appeal to. Bacon wrote philosophy in Latin, doubting of the permanence of what he left in English; for he knew the changes the vernacular had suffered, and could not foresee that further changes would not make his own vocabulary obsolete.

It is not every generation that affords us even one great poet or great philosopher, and critics have loved to speculate upon the causes that produced in a single age such figures as those of Shakespeare, Jonson, Drayton, Bacon, Hooker, and Donne. The invention of printing, the revival of letters, the rise of the middle class, the great voyages of discovery, all these seemed to prefigure a great intellectual uprising. Conflict of old with new must ever sharpen the minds of men and broaden the view.

Nor had there been lacking precursors of this literary outbreak. Spenser and Marlowe were Shakespeare's immediate predecessors. The age of Elizabeth was especially one of change. The imaginations of men were inflamed by the voyages of Drake and Raleigh, so that even the commoner sort took on some boldness of act and loftiness of thought. It was an age of luxury in dress, equipage, and manners; court pageants, masques, and revels were so frequent as to become almost a commonplace. Men were then surrounded, as Lamb says, by "visible poetry." Wealthy nobles were generous patrons of letters. Elizabeth, herself no mean scholar, smiled approval upon the stage, and Shakespeare began his great dramatic creations. There was then no reading public, no newspaper press or periodical literature. Only by means of the drama could authorship gain the ear of the public. It was but natural, therefore, that literature should adapt itself to the stage, which afforded to the poet the only means of livelihood, apart from patronage, that in that day he could hope for.

The striking characteristics of the Elizabethan literature seem to be these: it was creative, imaginative; great

breadth of view and of thought were in it; and it was intensely human, real, natural. There was, as we have seen, abundant reason in the circumstances of the time why its writers should exercise creative power, though nothing that can account for their happy possession of it. They lived in an imaginative age, and in both poet and philosopher imagination gave insight into spiritual truths, and supplied also the power of inventing, devising, and shaping; that is, intellectual creativeness. This is seen equally in the sprightliest fancies of Shakespeare, the deepest speculations of Bacon, or the loftiest flights of Milton, who came after them. In a large way, Milton's great epic, Bacon's whole method, and any one of Shakespeare's plays, is a creation.

Change and vicissitude gave large scope to men's minds. New lands were opening to the colonist; false philosophy was losing its hold on the higher intellects; "creation widened in man's view." The age called for men of insight and foresight, men who could analyze and combine.

Accordingly, the thinking of Bacon and of Shakespeare was never one-sided, it was with the whole mind, not with one or with a few faculties of it. The sagest philosophizing of Bacon is continually lighted up with fanciful touches and subtile conceits. Raleigh could command by sea or land, could write charming verse, found a colony, hold his own. in parliament, or pen grave history. Bacon was statesman and jurist as well as philosopher; and that Shakespeare's mind had as many facets as a diamond, is shown by the endeavor of the curious to make him out, from his own writings, a member, at one time or another, of each of the learned professions, and a holder of opposite creeds in religion. He was, indeed, "a universal, round man."

This literature dealt with men as they are, fools and wise, bad and good, high and low. The drama in which

they were pictured forth, appealed to the thoughts and passions of natural flesh-and-blood hearers. In the whole gamut of Shakespeare's music there is not an untruthful note; from young Gobbo to Portia, from Macbeth to the drunken Porter, every figure is human, every action and word proper to its place. This is because Shakespeare's mind was free from that exaggeration which is a necessary element of caricature. His characters do not act upon one unvarying rule of conduct, but, as always happens in real life, are swayed from this, as the drama progresses, by a mixture of motives and impulses, by change of situation, and by mere incident. This it is that gives the element of essential truth to Shakespeare's presentations, which are so varied, exhibiting the whole range of human passions, that they appeal to every phase of moral sentiment.

So, also, Bacon's ambition in publishing his "Essays" was, as he wrote in his preface to that work, to bring the matters he treated of "home to men's minds and bosoms." Wise saws and instances modern and ancient brighten every page of these counsels of his..

In a word, the Elizabethan literature depicts or idealizes human nature in its virtues, vices, passions, weaknesses, and strength; in its hopes, fears, thoughts, and fancies. It holds the mirror up to Nature, and shows to us Nature's image faithfully reflected in it. It is, after the brief Old-English Introduction, the first and best chapter in the unfinished volume of our literature.

SHAKESPEARE

1564-1616

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, dramatist and poet, was born at Stratford-onAvon, England, in April, 1564. Of his early life almost nothing is known. It is believed that he was a student in the free school at Stratford, and that

in his youth he assisted his father in the latter's business, which was that of a wool-dealer and glover. That he formally entered upon any definite call. ing, we have no proof; but critics have found evidence in his writings of his familiarity with various professions: Malone, one of his acutest commentators, firmly insisted that Shakespeare was a lawyer's clerk. At the age of

eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years his senior. Of this union only a vague report that it proved uncongenial has come down to us. In 1586 or 1587 Shakespeare seems to have gone to London, and two years later appears as one of the proprietors of the Blackfriars Theatre. In the few years next following he became known as a playwright, and in 1593 he published his first poem, "Venus and Adonis." The dates of publication of his plays are not settled beyond doubt, but the best authorities place "Henry VI." first, and "The Tempest" last, all included between 1589 and 1611. Shakespeare was an actor as well as a writer of plays, and remained on the stage certainly as late as 1603. Two years later he bought a handsome house at Stratford, and lived therein, enjoying the friendship and respect of his neighbors, till his death in 1616.

Meager as is the foregoing sketch, it yet embodies, with a few trifling exceptions, all the known facts as to Shakespeare's life. A mist seems to have settled over "the most illustrious of the sons of man," almost wholly hiding his personality from curious and admiring posterity. Of many of his contemporary writers, and of some who preceded him, comparatively full particulars have come down to us: Edmund Spenser stands out conspicuous among the bright lights of the Elizabethan age; the genial face and the personal habits of "rare Ben Jonson" are almost familiar to us; and even of Chaucer, the father of English literature, we possess a reasonably distinct portraiture: but Shakespeare, the man, is lost to us in the darkness of the past.

The name of Shakespeare is so pre-eminently famous, standing out in the firmament of literature "like the moon among the lesser stars," that no attempt to convey an idea of his greatness seems to be necessary here. We content ourselves, therefore, with quoting the opinions of a few of those who have been worthy to judge him.

Dr. Samuel Johnson says: "The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissolvable fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare."

Thomas De Quincey says: "In the gravest sense it may be affirmed of Shakespeare that he is among the modern luxuries of life; it was his prerogative to have thought more finely and more extensively than all other poets combined.”

Lord Jeffrey says: "More full of wisdom and ridicule and sagacity than all the moralists that ever existed, he is more wild, airy, and inventive, and more pathetic and fantastic than all the poets of all regions and ages of the world."

Lord Macaulay pronounced Shakespeare "the greatest poet that ever lived," and esteemed "Othello," the play from which our first selection is taken, as "perhaps the greatest work in the world."

Thomas Carlyle bears this characteristic testimony: "Of this Shakespeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the best judgment is slowly point. ing to the conclusion that Shakespeare is the chief of all poets hitherto, the