quence, their profound wisdom; but it is long before the play, as a whole, obtains its proper mastery over the understanding. It is very difficult to define what is the great charm and wonder of its entirety. To us it appears as if the poet, without the slightest particle of presumption, had proposed to himself to look down upon the Homeric heroes from an Olympus of his own. He opens the "Iliad," and there he reads of "Achilles' baneful wrath." A little onward he is told of the "high threatening" of "the great cloud-gatherer." The gods of Homer are made up of human passions. But he appears throned upon an eminence, from which he can not only command a perfect view of the game which men play, but, seeing all, become a partisan of none,-perfectly cognizant of all motives, but himself motiveless. And yet the whole representation is true, and it is therefore genial. He does not stand above men by lowering men. Social life is not made worse than it is, that he who describes it may appear above its ordinary standard. It is not a travestie of Homer, or of Nature. The heroic is not lowered by association with the ridiculous. The heroes of the "Iliad" show us very little of the vulgar side of human life,-not much even of the familiar; but the result is, that they cease to be heroic. How this is attained is the wonder. It is something to have got rid of the machinery of the gods,-something to have a Thersites eternally despising and despised. But this is not all. The whole tendency of the play,—its incidents, its characterization, is to lower what the Germans call herodom. Ulrici maintains that "The far-sighted Shakspere most certainly did not mistake as to the beneficial effect which a nearer intimacy with the high culture of antiquity had produced, and would produce, upon the Christian European mind. But he saw the danger of an indiscriminate admiration of this classical antiquity; for he who thus accepted it must necessarily fall to the very lowest station in religion and morality;-as, indeed, if we closely observe the character of the 18th century, we see has happened. Out of this prophetic spirit, which pene

trated with equal clearness through the darkness of coming centuries and the clouds of a far-distant past, Shakspere wrote this deeply-significant satire upon the Homeric herodom. He had no desire to debase the elevated, to deteriorate or make little the great, and still less to attack the poetical worth of Homer, or of heroic poetry in general. But he wished to warn thoroughly against the over-valuation and idolatry of them, to which man so willingly abandons himself. He endeavored, at the same time, to bring strikingly to view the universal truth that everything that is merely human, even when it is glorified with the nimbus of a poetic ideality and a mythical past, yet, seen in the bird's-eye perspective of a pure moral ideality, appears very small." All this may seem as super-refinement, in which the critic pretends to see farther than the poet ever saw. But to such an objection there is a very plain answer. A certain result is produced:—is the result correctly described? If it be so, is that result an effect of principle or an effect of chance? As a proof that it was the effect of principle, we may say that Dryden did not see the principle; and that, not seeing it, he entirely changed the character of the play as a work of art.KNIGHT, Pictorial Shakspere.

MORALS

Since the change in the moral tone and thought of the times requires expurgated editions, the morality of Shakespeare's plays has sometimes been questioned. That he is a moralizer no one will claim; that he is thoroughly moral we think must be evident to every careful student. If he is to paint life universal and complete, he cannot eschew immoral characters, but he can, and does show his morality in the handling of these characters; he never paints them in such attractive colors as to make them models for imitation, in each case the character must sustain itself; as Ian Maclaren says, "If Posty will tell lies, I cannot help it." If it is necessary to expose a hideous phase of life,

that it may be condemned and thus serve as a lesson, Shakespeare does not hesitate to do it. Vice may be pardoned, not condoned. Even in his liberality which the extremely fastidious might fancy tends to looseness, he never mixes vice and virtue.-FERRIS-GETTEMY, Outline Studies in the Shakespearean Drama.

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA

MARGARELON, a bastard son of Priam

ENEAS,

ANTENOR,} Trojan commanders

CALCHAS, a Trojan priest, taking part with the Greeks PANDARUS, uncle to Cressida

AGAMEMNON, the Grecian general

MENELAUS, his brother

PATROCLUS,

THERSITES, a deformed and scurrilous Grecian

ALEXANDER, servant to Cressida

Servant to Troilus

Servant to Paris

Servant to Diomedes

HELEN, wife to Menelaus

ANDROMACHE, wife to Hector

CASSANDRA, daughter to Priam; a prophetess

CRESSIDA, daughter to Calchas

Trojan and Greek Soldiers, and Attendants

SCENE: Troy, and the Grecian camp