self. These have a pretence of history; but Hamlet, with hardly that pretence, stands alone supreme in varied excellence. Ambition, murder, resistless fate, filial love, the love of woman, revenge, the power of conscience, paternal solicitude, infinite jest: what a volume is this! TABLE OF DATES AND SOURCES. - The following table, which presents the plays in chronological order,' the times when they were written, as nearly as can be known, and the sources whence they were derived, will be of more service to the student than any discursive remarks upon the several plays. 9. Richard III. 1590 From the "Gesta Romanorum." 1591 66 an older play. 66 1591 an old tale. 1592 a comedy of Plautus. 1593 From an old play and Sir Thomas More's History. 10. Midsummer Night's Dream 1594 Suggested by Palamon and Arcite, The dates as determined by Malone are given: many of them differ from those of Drake and Chalmers. 18. Henry V. 19. As You Like It 1599 From an older play. 1600 Suggested in part by Lodge's novel, Rosalynd. 20. Much Ado About Nothing 1600 Source unknown. 21. Hamlet. 1601 From the Latin History of Scandinavia, by Saxo, called Gram maticus. 1601 Said to have been suggested by Elizabeth. 1601 From an old tale. 1602 Of classical origin, through Chaucer. 1603 From the chronicles of the day. 28. King Lear 29. Macbeth 33. Coriolanus. 30. Julius Cæsar 31. Antony and Cleopatra 32. Cymbeline 34. Timon of Athens. 66 and other sources. a novel by Greene. Italian Tale. Denied to Shakspeare; probably by Marlowe or Kyd. ROM what has been said, it is manifest that as to his FRO plots and historical reproductions, Shakspeare has little inerit but taste in selection; and indeed in most cases, had he invented the stories, his merit would not have been great: what then is the true secret of his power and of his fame? This question is not difficult to answer. First, these are due to his wonderful insight into human nature, and the philosophy of human life: he dissects the human mind in all its conditions, and by this vivisection he displays its workings as it lives and throbs; he divines the secret impulses of all ages and characters-childhood, boyhood, manhood, girlhood, and womanhood; men of peace, and men of war; clowns, nobles, and kings. His large heart was sympathetic with all, and even most so with the lowly and suffering; he shows us to ourselves, and enables us to use that knowledge for our profit. All the virtues are held up to our imitation and praise, and all the vices are scourged and rendered odious in our sight. To read Shakspeare aright is of the nature of honest self-examination, that most difficult and most necessary of duties. CREATION OF CHARACTER. Second: He stands supreme in the creation of character, which may be considered the distinguishing mark of the highest literary genius. The men and women whom he has made are not stage-puppets moved by hidden strings; they are real. We know them as intimately as the friends and acquaintances who visit us, or the people whom we accost in our daily walks. And again, in this varied delineation of character, Shakspeare less than any other author either obtrudes or repeats himself. Unlike Byron, he is nowhere his own hero: unlike most modern novelists, he fashions men who, while they have the generic human resemblance, differ from each other like those of flesh and blood around us: he has presented a hundred phases of love, passion, ambition, jealousy, revenge, treachery, and cruelty, and each distinct from the others of its kind; but lest any character should degenerate into an allegorical representation of a single virtue or vice, he has provided it with the other lineaments necessary to produce in it a rare human identity. The stock company of most writers is limited, and does arduous duty in each new play or romance; so that we detect in the comic actor, who is now convulsing the pit with laughter, the same person who a little while ago died heroically to slow music in the tragedy. Each character in Shakspeare plays but one part, and plays it skilfully and well. And who has portrayed the character of woman like Shakspeare? — the grand sorrow of the repudiated Catharine, the incorruptible. chastity of Isabella, the cleverness of Portia, the loves of Jessica and of Juliet, the innocent curiosity of Miranda, the broken heart and crazed brain of the fair Ophelia. In this connection also should be noticed his powers of grouping and composition; which, in the words of one of his biographers, "present to us pictures from the realms of spirits and from fairyland, which in deep reflection and in useful maxims, yield nothing to the pages of the philosophers, and which glow with all the poetic beauty that an exhaustless fancy could shower upon them." IMAGINATION AND FANCY. - And this brings us to notice, in the third place, his rare gifts of imagination and of fancy; those instruments of the representative faculty by which objects of sense and of mind are held up to view in new, varied, and vivid lights. Many of his tragedies abound in imaginative pictures, while there are not in the realm of Fancy's fairy frostwork more exquisite representations than those found in the Tempest and the Midsummer Night's Dream. POWER OF EXPRESSION. Fourth, Shakspeare is remarkable for the power and felicity of his expression. He adapts his language to the persons who use it, and thus we pass from the pompous grandiloquence of king and herald to the common English and coarse conceits of clown and nurse and grave-digger; from the bombastic speech of Glendower and the rhapsodies of Hotspur to the slang and jests of Falstaff. But something more is meant by felicity of expression than this. It applies to the apt words which present pithy bits of household philosophy, and to the beautiful words which convey the higher sentiments and flights of fancy; to the simple words couching grand thoughts with such exquisite aptness that they seem made for each other, so that no other words would do as well, and to the dainty songs, like those of birds, which fill his forests and gardens with melody. Thus it is that orators and essayists give dignity and point to their own periods by quoting Shakspeare. Such are a few of Shakspeare's high merits, which constitute him the greatest poet who has ever used the English tongue-poet, moralist, and philosopher in one. HIS FAULTS.—If it be necessary to point out his faults, it should be observed that most of them are those of the age and |