itself to the things done, as though they were given under an unseen law. It has been well remarked by Moulton in his "Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist," that "It is in accordance with the order of things that Shakespeare should produce dramas by the practical process of art-creation, and that it should be left to others, his critics succeeding him at long intervals, to discover by analysis his purposes and the laws which underlie his effects." The art of the swallow in making the arched walls of its nest under the eaves of the barn; in mixing the mortar out of which it builds these walls, is unconscious. The art of the bee in building its hexagonal cells; the electicism of the vegetable kingdom, as it takes coveted qualities from the earth and distributes them, some to stalk, some to leaf, some to fruit, is all under law; is all done "in a sad sincerity," as if nature could not free herself from her Creator. This is the manner in which mind creates.

Nor is Hamlet any more Hamlet than is Macbeth, Macbeth; than is Othello, Othello; Fallstaff, Faflstaff; Jacques, Jacques. Never for one moment does the man Shakespeare show himself masquerading under some other name. The conscious character grows

under the hand of the unconscious Artist. And when we come to female character, that most volatile and ethereal embodiment of God's image, we find the same mastery over sentiment and motives such as sway the heart of woman; we find a gallery of female creations as fresh and unique, as though they had been taken as Eve was, from the very ribs of humanity itself: Portia, the magnetism of whose beauty is thus expressed:

"From the four corners of the earth they come
To kiss this shrine, this mortal-breathing saint;
The Hyrcanian deserts and the vasty wilds

Of wide Arabia, are as thoroughfares now

For princes to come view fair Portia;
The wat'ry kingdom, whose ambitious head

Spits in the face of heav'n, is no bar

To stop the foreign spirits, but they come
As o'er a brook, to see fair Portia ;

Portia, a woman set there, as Mrs. Jameson expresses it, as "cotemporary of the Raffaelles and the Ariostos; while the sea-wedded Venice, its merchants and magnificos, the Rialto and the long canal, rise up before us when we think of her ;" Juliet, with all the Spring fragrance and color and freshness and fervor of a maidenhood just opening into womanhood; Juliet,

dying as the flowers do, because such fragrance and color and freshness and fervor cannot be perpetuated in humanity, any more than in flowers; Juliet, "all love," as Mrs. Jameson has it: "love itself," blending in her one self "the love that is so chaste and dignified in Portia ; so airy-delicate and fearless in Miranda; so sweetly confiding in Perdita; so playfully fond in Rosalind; so constant in Imogen; so devoted in Desdemona; so fervent in Helen; so tender in Viola; and exhaling her life for love, as the flower exhales its fragrance;" Beatrice, with a wit as penetrating as the lance of Saladin, with a tongue as sharp and raggededged and salt as the East-wind, straight from a watery continent of saltness; and yet in spite of it all, womanly and capable of being wedded; and so over the whole round orb of female possibilities. Richard Grant White says that "Shakespeare is not woman's poet." No, nor man's either. He is humanity's poet. And God made man, male and female; and Shakespeare has depicted man, male and female. The same American critic has said that Shakespeare has written next to nothing in praise of woman; and, therefore, his home-life must have been embittered by Anne

Hathaway. His gallery of female portraits speaks for itself. To depict woman as Shakespeare has done, is her highest praise. It is not praise that woman needs of poets; it is to be portrayed as she is. And as Bulwer has said, "a woman was the first to interpret aright" how Shakespeare had portrayed woman.

took a woman's genius to do it.

:

It

It is the German Heine who says: "The globe is Shakespeare's unity of place; eternity is his unity of time; and humanity his hero :" and the English Hazlitt "It is we who are Hamlet." Yes, and it is we who are all the rest: Falstaff and Lear and Macbeth ; Portia, Miranda, Ophelia. For, all Shakespeare's characters are representative and typical; stand ever after as at the head of their class. Ulrici says, "Goethe is, in fact, the microcosm of his own age and nation." Shakespeare is the microcosm of all ages and all nations; the poet of the æons, turning over for humanity, pages transcribed from the living tablet of the heart.

If all this is true; if there is no such thing as interpreting Shakespeare from our knowledge of himself or of his material; if, again, it is true that he did not

draw his portraits from actual models seen without, but moulded them from original materials within, as the silk-worm eats and digests fibres of leaves and makes them into silks; if the interpreter of Shakespeare's men and women is obliged to study them and to make their acquaintance, just as he would study and make the acquaintance of living men and women around him; it follows that there is no more difficult, no more eminent, literary work done than that done by the Shakespearean interpreter. Next to Shakespeare, stand the men who best know how to interpret him. It is not strange, then, that such men as Goethe and Schlegel, as Hazlitt and Coleridge have delighted to sit at the feet of this great master. Where else should such genius sit? The work of interpreting Shakespeare, besides quickening a man's best powers, has all the fascination of living among the noblest and and purest ideals of humanity; while the imagination is led on from delight to delight, as was the shipwrecked Ferdinand in The Tempest, by the music of Ariel; and with much the same thought:

"Where should this music be? i' the air, or the earth?

It sounds no more; and sure it waits upon

Some god o' the island."