endure their calamities. This deity they called Fortune, by which many of the children of genius besides Shakespeare have thought themselves hardly used. Into the mouth of Sextus Pompeius he puts what was certainly his own sentiment:

Well, I know not

What counts harsh Fortune casts upon my face,

But in my bosom shall she never come

To make my heart her vassal.

A propos of Pompey, however, it may be said that when Fortune came to him in all her gorgeous garniture he repelled her, through a vain scruple, and thereby lost the empire of the world, which the counsel of Menas would have secured to him.

There is more or less of tragedy in every man's life, though in most cases it is hidden tragedy—the tragedy of the soul; born, perhaps, of the womb of guilt, but only the more terrible on that account. This tragedy is more or less intense in proportion to the amount of the sufferer's sensibility. In some this displays itself through a perpetual fretfulness, which is the external indication of the goading weariness existing within. But when the mind is great, and yet subordinated by circumstances to the sway of other minds, in their nature far inferior to itself, the tragedy, however deep, is invisible, though the action is perpetually going on and growing more intense as the powers of life develop themselves. The organisation of society, co-operating with natural idiosyncrasies, condemns many to this species of intellectual martyrdom. When men of extraordinary powers are able to shake off entirely the shackles of conscience, they study, from the moment they become

conscious of their force, every means of traversing the interval lying between them and success, and employ it without regard to the misery or ruin they may bring upon mankind. This mode of judging and acting is what they who suffer by it regard as supreme wickedness. There is much, however, in the modes of thinking of men in general which goes far towards explaining, though not justifying, the daring course of superior intellects. If born by chance beyond the verge of those tracts of life which are illuminated by fortune, they are constrained hourly to witness those acts of baseness and servility with which a majority of mankind seek to flatter and conciliate the possessors of power and opulence, though gifted by nature, it may be, with no inherent titles even to respect. That Shakespeare writhed under the conviction of this truth is certain. Around him, whether in high situations or low, he saw no equal in those rare endowments which Nature bestows, in genius, in opulence of ideas, in wisdom, equal to the reconstruction and impressing of a new character upon civil society. Yet, look in whatever direction he might, he beheld a superior, patron, master, raised by the idolatry of the vulgar almost beyond the reach of his imagination. To these individuals the coarse necessities of life compelled him to pay homage, to burn incense, to recognisethe as them supreme arbiters of his destiny. Were such circumstances reconcilable with social contentment, with self-respect, with mental serenity? To feel thus would have been to jump, as he himself expresses it, with the fool multitude. To the fetishism of that multitude he traced the throes and agonies of his great soul when, in compliment extern, he appeared to fawn on those whom he

despised. They, bedizened with opulence and gorged with wealth, were born, he knew, to eat, to drink, to propagate and rot'; while he, by the necessities. of his own nature, was engaged in generating thoughts which would put-though not in forty minutes—a girdle round about the earth to fade only with the human race itself.

Everybody is familiar with the allegory of Prodicus -the Choice of Hercules-in which the hero, in spite of the most bewitching allurements, prefers virtue to vice. But the picture is drawn after the manner of moralists, not of philosophers; for vice does not present herself in the tawdry frippery which she wears in the sophist's production, but too often steals in, in the rear of some gigantic passion, which completely obscures her approach, till her presence, felt rather than seen, has softened the heart, and rendered it tolerant of her familiarity. Shakespeare's life was probably one long tragedy, interspersed with pleasant episodes, but terminating in delirium. It is true he laughs in his plays, but it is seldom with the laughter of the heart:

Full in the fount of joy's delicious springs

Some bitter o'er the flowers its bubbling venom flings.

His melancholy is genuine; no flush of good fortune comes without some drawback of evil; even his fools perish in their folly, while the greatest and noblest natures he portrays are entangled in the net of destiny and perish miserably. Nothing bright and beautiful sets precisely as it rises, but the splendour in which it comes forth soon suffers the eclipse of affliction. Domestic felicity, nobility, riches, are blighted by love, which should be their ornament and

preserver; power comes forth by the same throes as guilt; philosophy itself screens not its owner from blight and ruin; and even the most harmless innocence is brought to a premature grave by the gloom and perversity of others. The world is:

An unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.

Looking keenly at the circumstances of society, Shakespeare discerned and has described the fallacies by which men are usually deluded. It is an old saying that Wisdom crieth in the street, and no man regardeth'; but let the same Wisdom cry out in a palace, and she will be sure to command attention. The reverse also is true-that is, nonsense or folly uttered by men in high places may either be made to pass for wisdom, or if united with ever so much wickedness will be sure to be excused.

Having materials of this kind of which he wished. to be delivered, Shakespeare cared much less than he ought about framing his plots and laying a probable foundation. He shirked the groundwork altogether in the best way he could, and trusted to what he meant to build on it for the effect he desired to produce.

ESSAY XVII

LANGUAGE

SOME years ago a theory was in vogue among us which taught that the language of all our great writers, if not pure Anglo-Saxon, approximated nearly to that dialect. The language of Shakespeare, however, though it be English, is not Anglo-Saxon, but a rich assemblage of ornament, like a Corinthian capital, made up of all known languages, and luxuriant even to redundance.

The Athenians when they planted their colonies in Asia, and carried on commerce with the greater part of the ancient world, gradually imported new words with their merchandise, until the Attic came to be distinguished from the other dialects of Greece by a certain foreign aspect which some regarded as a beauty, others as a defect. But, whether defect or beauty, such is the aspect of the English language, made up of spoils from all cultivated nations, trophies of commerce or conquest.

In truth, the speech of a wide-ruling people, which through some of its relations, pacific or warlike, touches upon all parts of the world, must of necessity exhibit a character expressive of its political position, which in the case of England is that of the foremost among nations, colonising, subduing, civilising, till it can scarcely be doubted that as centuries roll on it will exercise command over the greater part of the earth.