political life of Continental Europe, have shown themselves most efficient in all great and worthy achievement.

In the political history and condition of the England of Elizabeth's time, there were circumstances eminently favourable to many-sided intellectual progress, and to the development of a wide variety of individual character. Although the different nationalities, which had contributed to the population of England, had become so far amalgamated as to have produced a recognizable uniformity of character, yet the chemical combination had not been so complete as wholly to extinguish the separate traits of each. These had propagated, and still propagate, themselves more or less unmixed, from century to century, just as, in human and brute life, peculiarities of remote ancestry manifest themselves in late descendants, and often reappear in lines where for generations they had seemed to be extinct. Hence, the English have in all ages been remarkable for individuality, and what we call originality, or, if you please, eccentricity or oddity of character.

These supposed individualities usually combine, with something that is peculiar to the man John or Peter, much more that is common to a nation, a family, or a class, and the eccentric person is, in reality, oftener a typical or representative man than an anomaly. He is noticed as a strange or peculiar individual, not because his character is a departure from the general laws of humanity, but because he is, locally or chronologically, separated from the class to which he belongs, and we observe him as an isolated phenomenon, not as an instance of a species.*

* True imaginative conception o. character, whether in dramatic or in narrative literature, depends more upon power of observation than of invention. The truest personages in fiction are those most accurately copied from actual life, and the impression produced upon us by a character in a work o. imagination is just. in proportion to the degree in which we recognize it as real. We do not know, historically, how far Shakespeare drew from individual nature, how far his personages are portraits; but modern criticism and literary history are continually accumulating evidence to prove that all great artists record what they see, much more frequently than they invent what they have never witnessed.

Modern English literature has not produced a more Shakespearian - I might

The free development of these various forms and types of humanity in England has been much favoured by a detached geographical position, which has protected the nation against controlling foreign influences, by the extended commerce and navigation, which its long line of coast, its numerous harbours, its coal and tin, the excellent quality of its wool, and some other native products, have secured to it, and perhaps in a still greater degree by the character of its political institutions, which have been, from a remote age, of a more popular and liberal character than those of any of the great Continental

states.

English life, in the sixteenth century, was full of multifarious experiences. There had always been a greater number and variety of stimulating tendencies and influences, and greater practical liberty of yielding to them, in England than in any other modern nation; and consequently, in the time of Shakespeare, the human intellect, the human heart, affections, and passions, were there more fully and variously developed, and the articulate expression of all these mental and moral conditions and impulses more cultivated and diversified, than in any contemporaneous people.

In all the facilities for the observation of human life and nature on a wide and comprehensive scale, the Englishman of Shakespeare's time was at a more advanced point than has even yet been reached in the society of any other of the Gothic or Romance nations. This is one of the reasons why the plays of Shakespeare have such an incontestable superiority over the drama of all other modern countries, and why so many thoughts which, in the recent literature of Continental Europe, have been hailed as new revelations, are, to the Englishman, but the thousandth repetition of old and familiar oracles, or generalizations

say a more original- comic character than Lever's Major Monsoon in Charles O'Malley. But Major Monsoon is well known to be a minutely accurate portrait of the character, a faithful chronicle of the sayings and doings, of a real living person.

which have, from time immemorial, been matters of too universal and every-day consciousness to have been thought worthy of a place in English literature at all.

Shakespeare stood, to the age of Elizabeth and of James, in just the position which Chaucer occupied with respect to that of Edward III. and of Richard II.; and in these two authors, the genius and the literature of their respective ages reached its culminating point. For the excellence of each, all preceding English history and literature was a necessary preparation, and the dialect of each was composed by an application of the same principles to the philological material which earlier labourers had gathered for them.

The material thus prepared for the two great masters of the English tongue was in a very different state when it passed under their respective manipulation; and it may be seriously questioned whether, simply as a philological constructor, Chaucer were not the greater architect of the two. In Chaucer's time, every department of the language was rude, defective, and unpolished, and the task of enriching, harmonizing, and adapting was performed by him alone. Shakespeare had been preceded by a multitude of skilful artists, who had improved and refined all the various special vocabularies which make up the totality of the English language; and the common dialect which more or less belongs to all imaginative composition had been carried by others to almost as high a pitch of perfection as is found in Shakespeare himself.

Chaucer, as a linguistic reformer, had great advantages over Shakespeare, in possessing a better philological training. He grew up in an almost equal familiarity with French, then a highly cultivated dialect, and with his mother tongue, and he was also well acquainted with Latin and with Italian; but we have no reason to believe that Shakespeare had acquired anything more than the merest smattering of any language but his own.

But although the dialect of Shakespeare does not exhibit the

same relative superiority as that of Chaucer over all older and contemporaneous literature, its absolute superiority is, nevertheless, unquestionable. I have before had occasion to remark that the greatest authors very often confine themselves to a restricted vocabulary, and that the power of their diction lies, not in the multitude of words, but in skilful combination and adaptation of a few. This is strikingly verified by an examination of the stock of words employed by Shakespeare. He introduces, indeed, terms borrowed from every art and every science, from all theoretical knowledge and all human experience; but his entire vocabulary little exceeds fifteen thousand words, and of these a large number, chiefly of Latin origin, occur but once or at most twice in his pages. The affluence of his speech arises from variety of combination, not from numerical abundance. And yet the authorized vocabulary of Shakespeare's time probably embraced twice or thrice the number of words which he found necessary for his purposes; for though there were at that time no dictionaries which exhibit a great stock of words, yet in perusing Hooker, the old translators, and the early voyagers and travellers, we find a verbal wealth, a copiousness of diction, which forms a singular contrast with the philological economy of the great dramatist.

In his theory of dramatic construction, Shakespeare owes little -in his conception of character, nothing to earlier or contemporary artists; but in his diction, everything except felicity of selection and combination. The existence of the whole copious English vocabulary was necessary, in order that his marvellous gift of selection might have room for its exercise. Without a Cimabue and a Giotto, a Fra Angelico and a Perugino, there could not have been a Raphael; and all previous English philology and literature were indispensable to the creation of a medium, through which such revelations of man as had not yet been made to man might be possible to the genius of a Shakespeare.