CONCLUSION.

HAVE now gone through the interesting and instructive task which I proposed to

myself; and the conclusion at which I have arrived is this:-Take the entire range of English Literature; put together our best authors, who have written upon subjects not professedly religious or theological, and we shall not find, I believe, in them all united, so much evidence of the Bible having been read and used, as we have found in Shakspeare alone. This is a phenomenon which admits of being looked at from several points of view; but I shall be content to regard it solely in connection with the undoubted fact, that of all our authors, Shakspeare is also, by general confession, the greatest and the best. According to the testimony of Charles Lamb, a most competent judge in regard to all the literary elements of the question, our poet, 'in his divine mind and manners, surpassed not only the great men his contem

poraries, but all mankind.'* Yes; and claiming for him this superiority over his contemporaries, I cannot but remark that, while most of the great laymen of that great Elizabethan age-Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, the poet Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Burleigh, Ben Jonson-have paid homage to Christianity, if not always in their tice, yet in the convictions of their understanding, and in the profession of their faith, none of them has done this so fully or so effectually as Shakspeare.

prac

But I may go further. Not a little remarkable is it that those only have disputed the superior merit and excellency of our poet who have also denied the value and authority of Holy Scripture. The disparagement of such judges-I allude especially to Voltaire and David Hume-is an additional confirmation of the otherwise unanimous panegyric with which he has been honoured. It will appear scarcely credible at the present day that the accepted Historian of England, in speaking of England's greatest poet, should have given vent

to criticisms such as these:

A striking peculiarity of sentiment Shakspeare frequently hits; a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold. It is in vain we look [in him] for either purity or simplicity of diction. . . . Both he and Ben Jonson were equally deficient in taste and elegance, in harmony and The English theatre has ever since taken a tincture of Shakspeare; and thence it has proceeded that the

correctness.

strong

*

Specimens of Dramatic Poets, Preface, vol. i. p. 7.

nation has undergone from all its neighbours THE REPROACH OF BARBARISM, from which its valuable productions in some other parts of learning would otherwise have exempted it.*

The author of these remarks upon Shakspeare has himself informed us that the volume which contained them, when first published, so far from being popular, was received with one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation,' on account of its political views: nor, if the rest of its contents had been equally erroneous with the passage which I have quoted, would it have deserved any better reception. And how did Hume console himself under the disappointment? He proceeded to write his Natural History of Religion, in which he gave the world to understand that, as he had looked in vain, in Shakspeare, for purity or simplicity of diction, for taste or elegance, for harmony or correctness, so he had been unable to derive thing but doubt, uncertainty, and suspense of judgment,' from the written Word of God! The concluding remark of the passage quoted above, in which Shakspeare and Ben Jonson are accused of having brought upon us as a nation the reproach of barbarism from all our neighbours,' is evidently founded upon the strictures of Voltaire,† who, not long before, had characterised our poet as a writer

any

* Hume's Hist. of England, Appendix to Reign of James I. † All that can be said in excuse for Voltaire's criticism has been fairly stated by Mr. C. Knight, in his Studies of Shakspeare, p. 540, sq.

of monstrous Farces, called by him Tragedies,' had pronounced Hamlet to be the work of a drunken savage,' * and had attributed barbarism and ignorance' to the nation by which he was admired! What the same French author also thought and wrote of divine Revelation, and of the profession of Christianity, need not be told.

The best answer to this latter critic has been given by another foreigner-not a Frenchman, but a German-Augustus William Schlegel, who has shown an admirable appreciation of the genius and characteristic excellencies of our great poet in his masterly Lectures on Dramatic Literature:

Shakspeare is the pride of his nation.

.

He was the idol of his contemporaries; and after the interval of Puritanical fanaticism his fame began to revive with more than its original brightness towards the beginning of the last century, and since that period it has increased with the progress of time : and for centuries to come, I speak with the greatest confidence, it will continue to gather strength like an alpine avalanche, at every period of its descent. In general, Shakspeare's style yet remains the very best model both in the vigorous and sublime, and in the pleasing and tender.-Vol. ii. p. 102, sq. and p. 146.

To the criticism of Hume, which first appeared in 1764-exactly a century ago—the best reply will be the Tercentenary Festival in honour of the poet's

* Such criticism is not even yet quite extinct. An American writer has recently discovered that Shakspeare and Walter Scott were remarkably morbid men ; while Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, were undoubtedly insane! '-See Quart. Rev. Jan. 1864, p. 56.

birth, which our barbarous nation' is preparing to celebrate in the present year. Or, if we desire to see the very different opinion of another historian of England, and man of letters-—a writer, moreover, who was no enthusiast, but cool and cautious in his judgments-it is Mr. Hallam who pronounces that the name of Shakspeare is the greatest in our literature; it is THE GREATEST IN ALL LITERATURE.'

Dr. Farmer, in his celebrated essay Upon the Learning of Shakspeare, arrived at the conclusion that our poet's 'studies were demonstratively confined to nature and his own language.' To this conclusion (while I partly demur, as I have before intimated, to the narrow limits which it assigns to Shakspeare's reading) I would presume to add that, of all the books which he studied in his own language, there was none with which he was more familiar than the English Bible. That the lower† characters in his plays have in every instance treated Holy Scripture with the nice and exact reverence which we should feel to be desirable at the present day, is

* Hist. of Literature, vol. iii. p. 547.

† Warburton has the following note upon All's Well that ends Well, Act iv. Sc. 5, with reference to the dialogue between the clown and Lafeu :— Shakspeare is but rarely guilty of such impious trash (?). And it is observable that then he always puts that into the mouth of his fools, which is now grown the characteristic of the fine gentleman. I add, not of his 'fools' only, but of his madmen. Compare Edgar in King Lear, Act iii. Sc. 4.