structure, to ponder ceaselessly those questions relating to man, his origin, and his destiny, in familiarity with which consists what is called the spiritual element in human nature. It was Shakespeare's use, as it seems to us, to revert often, when alone, to that ultimate mood of the soul, in which one hovers wistfully on the borders of the finite, vainly pressing against the barriers that separate it from the unknown; that mood in which even what is common and under foot seems part of a vast current mystery, and in which, like Arabian Job of old, one looks by turns at the heaven above, the earth beneath, and one's own moving body between, interrogating whence it all is, why it all is, and whither it all tends. And this, we say, is Melancholy. It is more. It is that mood of man, which, most of all moods, is thoroughly, grandly, specifically human. That which is the essence of all worth, all beauty, all humour, all genius, is open or secret reference to the supernatural; and this is sorrow. The attitude of a finite creature, contemplating the infinite, can only be that of an exile-grief and wonder blending in a wistful longing for an unknown home.

As we consider this frame of mind to have been characteristic of Shakespeare, so we find that he has not forgotten to represent it as a poet. We have always fancied Hamlet to be a closer translation of Shakespeare's own character than any other of his personations. The same meditativeness, the same morbid reference at all times to the supernatural, the same inordinate development of the speculative faculty, the same intellectual melancholy, that are seen in the Prince of Denmark, seem to have distinguished Shakespeare. Nor is it possible here to forget that minor and lower form of the same fancy-the ornament of As you like it, the melancholy Jaques.

Jaques. More, more, I pr'ythee, more!

Amiens. It will make you melancholy, Monsieur Jaques.

Jaques. I thank it. More, I pr'ythee, more! I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs. More, I pr'ythee, more! Amiens. My voice is rugged; I know I cannot please you. Jaques. I do not desire you to please me; I desire you to sing.

*

*

*

Rosalind. They say you are a melancholy fellow.
Jaques. I am so; I do love it better than laughing.

*

Rosalind. Those that are in extremity of either are abominable fellows, and betray themselves to every modern censure, worse than drunkards. Jaques. Why, 'tis good to be sad, and say nothing. Rosalind. Why, then, 'tis good to be a post.

Jaques. I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud; nor the soldier's, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects; and, indeed, the sundry 'contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me, is a most humorous sadness."

Jaques is not Shakespeare; but in writing this description of Jaques, Shakespeare drew from his knowledge of himself. His also was a “melancholy of his own," a "humorous sadness in which his often rumination wrapt him." In that declared power of Jaques of "sucking melancholy out of a song,' the reference of Shakespeare to himself seems almost direct. Nay, more, as Rosalind, in rating poor Jaques, tells him on one occasion, that he is so abject a fellow, that she verily believes he is "out of love with his nativity, and almost chides God for making him of that countenance that he is;" so Shakespeare's melancholy, in one of his sonnets, takes exactly the same form of self-dissatisfaction.

"When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet, in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee," &c.

Think of that, reader! That mask of Shakespeare's face, which we have been discussing, Shakespeare himself did not like; and there were moments in which he was so abject as actually to wish that he had received from Nature another man's physical features!

If Shakespeare's melancholy was, like that of Jaques, a complex melancholy-a melancholy "compounded of many simples," extracted perhaps at first from some root of bitter experience in his own life, and then fed, as his sonnets clearly state, by a habitual sense of his own "outcast" condition in society, and by the sight of a hundred social wrongs around

It is sheer nonsense, with these and other such passages accessible to anybody, to go on repeating, as people seem determined to do, the hackneyed saying of the commentator Steevens, that "all that we know of Shakespeare is, that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon; married and had children there; went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote plays and poems; returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried."* It is our own fault, and not the fault of the materials, if we do not know a great deal more about Shakespeare than that; if we do not realize, for example, these distinct and indubitable facts about him-his special reputation among the critics of his time, as a man not so much of erudition as of prodigious natural genius; his gentleness and openness of disposition; his popular and sociable habits; his extreme ease, and, as some thought, negligence in composition; and, above all, and most characteristic of all, his excessive fluency in speech. "He sometimes required stopping," is Ben Jonson's expression; and whoever does not see a whole volume of revelation respecting Shakespeare in that single trait, has no eye for seeing anything. Let no one ever lose sight of that phrase in trying to imagine Shakespeare.

Still, after all, we cannot be content thus. With regard to such a man we cannot rest satisfied with a mere picture of his exterior in its aspect of repose, or in a few of its common attitudes. We seek, as the phrase is, to penetrate into his heart to detect and to fix in everlasting portraiture that mood of his soul which was ultimate and characteristic; in which, so to speak, he came ready-fashioned from the Creator's hands; towards which he always sank when alone; and on the ground-melody of which all his thoughts and actions were but voluntary variations. As far short of such a result as would be any notion we could form of the poet Burns from a mere chronological outline of his life, together with a few stories

*This saying of Steevens, though still repeated in books, has lost its force with the public. The Lives of Shakespeare by Mr. Halliwell and Mr. Charles Knight, written on such different principles, have effectually dissipated the old impression. Mr. Knight, by his use of the principle of synchronism, and his accumulation of picturesque details, in his Biography of Shakespeare, has left the public without excuse, if they still believe in Steevens.

such as are current about his moral irregularities; so far short of a true appreciation of Shakespeare would be that idea of him which we could derive from the scanty fund of the external evidence.

And here it is, that, in proceeding to make up the deficiency of the external evidence by going to the only other available source of light on the subject, namely the bequeathed writings of the man himself, we find ourselves obstructed at the outset by an obvious difficulty, which does not exist to the same extent in most other cases. We can, with comparative ease, recognise Burns himself in his works; for Burns is a lyrist, pouring out his own feelings in song, often alluding to himself, and generally under personal agitation when he writes. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is a dramatist, whose function it was not to communicate, but to create. Had he been a dramatist of the same school as Ben Jonson, indeed, using the drama as a means of spreading, or, at all events, as a medium through which to insinuate, his opinions; and often indicating his purposes by the very names of his dramatis persona (as Downright, Merecraft, Eitherside, and the like)—then the task would have been easier. But it is not so with Shakespeare. Less than almost any man that ever wrote, does he inculcate or dogmatise. He is the very type of the poet. He paints, represents, creates, holds the mirror up to nature; but from opinion, doctrine, controversy, theory, he holds instinctively aloof. In each of his plays there is a "central idea," to use the favourite term of the German critics-that is, a single thought round which all may be exhibited as consciously or unconsciously crystallized; but there is no pervading maxim, no point set forth to be argued or proved. Of none of all the plays can it be said that it is more than any other a vehicle for fixed articles in the creed of Shakespeare.

One quality or attribute of Shakespeare's genius, we do, indeed, contrive to seize out of this very difficulty of seizing anything that quality or attribute of many-sidedness, of which we have heard so much for the last century and a half. The immense variety of his characters and conceptions, embracing as it does Hamlets and Falstaffs, Kings and Clowns,

Prosperos and Dogberrys, and his apparently equal ease in handling them all, are matters that have been noted by one and all of the critics. And thus, while his own] character is lost in his incessant shiftings through such a succession of masks, we yet manage, as it were in revenge, to extract from the very impossibility of describing him an adjective which does possess a kind of quasi-descriptive value. It is as if of some one that had baffled all our attempts to investigate him, we were to console ourselves by saying that he was a perfect Proteus. We call Shakespeare "many-sided;" not a magazine, nor a lady at a literary party, but tells you that; and in adding this to our list of adjectives concerning him, we find a certain satisfaction, and even an increase of light.

But it would be cowardice to stop here. The old sea-god Proteus himself, despite his subtlety and versatility, had a real form and character of his own, into which he could be compelled, if one only knew the way. Hear how they served this old gentleman in the Odyssey.

"We at once,

Loud shouting, flew on him, and in our arms
Constrained him fast; nor the sea-prophet old
Called not incontinent his shifts to mind.
First he became a long-maned lion grim;
A dragon then, a panther, a huge boar,

A limpid stream, and an o'ershadowing tree.
We, persevering, held him; till, at length,
The subtle sage, his ineffectual arts
Resigning weary, questioned me and spoke."

And so with our Proteus. The many-sidedness of the dramatist, let it be well believed and pondered, is but the versatility in form of a certain personal and substantial being, which constitutes the specific mind of the dramatist himself. Precisely as we have insisted that Shakespeare's face, as the best portraits represent it to us, is no mere general face or face to let, but a good, decided, and even rather singular face; so, we would insist, he had as specific a character, as thoroughly a way of his own in thinking about things and going through his morning and evening hours, as any of ourselves. "Man is only many-sided," says Goethe, "when he strives after the highest because he must, and descends to the lesser because he