poem in which the poet's own thought has full liberty of development; and this fulness of his fancy now and again breaks through the boundaries of drama. As an instance in regard to poetic thought, take that wild and Dantesque passage put into the mouth of Claudio in his contemplation of the terror of death :

And the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice,

To be imprisoned in the viewless winds

And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world.

All this is quite beyond so poor and commonplace a creature as Claudio, nor in any case was it natural for a man in the agony of praying for life to go off into an imaginative rhapsody on the possibilities of existence after death; it was Shakspeare who could not help that. Hamlet's celebrated soliloquy is in keeping with the character and situation of Hamlet; still, I think it is Shakspeare's own reflection as much as Hamlet's; but it does not seem out of place in the mouth of him who is the subjective character par excellence in Shakspeare's plays; in whom, as Julius Hare beautifully put it, 'thousands of readers have each recognised his wiser and gentler self,' and through whose mouth one may fancy that Shakspeare himself speaks more than through any other one of his characters. But the most remarkable examples of Shakspeare's deliverance of his own mind, especially in a moral sense, are to be found in those sudden and keen observations, those brief criticisms of life, which he flashes upon us unexpectedly through the mouths of some of his inferior, or even some of his worst and most immoral, characters. It is perhaps in such passages, where the thoughts expressed are quite out of keeping with the personage who gives utterance to them, that we feel most certainly that we are getting at the poet's own mind.

Of Shakspeare's religious creed (to begin with that) we get little indication through the plays; but there are two passages which seem to imply that he accepted what evangelical divines used to call the scheme of redemption' through Christ's atonement. One is in the passing reference to the Holy Land:

Over whose acres walked those blessed feet,
That fifteen hundred years ago were nailed,
For our advantage, to the bitter cross;

The other is in the plea of Isabella to Angelo :

Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once,
And he that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy.

This, it may be said, is only in character for a sister of a religious order, but I doubt if Shakspeare would have touched on the subject,

in both cases, in such grave and tender language, if he had not had some personal feeling in regard to it. One passage indicates the sympathy (constantly met with among poets) for old religious superstitions, where Marcellus refers to the belief that:

Ever 'gainst that season comes,

Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then they say no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

Horatio's answer:

So I have heard, and do in part believe it,

I think expresses the poet's own feeling the natural attitude of a poet towards picturesque superstition; he would like to believe what is so charming in itself. It is curious to note in The Tempest, however, a more pagan and quasi-pantheistic tone :

The Powers delaying, not forgetting, have

Incensed the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures
Against your peace.

And again in the sublime passage about the cloud-capt towers which significantly ends :

We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Certainly not the reflection of the orthodoxy of Shakspeare's day. In connection with modern scepticism as to the authorship of Henry the Eighth, we may contrast this with Queen Katharine's vision of the angels, who offer her a crown which :

I feel

I am not worthy yet to wear; I shall

Assuredly.

I confess that hardly seems to me to be in Shakspeare's hand; there is a kind of savour of Uncle Tom's Cabin about it. He touches on the subject more in his own manner in the passage of arms between Olivia and the clown in Twelfth Night:

CLOWN.-Good Madonna, give me leave to prove you a fool.

OLIVIA.-Well, sir, for want of other idleness, I'll 'bide your proof.

CLOWN.-Good Madonna, why mournst thou?

OLIVIA.-Good fool, for my brother's death.

CLOWN.-I think his soul is in hell, Madonna.

OLIVIA.-I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

CLOWN.-The more fool you, Madonna, to weep for your brother's soul being in heaven.-Take away the fool, gentlemen.

As to Shakspeare's political creed, it is to be feared that he was a rank Tory. He adopts the then orthodox view of monarchy, as he does the orthodox view of Christianity. Even if we take some of the isolated sentences on kingship:

There's such divinity doth hedge a king,
That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts nothing of his will.

Never alone

Did the King sigh, but with a general groan.

If we take these to be merely dramatic expressions (and I doubt if they can be taken so), we cannot escape the consensus of evidence from the general treatment of monarchical personages in his plays ; the adulation with which they are addressed, the sublime bumptiousness of their own speeches, leaving no room to doubt that Shakspeare intended his audience at least to accept the theory of the divine right of kings. It might be said that no dramatist could or dared represent monarchy otherwise in those days; but if Shakspeare had dissented much from the general superstition he would have curtailed or moderated some of this tall talk about the privileges and the majesty of kings. And after all the position adopted was not so unreasonable as it would seem now. It was very spirited of Green, in his History of the English People, to ignore the kings altogether as landmarks of history, but there can be no doubt that in the pre-Revolution days the personal character of the reigning sovereign had an influence on the country which it is somewhat difficult to realise now. On the other hand, it is gratifying to note that Shakspeare had no taint of that damnable ultra-modern paradox that patriotism is a littleness and a superstition; that it is nobler to look on with philosophic unconcern, or even to rejoice, at the discomfiture of your own country in any contest carried on when the opposite political party are in power. One cannot doubt that Shakspeare spoke directly from his own heart to his countrymen in the stirring lines with which Faulconbridge winds up the play of King John:

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now these her princes are come home again,
Come the three corners of the world in arms,

And we shall shock them: nought shall make us rue,

If England to itself do prove but true.

One can fancy what a cheer arose in the Globe Theatre at the first declamation of this peroration, with the memory of the Armada still fresh in the minds of the audience.

But not only was Shakspeare politically a Tory, he was, alas! socially an aristocrat, in his leanings at all events.

No poet,

certainly, has shown more universal power of sympathy; nothing so tender in sympathy can be cited, perhaps, in our language as the three words in which sleep is characterised as 'Sore labour's bath'; and when he makes such excellent fooling of Dogberry and Verges, it is obvious that he has the kindliest feeling towards them all the time. But who can read Coriolanus, that master portrait of aristocratic hauteur, without feeling that Shakspeare in his heart thoroughly admired Coriolanus ?

His nature is too noble for this world;

He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,
Nor Jove for his power to thunder,

says Menenius. The populace are throughout the play represented as contemptible; as fickle, mean-spirited, and not knowing their own minds; and their two Tribunes as a couple of sneaks and cowards. It may be urged that this is only dramatic art, to set off with more effect the lofty and self-reliant figure of Coriolanus; but I think most readers must admit that a poet who had felt any sympathy with the popular side would have made it a little more respectable. And generally speaking, on the testimony of various other passages which there is not space to cite, it seems clear that Shakspeare had a decided contempt for the opinion of the many. Nor was he above the class prejudices of his day in another respect. The Merchant of Venice renders it abundantly clear that Shakspeare detested and despised the Jew as much as any of his hearers did. He indeed paints dramatically Shylock's view of the situation: Hath not a Jew eyes?' etc., but the outcome of the whole play is that Shylock was a member of an accursed race, who were fair game; and Irving's reading of the character, however thoughtful and interesting, was not Shakspeare's, and was totally inconsistent with many passages in the play.

Coming now to the lights Shakspeare throws on the conduct of life and on moral responsibility, we cannot doubt that we have in Polonius's advice to Laertes the poet's own idea as to maxims of conduct for a young man entering life; and a fine and manly compendium it is, not without a dash of worldly wisdom, but worldly wisdom of a lofty type:

Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,

Bear it that the opposer may beware of thee.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;

Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.

That this is Shakspeare's own morality is evident when we consider how entirely out of place it is in the mouth of Polonius, who in every other passage in the play is an old prig, at once pompous and trivial; 'he's for a jig, or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps,' says Hamlet when Polonius finds the player's speech too long-reminding one of Sir

Robert Walpole's recipe for entertaining a mixed company; at his own table, he said, he always talked bawdy, for in that everyone could join.' Still finer, but in somewhat the same tune, is Hamlet's characterisation of his chosen friend:

Blest are those

Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled

That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger

To sound what stop she please; give me that man

That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him

In my heart's core; yea, in my heart of hearts,
As I do thee.

If anyone doubts whether this is Shakspeare's own profession let him turn to the Sonnets:

They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:-
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.

Hamlet's friend has so little to say in the play that many readers probably hardly do justice to him; but it is that very reticence and sobriety of speech which is part of the strength of his character. When Hamlet in his wild excitement after the play scene begins to quote nonsense verses, and says, 'Would not this gain me a fellowship in a cry of players?' and Horatio replies, 'Half a share'; and in the same cool tone, after the next outburst, 'You might have rhymed,' the thoughtless spectator may perhaps regard him as dry and phlegmatic. But Hamlet had no doubt of his man. Horatio's is the type of friendship between men which is perhaps to be found among Englishmen more than among any other race; the friendship which does not protest or gush, but where each knows that he can depend on the other absolutely. Horatio's simplicity and reticence in all the scenes in which he appears are no mere accident; they are characteristic of a very noble though severe and self-contained nature. Horatio, in fact, would probably have shown himself, had he been placed in Hamlet's position, the finer and stronger nature of the two; Hamlet's defect (of which he was himself quite conscious) was a disposition to dream rather than to act. This made him more interesting as a study, but Shakspeare's sympathies were certainly with boldness in action. The famous passage There is a tide in the affairs of men is a kind of trumpet blowing to battle which has stirred many a slackened mind, possibly, into energy; and it is impossible not to recognise the personal spirit in it; it is not Brutus but Shakspeare who speaks. Similarly, the long exhortation of Ulysses to Achilles, in the