's dead; by far the most sensible and pleasing man I ever knew. Kind, too, in his nature, and generous, gentle in society, and of those mild manners which tend to soften the causticity of the general London tone of persiflage and personal satire. I am very sorry

as much as it is in my nature to be for one whom I could see but seldom." This is a concert of praise which it is a pleasure to associate with the name of the man who was, chiefly, the founder of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.

He was a friend of the artists of his time, and a patron of Wilkie and Haydon when they needed aid. In the latter's autobiog raphy there is a bright account of a fortnight's visit paid by these two to Coleorton, Sir George's country-seat, which brings the interior life there vividly to the eye, though

it borrows something from the unconscious. humor of the narrator, who always fills the scene with himself in the leading part. One pauses to note a characteristic sentence of the incorrigible beggar in which he breaks out with the indignant remark, “All my friends were always advising me what to do instead of advising the Government what to do for me." Sir George, however, had other friends, and most noteworthy of all, Wordsworth, of whom he first heard from Coleridge. Before meeting him, understanding that the two friends wished to live in the same neighborhood, he bought and presented to Wordsworth the little property of Applethwaite near Greta Hall, Coleridge's abode. Wordsworth never used the ground for the purpose for which it was given, but it remained in his possession. From this time, 1803, a close friendship grew up between his family at Grasmere and the one at Coleorton, grounded upon common interests and cemented with mutual exchanges of kindness and regard, so that it survived until the death of Sir George and Lady Beaumont, herself an excellent woman, of whom Crabb Robinson wrote, "She is a gentlewoman of great sweetness and dignity, I