on Nature's own laws, conformable to all truth whatsoever." If Goethe is the universal man, he puts so much of himself into his work that we can trace how he became so; under what influences of place, of teacher, of companion, he developed; how he interwove into his novels and his dramas threads from his own life in its different stages, and from his contemporaries, even of those in the sacred precincts of personal friendship; we can discern his Strasburg period and his Weimar period; what was done for him by travel and by court life; how he felt the influence of Frederike, Lili, Frau Von Stein, and even his own humbler Christine Vulpius, who taught him also; what he owed to Karl August, and what he owed to Friedrich Schiller. Bayard Taylor reminds us that it is the Margaret of his boyhood that appears at the spinning wheel in his Faust. There is no such material for such an interpretation of Shakespeare. His work was not that kind of work. It was done on a higher plane. His Hamlet, for example, is not a man of shreds and patches picked up in the course of a short life at Stratford-on-Avon and a longer one in London; picked up from observation of this man and that man;

partly himself at one period of his life, and partly himself at another period of his life; but made only from humanity. Hamlet is as genuine a creation out of the possibilities of humanity, out of the certainties of humanity, in certain fixed conditions, as though he actually lived there in Denmark, and had his father's murder to avenge. And that is why, and why only, Goethe himself was able to interpret him in Wilhelm Meister. But, Hamlet was not made up, as Goethe made up his Werther; half from himself and half from a youth called Jerusalem, the son of a Brunswick clergyman, who shot himself in Wetzlar in 1772. And Shakespeare did not have to go about apologizing for the liberties he had taken with his nearest friends, as did the great German.

A man must know human nature as Shakespeare himself knew it, in order to interpret human nature in Shakespeare. As face answers to face in the water, so the heart of Shakespeare's men to the heart of real men, the world over. Even the historic characters, those that are taken bodily out of English history, are so handled; are so elevated out of the plane where they lived and acted; are put in such positions and

relations to other historic characters; have such lights and shadows falling on them, that they cannot be justified, without a philosophy respecting them which is true to human nature. And when, as in the character of Julius Cæsar, Shakespeare seems to be untrue to history, he shows himself true to human nature; he gives us the Julius Cæsar the conspirators thought they were conspiring against. In Rufus Lyon, George Eliot says: "We may err in giving a too private interpretation to the Scriptures. The Word of God has to satisfy the larger needs of His people, like the rain and the sunshine; which no man must think to be meant for his own patch of seed-ground solely." The very principle which makes it within the compass of the Shakespearean critic to detect the handiwork of the great dramatist, to know it from the work of any Francis Bacon, as Falstaff claimed to know the Prince, by instinct, is the principle not alone that his style is his own; his power of phrasing thoughts, as no mere man ever before phrased them; of minting things into expressions, which bear the impress of his genius, as the coin the impress of the mint from which it falls ; but that there are discoverable great laws according

to which he worked, the application of which makes his work a unit; gives it unity, like the unity of God's work in nature; and not only that, brings it into harmony with God's work in nature.

Take, for example, the madness of Hamlet and the madness of King Lear; the one, madness in certain departments of life, with relation to certain men and women; madness in certain compartments of the mind, other compartments being all the more acute ; and the other, the utter wrecking of the mind, as when a ship goes to pieces among the rocks; its fragments torn apart and hurried away by every breaker. Study these instances as a physician; as a metaphysician; as a philosopher looking at man merely as a phenomenon ; no other such work has ever been done by the art of man. Do you ask, "Did Shakespeare know what he was doing, as we know it?" He knew what he was doing, in the sense that it satisfied all the demands of his genius when it was done. And here is the central marvel of his power, that he did it as though he were not doing it. If Bacon wrote Shakespeare, Bacon knew what he was doing and concealed it till Ignatius Donelly came and ciphered it

and

out. Take the struggle which went on in the mind of Hamlet's uncle, when he tried to pray. All the theological and metaphysical disquisitions, from the days of Thomas Aquinas until now, fail of giving us a better analysis of the difference between the old man and the new man in human nature; between moral and natural necessity; between prayer which is genuine, prayer that is false; between God honored and God mocked in prayer. Here was the better man trying to bring the worser man upon his knees before God; counting over, as a man counts coin out of his own hand into another man's, as the Jews purchased the innocent blood from Judas, all that it would cost to shift back from that orbit of blackness of darkness, into which his sins had wrenched him, into the orbit of light and love and joy, where God was waiting to absolve him and say, "Depart in peace!"

Emerson has said:

་་ The hand that rounded Peter's dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,

Wrought in a sad sincerity;

Himself from God he could not free;

He builded better than he knew;

The conscious stone to beauty grew."

This is the way instinct works. It seems to impart