tion on what is positive, practical, and finite in Shakspere's art as well as in Shakspere's life. But if the poet was of his own age, he was also "for all time." He does not merely endeavor to compass and comprehend the knowable: he broods with a passionate intensity over that which cannot be known. And, again, he not only studies self-control: he could depict, and we cannot doubt that he knew by personal experience, absolute abandonment and self-surrender. The infinite of meditation, the infinite of passion, both these lay within the range of Shakspere's experience and Shakspere's art. He does not, indeed, come forward with explanations of the mysteries of existence; perhaps because he felt more than other men their mysteriousness. Many of us seem to think it the all-essential thing to be provided with answers to the difficult questions which the world propounds, no matter how little the answers be to these great questions. Shakspere seems to have considered it more important to put the questions greatly, to feel the supreme problems.

Thus Shakspere, like nature and like the vision of human life itself, if he does not furnish us with a doctrine, has the power to free, arouse, dilate. Again and again we fall back into our little creed or our little theory. Shakspere delivers us; under his influence we come anew into the presence of stupendous mysteries, and, instead of our little piece of comfort and support and contentment, we receive the gift of solemn awe and bow the head in reverential silence. These questions are not stated by Shakspere as intellectual problems. He states them pregnantly, for the emotions and for the imagination. And it is by virtue of his very knowledge that he comes face to face with the mystery of the unknown. Because he had sent down his plummet farther into the depths than other men, he knew better than others how fathomless for human thought those depths remain. “Un

génie," Victor Hugo has said, "est un promontoire dans l'infini." This promontory which we name Shakspere, stretching out long and sharp, has before it measureless sea and the mass of threatening cloud; behind it the habitable globe, illuminated, and alive with moving figures of man and woman.

Our conclusion, therefore, is that Shakspere lived and moved in two worlds-one limited, practical, positive; the other a world opening into two infinites, an infinite of thought and an infinite of passion. He did not suppress either life to the advantage of the other; but he adjusted them, and by stern and persistent resolution held them in the necessary adjustment. In the year 1602 Shakspere bought for the sum of three hundred and twenty pounds one hundred and seven acres of arable land in the parish of Old Stratford. It was in the same year (if the chronology of Delius be accepted as correct) that Shakspere, in the person of his Hamlet, musing on a skull, was tracing out the relations of a buyer of land to the soil in a somewhat singular fashion. "This fellow might be in 's time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries; is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt?" The courtier Osric, who has "much land and fertile," is described by the Prince (who could be contented in a nut-shell, but that he has bad dreams) as "spacious in the possession of dirt." Yet this dirt Shakspere used to serve his needs.

How shall a man live sanely in presence of the small daily facts of life (which are also not small, but great), and in presence of the vast mystery of death? How shall he proportion his interests between the bright illuminated spot of the known and the dim environing unknown which possesses such strong attraction for the soul? How shall he restrain and attach his desires to the

little objects which claim each its definite share of the heart, while the heart longs to abandon itself to some one thing with measureless devotion? Shakspere's attainment of sanity and self-control was not that of a day or of a year, it was the attainment of his life. Now he was tempted by his speculative intellect and imagination to lose all clear perception of his limited and finite life; and again he was tempted to resign the conduct of his being by the promptings of a passionate heart. He is inexorable in his plays to all rebels against the fact; because he was conscious of the strongest temptation to become himself a rebel. He cannot forgive an idealist, because in spite of his practical and positive nature he was (let the Sonnets witness) an idealist himself. His series of dramatic writings is one long study of self-control.

And Shakspere, we have good reason to believe, did at last attain to the serene self-possession which he had sought with such persistent effort. He feared that he might become (in spite of Mercutio's jests) a Romeo; he feared that he might falter from his strong self-maintenance into a Hamlet; he suffered grievous wrong, and he resolved that he would not be a Timon. He ended by becoming Duke Prospero. Admired Miranda-truly "a thread of his own life"-he made over to the young gallant Ferdinand (and yet was there not a touch of sadness in resigning to a somewhat shallow-souled Fletcher the art he loved?). He broke his magic staff; he drowned his book deeper than ever plummet sounded; he went back, serenely looking down upon all of human life, yet refusing his share in none of it, to his dukedom at Stratford, resolved to do duke's work, such as it is, well; yet Prospero must forever have remained somewhat apart and distinguished from other dukes and Warwickshire magnificoes, by virtue of the enchanted island and the marvellous years of mageship.

It has been asked whether Shakspere was a Protestant or a Catholic, and he has been proved to belong to each communion to the satisfaction of contending theological zealots. Shakspere's poetry, resting upon a purely human basis, is not a rendering into art of the dogmas of either Catholicism or Protestantism. Shakspere himself, a great artistic nature, framed for manifold joy and pain, may, like other artists, have had no faculty for the attainment of certitude upon extra-mundane and superhuman matters; of concrete moral facts he had the clearest perception, but we do not find that he was interested, at least as an artist, in truths or alleged truths which transcend the limits of human experience. That the world suggests inquiries which cannot be answered; that mysteries confront and baffle us; that around our knowledge lies ignorance, around our light darkness-this to Shakspere seemed a fact containing within it a profound significance, which might almost be named religious. But, studiously as Shakspere abstains from embodying theological dogma in his art, and tolerant as his spirit is, it is certain that the spirit of Protestantism-of Protestantism considered as portion of a great movement of humanity -animates and breathes through his writings. Unless he had stood in antagonism to his time, it could not be otherwise. Shakspere's creed is not a series of abstract statements of truth, but a body of concrete impulses, tendencies, and habits. The spirit of his faith is not to be ascertained by bringing together little sentences from the utterances of this one of his dramatis persona and of that. By such a method he might be proved (as Birch tried to prove Shakspere) an atheist. The faith by

"Inquiry into the Philosophy and Religion of Shakespeare," 1848. This is also too much the method (leading, however, to a very different result) of Flathe in the laborious chapter "Die Anschauungen Shakspeare's über sein Selbst, etc.," which opens the first volume of "Shakspeare in

which Shakspere lived is rather to be discovered by noting the total issue and resultant of his art towards the fostering and sustenance of a certain type of human character. It may be asserted, without hesitation, that the Protestant type of character, and the Protestant polity in state and nation, is that which has received impulse and vigor from the mind of the greatest of English poets. Energy, devotion to the fact, self-government, tolerance, a disbelief in minute apparatus for the improvement of human character, an indifference to externals in comparison with that which is of the invisible life, and a resolution to judge all things from a purely human standpoint— these grow upon us as habits of thought and feeling, as long as Shakspere remains an influence with us in the building-up of character. Such habits of thought and feeling are those which belong more especially to the Protestant ideal of manhood.*

Is Shakspere a religious poet? An answer has been given to this question by Mr. Walter Bagehot, which contains the essential truth: "If this world is not all evil, he who has understood and painted it best must probably have some good. If the underlying and almighty essence of this world be good, then it is likely that the writer who most deeply approached to that essence will be him

seiner Wirklichkeit." On this subject, see Vehse's book already referred to; the last of Kreyssig's lectures in his smaller work, "ShakespeareFragen;" and Rümelin, "Shakespeare-Studien,” pp. 207–215 (second edition). *See on this subject the able reply to Rio by Michael Bernays, in "Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare - Gesellschaft," vol. i., pp. 220–299. A minute but perhaps significant piece of evidence has been noticed recently by H. von Friesen. In Romeo and Juliet (act iv., sc. 1) we read, "Or shall I come to you at evening mass ?" No Catholic, observes H. von Friesen, could have spoken of "evening mass" ("Altengland und William Shakspere" [1874], pp. 286, 287). Staunton had previously noticed the difficulty But see the paper on this passage by the late Mr. R. Simpson, in Trans. New Sh. 9 c., 1875-76.