to cultivate the habit of studying character and human life. This is the book in which humanity finds its universal expression. Men do not know, amid the commonplace events of everyday life, what thoughts, feelings, and aspirations they are capable of, until they see them expressed dramatically. A man who has spent his life in a tame and flat country knows not the feelings of sublimity that are latent in his nature, and as yet existing only in the possible, which may one day be awakened by the sight of mighty hills rising into cloud-land, or by a view of the vast ocean in a calm. To a man who stands for the first time in an ancient cathedral, and looks at the tall and massive pillars, which appear more imposing from the subdued light that streams in through the finely stained windows, the peculiar feelings of awe that fill his mind are altogether new. Analogies of this sort may serve to show how Shakespeare supplies to men the conditions requisite for knowing what is latent in themselves, as well as for studying human nature. Hence his thoughts have interwoven themselves with the current ideas and maxims of English-speaking men. The volume of his dramas being one with which every educated man is familiar, it is to the Anglo-Saxon race what Homer was to the Greeks-a book which everybody knows, and an allusion to whose sentiments is at once understood and creates in all a feeling of that common humanity, which ever strives to find in another some opinion or some feeling which is shared in common. To sum up in a word—in the view that life is an education, and that all things have for their ultimate end the formation

of character, to the question, In what is Shakespeare an educator of men? we answer, In affording the means of the highest cultivation of taste, in giving noble views of man and of his destiny, in cultivating the study of character, and in creating a universal language by which the English-speaking race can find expression for their common humanity.

In so far as this is the work of a dramatist, Shakespeare stands alone. The Greeks had three great tragedians-Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides-who stand on something like equality. Special opinions and tastes may place one before the others, but still they form a group. The Germans have Goethe and Schiller, both men of the first rank. But between Shakespeare and any other English dramatic writer the distance is immense. He ranks, indeed, far higher than any of those we have just mentioned, whether Greek or German; but we have no other who is worthy of being compared with them.

Shakespeare is one of those great men whose lives have changed the destiny of the world, and made it different from what it would have been. But his power is not in the outward and visible, like that of Alexander the Great and Tamerlane, great conquerors who have altered the fates of nations and of empires. It is rather in the spirit which inspires the inner life of man, and which, though slowly, ever moulds the outward and the material.

There is a law in the production of great men. They sometimes appear in groups, and at other times they stand alone. Certain periods are prolific of men of

genius. The age that is peculiarly fertile of great men is the transition stage between grand epochs-the age of revolution. At such a time the wants of the age are a kind of craving that must be satisfied, and summon forth the utmost powers of all the typical men. This is a time, too, of great expectation. Men's minds are looking for something unusual about to happen in the world, they know not what. All this was peculiarly characteristic of Shakespeare's age. It was one in which thrones were falling-a time when old things were going to dissolution, and a new era was being ushered in with great and portentous events. We may compare society to one of the grand volcanic mountains, Etna or Hecla. After a slumber of centuries there is a short period of violent eruptions, and then things settle down again into the former state of repose, but with great changes in the face of nature. Thus society has its long periods of repose followed by revolutions. In fact, the history of nations, like that of individuals, is a succession of epochs. The institutions, the laws, and even the religious beliefs of one age have a period within which they develop, flourish, and decay. A new age, of a totally different and often of an antagonistic character, then follows, in which everything is changed. Between these epochs there is a transition state, which is usually prolific of great men. Some have their mission to pull down and destroy the old. Others are awakened to meet the felt wants of the age, and it is their work to give character and shape to the Once and again, at such a point, there has appeared a mind of transcendent power, whose part in

new.

relation to the past seems to be that of giving it a nobler and an immortal existence before it has sunk into utter oblivion, while its relations to the future are not so much with the age just succeeding as with all time. Such was Homer, and at such a point did he live. Several generations had passed away since the famous siege of Troy, the age was changing, and nothing would have been saved from the wrecks of time but the names of a few illustrious heroes, when Homer appeared to embalm the perishing traditions in his immortal epic poems the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey." In these he has painted with extraordinary power the manners, customs, institutions, and characteristics of the heroic age, and given mankind the knowledge of a portion of their history which otherwise would have been totally forgotten. This, however, is the poet in one aspect only.

Similar in character and position was Shakespeare. He stands midway between darkness and light, between an age when religion was a thing of gorgeous shows and pageants, a ritual rendered imposing by solemn fanes and Gothic piles, and that age when it returned to be an inward life, a moral power, which showed itself in spiritual worship and holiness of life. And the man Shakespeare has a phase of both. He combines the splendid pictorial imagination which is nurtured by the pomp and pageantry of the one with the just views of man and of truth which are the product of the other. Remarks of an altogether similar character might be made regarding his stand-point between the fall of feudalism and the rise of freedom. Were as

great a dramatist to live in our times, wherever he found characters for his dramas, it could not now be either in proud baronial halls or in the courts of kings, for neither of these is to us romantic or poetical. Already the Middle Ages had come to a close, and a new epoch had begun, but this in England was not so far advanced as to prevent the former age from stamping its character on the youthful mind of this great genius. He had seen the Moralities, the pastorals, spectacles, pantomimes, and histories, as well as certain tragedies and comedies, which were characteristic of the previous period, and most of which were interdicted during his time and soon vanished. Out of these rude materials his creative mind constructed the modern drama in its perfect form. Nor had the stirring events, which filled the later portion of Queen Elizabeth's reign and banished the recollection of the wars of the Roses, happened too soon relatively to the youth of the poet to prevent him from catching an enthusiasm from popular traditions. He has reproduced the events of those times and of bygone English history in his Historical plays with a vividness and a power which no mere historian could do who had not caught the inspiration of living and lingering recollections.

Undoubtedly, therefore, the character of the age which preceded the Reformation gave a complexion to the productions of Shakespeare's genius, but did not affect its essential nature. Had not circumstances in his personal history, and possibly the wants of the age as felt by a mind like his, given him a bent in the direction of the drama, his genius would have found