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not fiercely dashing and shaking themselves like imprisoned birds against the bars of their prisonhouse, or moodily nourishing in their own hearts and in the hearts of others, thoughts of discontent, revolt, and despair. Such a poet, I am bold to affirm, we possessed in Shakspere. For must we not, first of all, thankfully acknowledge a healthiness, a moral soundness, in all, or nearly all, which he has written-that on his part there is no paltering with the everlasting ordinances on which the moral estate of man's life reposes, no challenge of the fitness of these, no summoning of God to answer for Himself at the bar of man for the world which He has ordained. Then, too, if he deals with murderous crimes-and he could not do otherwise, for these, alike in fiction and in reality, constitute the tragedy of life—yet the crimes with which he deals travel the common road of human guilt, with no attempt upon his part to extend and enlarge the domain of possible sin, and certainly with no desire to paint it in any other colours than its own. dallies not with forbidden things. All that which with a just and moral instinct has been spoken of as infanda and nefanda-things not to be spoken of any more than to be done-are, with the rarest exceptions, unuttered by him. There are some of his contemporaries whose jewels, when they offer them, must be plucked out of the mire, who seem to revel in loathsome and disgusting images, all which, for poor human nature's sake, we would willingly put out of sight altogether. What an immeasurable gulf in this matter divides Shakspere from them? If Shakspere

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has wrought any passing wrong, or given any just occasion of offence, let us not forget the compensation which he has made-that we owe to him those ideals of perfect womanhood which are the loveliest, perhaps the most transcendent, creations of his art. Shakspere's women! We have but to mention them, and what a procession of female forms, whose very names make music in our ears, moves at once before the eye of the mind! Surely if the women be in God's intention the appointed guardians of the sanctities of home, the purities of domestic life, we owe him much who has peopled the world of our imagination with shapes so perfect and so peerless as these. If there was a part of his own life where he was not always true to those ideals of female loveliness which he had created, where he had laid up matter for after sorrows and self-reproach, and, in his own most wonderful words, "gored his own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,"-for what is so dear as innocence and self-respect? He was as a diamond, only to be polished in its own dust, like so many a meaner man making in one part of his life work of repentance for another. But, with all this, we dare affirm a habitual delight in the purest and noblest, and the fairest, on the part of one who in the workshop of his imagination forged a Miranda and an Imogen. Of Shakspere can it be said that he who has painted his long gallery of women, holy, and pure, and good, walking in fearless chastity through the world, has painted in anything like full length any one wanton woman throughout the whole range of his art? Again,

there is another point from which to view Shakspere. I mean the justness and the fairness which he shows to all sorts of men. Shakspere was the child of England-of the Reformation. He was born of its spirit, could never have been what he was if he had not lived and moved in the atmosphere, intellectual and moral, which it had created. Nor was he merely its unconscious product. One who so loved England-"this demi-paradise," who dwelt with such affection on the annals of her past glory, who allows the beating of his own patriot heart to be so clearly felt and seen, could not have been indifferent to the assertion of national independence which the Reformation involved. Indeed, all of us must have felt what we heard not another but Shakspere himself speaking in those grand lines with which he makes King John put back the pretensions of a Roman Bishop to tithe and toll in the dominions of an English King. And yet, born as he was of the spirit of the Reformation, with the after agitation of that mighty struggle not yet subsided, welcome as would have been to multitudes of his hearers the holding up to hatred, or ridicule, or contempt of the proud prelate, the scandalous friar, the incontinent nun, there is a noble absence in his writings of any thing of the kind. As often as he does introduce members of any religious order, they are grave, serious, devout, and full of kindly help for others. Indeed, we number among them the stately and severe Isabella, who, if she exaggerates aught, yet does it upon virtue's side. A grand feeling of self-respect on the part of the poet will not allow him

to fall in with popular cries, howl with the wolves, or trample on the prostrate and fallen; and he has helped to teach the English people a lesson which they have not altogether failed to learn. Shakspere has been found fault with because he writes without any moral purpose, and that he makes no just distribution of good or evil. It is a shallow view of art, as of life which could alone have given birth to this accusation. As we read his works we feel that justice walks the world, delaying, it may be, but not forgetting, as is ever the manner with the Divine avenger. Even faults comparatively trivial, like that of Cordelia, he does not fail to show us what a train of sorrows for this life, at least, they may entail. For this, if I may say it with reverence, he often reminds me of Scripture, and he will, indeed, repay almost any amount of patient and accurate study which we may bestow upon him. Let me illustrate what I say. They are but a few idle words dropped at random which in the opening scene of "King Lear" make only too evident that Gloucester had never looked back with serious displeasure at the sins of his youth, which stood embodied before him in the person of his bastard son; that he still regarded it with complacency, and rolled it as a sweet morsel under his tongue. This son,

his whole being corroded, poisoned, turned to gall and bitterness by the ever-present consciousness of the circumstances of his birth, is made the instrument to undo him. Shakspere himself points out the moral in these words, so often quoted, but not oftener than they deserve:

"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us."

The most rev. prelate next cited illustrations from the works of Shakspere, to show that those who allow temptations to grow upon them fall from one wickedness to another-Macbeth, for instance, in that most dangerous hour of his success, giving place to deceit, allowing the devilish suggestion room in his heart, and then the dread concatenation of crimes, one ever driving on the other, till the end was desolation and despair-the blackness of darkness for ever.

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(said he) I sometimes ask myself-where is there a sermon on the need of resisting temptation at the outset, of treading out the sparks of hell ere they had set on fire the whole course of nature, like that? And then once more, to speak not of what Shakspere has written, but of what Shakspere was, assuredly we owe him a large debt for the connexion which he has shown may exist between the loftiest genius and the most perfect sober-mindedness. He has for ever

rendered absurd the notion that genius is of necessity irregular, unable to acquiesce in the ordinary conditions of human existence, or cheerfully adapt itself to these. Doubtless it has often failed in this. There are too many to whom, whether by their own fault, or by some mysterious destiny, the very gifts of Heaven have been fatal. The shore of human life is strewn with no sadder wrecks than some which these have made. Not without abundant warrant did a poet of our own age sum up the lives of too many who had

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