a vein of goodness in the queen, was necessary, perhaps, to keep us both from misprising the influence of the one, and exaggerating the wickedness of the other. The love she thus inspires tells us that her helplessness springs from innocence, not from weakness; and so prevents the pity, which her condition moves, from lessening the respect due to her character. Almost any other author would have depicted the queen without a single alleviating trait. Shakespeare, with far more effect, as well as far more truth, exhibits her with such a mixture of good and bad, as neither discensure nor precludes pity. Herself dragged along in the terrible train of consequences which her own guilt had a hand in starting, she is hurried away into the same dreadful abyss with those whom she loves and against whom she has sinned. In her tenderness towards Hamlet and Ophelia, we recognize the virtues of a mother without in the least palliating the guilt of the wife; while the crimes in which she is a partner almost disappear in those of which she is the victim."

arms

Nor is even Mrs. Jameson more appreciative of Ophelia's character, or scrupulous about her reputa

tion, than Mr. Hudson. This, too, is the result of inductive study. "The space," he writes, "Ophelia fills in the reader's thoughts is strangely disproportionate to that she fills in the play. Her very silence utters her; unseen, she is missed, and so thought of the more; in her absence she is virtually present, in what others bring from her. Whatever grace comes from Polonius and the queen is of her inspiring; Laertes is scarce regarded but as he loves his sister; of Hamlet's soul, too, she is the sunrise and morning hymn. The soul of innocence and gentleness, virtue radiates from her insensibly, as fragrance is exhaled from flowers. It is in such forms that heaven most frequently visits us."

Mr. Hudson was also a teacher as well as lecturer and author. For twenty years he gave instruction in Shakespeare to the young ladies in Gannett Institute, Boston. He also taught in other schools in that region. Above the medium height, thin, wiry, with sharp and angular features; with grey eyes, keen, expressive and penetrating; with a facial expression peculiar and striking; not at all an elocutionist, he stood before his audiences and classes as if charged

with a kind of electric light, burdened with a kind of volcanic energy, struggling to find exit in flashes or volumes of expression; in his own untaught and untrammeled way, by tones, emphasis and accent, gestures, contortions and gyrations, getting for himself the utterance he sought and inspiring his hearers and pupils with his own enthusiasm. If he was positive and dogmatic, it was because he had thoroughly studied every foot of ground on which he trod; because he took nothing by dictation, nothing for granted. He prescribed no routine work; he required no especial preparation on the part of his pupils. If they could sit in his presence and listen to his discussions and portrayals and subtle analyses without being moved to personal thought and study, without coming to feel with regard to the Shakespearean world that it was a real one and they were in it; that Portia and Juliet and Ophelia and Rosalind and Desdemona and Cordelia were their sister women, their companions, their teachers, whose aspirations and emulations, whose joys and sorrows they could understand, then, alas! routine work would do them no good; they were past getting anything out of text-books. He took a sin

cere and deep interest in the pupils he instructed; felt toward them a kind of fatherly concern, that they

might get an insight into the great themes he discussed and thus furnish themselves for literary refreshment and education all their lives long; as though he were conferring upon them a benefit which they would some day understand.

Other pursuits Mr. Hudson had followed. In 1849 he took deacon's orders in the Episcopal church; and from 1858-1860 he served as rector to a church in Litchfield, Connecticut. During three years he was editor of the Church Journal; served as chaplain to the "New York Volunteer Engineers" under General Butler during the civil war, a part of the time under arrest; an episode which his caustic pen has duly commemorated; and for a short time was editor of the Saturday Evening Gazette. But it may be said that he put the strength of his life into his Shakespearean studies. In 1848 he published lectures on Shakespeare, in two volumes, the work running through two editions in a single year; in 1850-'57, an edition of Shakespeare, in eleven volumes; in 1870, "School Shakespeare"; in 1872, "Life, Art and Characters of

Shakespeare," a work which embraces all the best results of his study in this direction; in 1881, the "Harvard Edition of Shakespeare," in ten volumes. Besides these he had published, in 1874, a volume of sermons; in 1875, a "Text-Book of Poetry"; in 1876, a "Text-Book of Prose"; in 1878, a "Classical English Reader," and at other times, "Essays on Education," " English Studies," and other works. These all give us some conception of his literary activity and capacity. It is only when we read "General Butler's Campaign on the Hudson," a brochure penned after he had been kept by that doughty general 51 days in confinement without the filing of charges, that we appreciate his power to use strong language, his keen wit, his sharp irony, his overwhelming invective. Here is a taste of it: "You, sir, were simply rioting in the abuse of military power, spurning alike at the restraints of law and the usages of humanity. I never imagined before, what it was for an honest man to find himself stripped of all legal protection, and held in the condition of an outlaw Indeed, sir, no language of mine can fairly express to you how much I suffered during those long, dreary,