ceed from the incapacity or indisposition of the historian to pierce to the heart of the facts by sympathy and imagination. There would be abundant information, abundant eloquence, abundant invective against crime, abundant scorn of stupidity and folly, perhaps much sagacious reflection and judicial scrutiny of evidence; but the inward and essential truth would be wanting. What external statement of the acts and probable motives of Macbeth and Othello could convey the idea we have of them from being witnesses of the conflict of their thoughts and passions? How wicked and shallow and feeble and foolish would Hamlet appear, if represented, not in the light of Shakespeare's imagination, but in the light of Macaulay's epigrams! How the historian would display the dazzling fence of his thetoric on the indecision of the prince, his brutality to Ophelia, his cowardice, his impotence between contending motives, and the chaos of blunders and crimes in which he sinks from view! The subject would be even a better one for him than that of James the Second; yet the very supposition of such a mode of treatment makes us feel the pathos of the real Hamlet's injunction to the friend who strives to be his companion in death:

"Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story."

If the historian would thus deal with the heroes, such "small deer" as Bardolph and Master Slender would of course be puffed out of existence with one hiss of lordly contempt. Yet Macaulay has a more vivid historical imagination, more power of placing himself in the age about which he writes, than historians like Hume and Hallam, whose judgments of men are summaries of qualities, and imply no inwardness of vision, no discerning of spirits. In the whole class, the point of view is the historian's, and not the point of view of the persons the historian describes. The curse which clings to celebrity is, that it commonly enters history only to be puffed or lampooned.

Society,

The truth is, that most men, the intelligent and the virtuous as well as the ignorant and the vicious, are intolerant of other individualities. They are uncharitable by defect of sympathy and defect of insight. even the best, is apt to be made up of people who are engaged in the agreeable occupation of despising each other; for one association for mutual admiration there are twenty for mutual contempt; yet while conversation is thus mostly made up of strictures on individuals, it rarely evinces any just perception of individualities. James is indignant or jocose at the absence of James in John, and John is horror-stricken at the impudence of James in refusing to be John. Each person feels himself

to be misunderstood, though he never questions his power to understand his neighbor. Egotism, vanity, prejudice, pride of opinion, conceit of excellence, a mean delight in recognizing inferiority in others, a meaner delight in refusing to recognize the superiority of others, all the honest and all the base forms of self-assertion, cloud and distort the vision when one mind directs its glance at another. For one person who is mentally conscientious there are thousands who are morally honest. The result is a vast massacre of character, which would move the observer's compassion were it not that the victims are also the culprits, and that pity at the spectacle of the arrow quivering in the sufferer's breast is checked by the sight of the bow bent in the sufferer's hands. This depreciation of others is the most approved method of exalting ourselves. It educates us in self-esteem, if not in knowledge. The savage conceives that the power of the enemy he kills is added to his own. Shakespeare more justly conceived that the power of the human being with whom he sympathized was added to his own.

This toleration, without which an internal knowledge of other natures is impossible, Shakespeare possessed beyond any other man recorded in literature or history. It is a moral as well as mental trait, and belongs to the highest class of virtues. It is a virtue which, if gener

ally exercised, would remove mutual hostility by enlightening mutual ignorance. And in Shakespeare we have, for once, a man great enough to be modest and charitable; who has the giant's power, but, far from using it like a giant, trampling on weaker creatures, prefers to feel them in his arms rather than feel them under his feet; and whose toleration of others is the exercise of humility, veracity, beneficence, and justice, as well as the exercise of reason, imagination, and humor. We shall never appreciate Shakespeare's genius until we recognize in him the exercise of the most difficult virtues, as well as the exercise of the most wide-reaching intelligence.

It is, of course, not so wonderful that he should take the point of view of characters in themselves beautiful and noble, though even these might appear very different under the glance of a less soul-searching eye. For such aspects of life, however, all genius has a natural affinity. But the marvel of his comprehensiveness is his mode of dealing with the vulgar, the vicious, and the low, with persons who are commonly spurned as dolts and knaves. His serene benevolence did not pause at what are called "deserving objects of charity," but extended to the undeserving, who are, in truth, the proper objects of charity. If we compare him, in this respect, with poets like Dante and Milton, in whom

elevation is the predominant characteristic, we shall find that they tolerate humanity only in its exceptional examples of beauty and might. They are aristocrats of intellect and conscience, the noblest aristocracy, but also the haughtiest and most exclusive. They can sympathize with great energies, whether celestial or diabolic, but their attitude towards the feeble and the low is apt to be that of indifference or contempt. Milton can do justice to the Devil, though not, like Shakespeare, to "poor devils." But it may be doubted if the wise and good have the right to cut the Providential bond which connects them with the foolish and the bad, and set up an aristocratic humanity of their own, ten times more supercilious than the aristocracy of blood. Divorce the loftiest qualities from humility and geniality, and they quickly contract a pharisaic taint; and if there is anything which makes the wretched more wretched, it is the insolent condescension of patronizing benevolence, if there is anything which makes the vicious more vicious, it is the "I-am-better-than-thou " expression on the face of conscious virtue. Now Shakespeare had none of this pride of superiority, either in its noble or ignoble form. Consider that, if his gigantic powers had been directed by antipathies instead of sympathies, he would have left few classes of human character untouched by his terrible scorn. Even if his antipathies