But when you turn to the works of Shakespeare, you turn to a book which is not only a man, but a thousand men and women. He transplanted his nature into his characters, and he verily lived their lives; and consequently in his plays you have no dead picture which it is enough to look on and pass from; you have life, the ineffable thing which may be studied for ever, and yet can never be fathomed. And how can I prove this? I cannot in the time at my disposal, but I will give instances which will show that I am not speaking without foundation. I will first give some curious instances which will evidence the existence of this hidden thought. Who was the third murderer in Macbeth, the mysterious character, never named, and yet evidently regarded as of some importance? The best critics have supposed it might be Macbeth himself disguised. It may be so, but Shakespeare has said nothing about the matter. The introduction of the character is the result of some hidden thought which he leaves us to discover. Turn to The Tempest. What was the one good act which Sycorax had done, for the sake of which the authorities of Argier would not take her life? Shakespeare never tells us. Or, of far more consequence, what were Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel? We may think that Prospero was Shakespeare himself, Caliban his earthly nature, and Ariel his intellectual imagination, as distinguished from his soul to which he will devote the remaining years of his life. This is probable, but Shakespeare never says so. Again, in Romeo and Juliet there is a character named who never once appears in the play-Rosaline, the girl whom Romeo thought he loved. In reality she did not love him, and he did not love her. His condition was that of dry gunpowder, and he merely thought she was the spark. Yet this lady had evidently occupied Shakespeare's thought, because he describes her more than once as a pale, anæmic girl, with brilliant black eyes; exactly the type which, as physiologists tell us, is the least likely to be touched by the passion of love. In As You Like It there is the wonderful character of Jaques, often imagined as a young man. Evidently that was not Shakespeare's view. Read the play carefully, and you find he is an elderly roué. It is not that he has left sin, but that sin has left him; and when he appeals to the Duke for a free charter for his cynicism, and asks what harm he can do in satirising evil, the Duke replies:

Most mischievous foul sin, in chiding sin:

For thou thyself hast been a libertine,

As sensual as the brutish sting itself.

And how do we know he was an old man? Only by one single word in the play which drops from the garrulous lips of Audrey

"Faith, the priest was good enough, for all the old gentleman's saying."

That is the only clue Shakespeare gives to his intention.

I now pass to a more striking proof in the evidences of the profound thought which Shakespeare devoted to the development of the more important personages. Every one of these will repay the minuter study which only Nature can tolerate, and from which all mere works of art must be exempt.

None are only what they appear on the surface. To the student they assume an infinitely deeper and in proportion to his study an infinitely more beautiful and instructive form. Take for instance Desdemona, whose tragedy even now excites the sympathy of all.

But there was in her just that touch of doubleness which ultimately, perhaps, brought on her cruel fate. At first you do not see it. Shakespeare had it in mind all through. Her own father saw it. When she announces her secret marriage to Othello, he says:

"Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see;

She has deceived her father, and may thee."

Turn to Hermione, one of the purest and most beautiful characters in the whole picture-gallery of Shakespeare's women. But she is cold. Not every woman could bear to be reintroduced to her longlost husband as a statue. And when she descends she is voiceless. Another woman might have changed Leontes' repentance into passion long before; but that would not have been Hermione. Look again at Ophelia, whose sad fate has moistened many a thousand eyes. How sad and undeserved it all seems. But study her deeply, and you will find her no mate for Hamlet she had no depth of mind or principle. It has been well said, "Fancy Hermione receiving the suggestion from Polonius to make her lovemeetings a means of furthering political schemes!" Poor Ophelia! She had beauty but not intellect. How instructive it is to see that Hamlet loves her more when she is dead. He might then picture her as he would have had her. Alive, she perpetually played the traitor to his ideal. Take Macbeth. When the first murder is concerned, it is Lady Macbeth who is the temptress. She is a woman, her nerves more highly strung and acute, quicker to see the object and discern the end. But she is a womanthose nerves give way, and, long before the awful succession of murders is completed, Lady Macbeth is broken down, and wringing her hands and asking

All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." Take Macbeth himself. What is the opinion we form of him? A thorough-paced villain, without remorse, and without any good in him? That is not Shakespeare's idea. To him he is a man led into evil, not from love of evil but because he is lured by the phantom of ambition and will have his aim. And when the end is

near, what is the attitude of mind Shakespeare gives him? Does he defy fate, and declare he will go on to the end defiant and unrelenting? Oh, no! He is terribly aware that, whatever may be the issue of the battle, he has lost the game for which he played; and almost pathetically he says

My way of life

Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf:

And that which should accompany old age,

As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have."

Take a meaner villain, Borachio in Much Ado About Nothing. Here is a man who has committed an astounding crime. The catastrophe comes, and his conscience is thoroughly awakened. He looks himself as bluntly in the face as he had the crime itself. He says

"The lady is dead upon mine and my master's false accusation ; and, briefly, I desire nothing but the reward of a villain.'

There is a certain pride in the awakened conscience of a man who, if bad, was at least simple. But one of the most remarkable instances of Shakespeare's power of delineation of character is to be found in Romeo and Juliet. If that play had ended as it began it would be absolutely unactable, except to an audience of young men just entering on life, and young ladies just emerging from boarding-school. Had the violent and sudden love of the first scenes formed the sole interest of the play, to the bulk of humanity it would have been unendurable. But Shakespeare knew better than that. He had, indeed, painted these Italian lovers red-hot, and more than red-hot, but he knew that what is once molten can run into any mould which circumstances may present, and the characters thus solidify into a strength and dignity not easily to be paralleled. See how Romeo turns to the half-starved Apothecary, who is only introduced in a single scene, but to whom he has given a deathless life, and how he offers that argument which has always been the argument of anarchy, and wrong-doing :

"The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law :
The world affords no law to make thee rich;

Then be not poor, but break it, and take this."

And so, more significantly still, when Juliet is driven to the last inch of ground, the last corner when her father has abused her grossly, and her mother has slammed the door upon her, and she turns, as a last hope, to the Nurse, who makes the monstrous suggestion that she should take Paris and commit bigamy within forty-eight hours. Left alone she soliloquises:

"Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend!

Is it more sin-to wish me thus forsworn.
Or to dispraise my lord with that same tongue

Which she hath praised him with above compare
So many thousand times?-- Go, counsellor ;
Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain.
I'll to the friar, to know his remedy;

If all else fail, myself have power to die."

There is hardly, perhaps, in the whole range of Shakespeare's writings a sentence of more tragic dignity than that "If all else fail, myself have power to die.'

Now then, how can we account for this actual life in the plays of Shakespeare? First of all we say it is to be accounted for by the immense and unparalleled breadth of Shakespeare's outlook upon humanity. We often say Shakespeare was of no party and no creed. I have said so; but I repent, and know better. If that be the truth it is but the truth expressed in an incorrect manner. The better way to say it is that he was of all parties and all creeds. Have you ever thought of the enormous width of his range as to time and space? His plays tell of ancient Greece, from the mythical time of Troy to the time when Plautus and other dramatists were introducing the relics of the intellectual splendour of fallen Greece to ancient Rome. He deals with Rome itself, from Coriolanus, who lived five centuries before Christ, to the times of Julius Cæsar and Augustus, when that birth had taken place which was to leaven the life of the world. He takes Scotland about the time of Edward the Confessor. He deals with his own country in the prehistoric times of Lear, who is nothing but a mere legend. Then he comes to the days of the Roman conquest in Cymbeline. He draws a long series of Plantagenet portraits down to Richard III. He shows us the whole course of the wars of the Roses, and then he comes to Tudor life in Henry VIII., a scene from which Mr. Parsons has recited to us to-night. He deals with Italy over and over again, and shows how he understood it, by the varying characteristics he connects with its cities. In Verona he shows the system of local aristocracy which made the story of mediæval Italy so picturesque, but so stormy. In Padua he sees the learning which accompanied the great new birth of Art we call the Renascence, and in Venice the commerce which made the wealth of Italy. He treats France, Denmark, Illyria, not historically but always with a keen eye to the local atmosphere. And he even glances at America, which was in his day hardly known, in his reference to "the still vex'd Bermoothes."

One thing he would not touch-his own country in his own day—because he would not be mixed up in those party questions which must inevitably hamper his skill, and limit his power.

Just in the same spirit he never sought patronage. To his poems he affixed dedications, to his plays never; and though he has covert allusions to those whom he honoured and loved, they can only be discovered by great study and care.

Yet every historical play shows how well he understood, and how impartially he could treat the mainsprings of all political action. He sees that republican simplicity was the only hope of ancient Rome, and that not even the resplendent genius of Julius Cæsar could save her from the downward path when that was Yet he could equally see the importance of loyalty under different conditions, and could paint a Plantagenet King as almost a deity on earth.

Turn to creeds. There was no body in the Roman Catholic Church so detested in his time as the friars. Two centuries before, Chaucer had devoted the greatest powers of his invective to satirise this then corrupted body. Look at the friar in Much Ado About Nothing, and that philosopher and gentleman in Romeo and Juliet, and see with how much fairness he could treat the matter of creed. Consider that Othello was the follower of that false prophet whose creed was, at that time, the greatest menace to Europe, and see how differently he depicts him from "the unspeakable Turk," who forms our embodiment of that faith. Consider that the Jew was not even allowed to live in England, and see how kindly, how gently, and how justly he is treated in Shylock.

When we compare ourselves with the width of Shakespeare, how small we seem to become. No doubt it is necessary that we should have a creed, that we should belong to a party; but when we become bigoted partisans, and aspire to mould the earth according to our own ideas, how much we vary from the sublime, calm charity of Shakespeare. The party-man seems to say: "Look at me! poor one-eyed man! I can only see one side of truth, I can only sympathise with one class of humanity." Let us turn to a man who can sympathise with all parties and all creeds, and love them all.

Sometimes I am puzzled to understand how Shakespeare is so great, and suddenly come upon firm ground by comparing myself with him, and seeing how little I am. And if we adopt that plan we shall never doubt that we do right in these continual meetings to venerate and honour the memory of Shakespeare. Among the infinite nonsense talked about Shakespeare-and I venture to say there is more uttered about him than any other man who ever lived-some have been found to say he was cold-hearted, unsympathetic, and selfish. Did you ever know aught but sympathy evoke sympathy, or aught but love beget love? It is this sympathy which made Shakespeare great. It is a simple secret, and may be a universal possession. This is our consolation. To reach his height is impossible, to attempt it is absurd; to adopt his secret is to follow in his footsteps, and, however far off we follow, it is open to us to move, at least, in the direction,