in the firmament, at which the great and the high of all ages kindle
themselves: he is the possession of all the chosen of the world for
uncounted time. Dante, one calculates, may long survive Mahomet. In
this way the balance may be made straight again.

But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on the
world by what _we_ can judge of their effect there, that a man and his
work are measured. Effect? Influence? Utility? Let a man _do_ his
work; the fruit of it is the care of Another than he. It will grow its
own fruit; and whether embodied in Caliph Thrones and Arabian
Conquests, so that it 'fills all Morning and Evening Newspapers', and
all Histories, which are a kind of distilled Newspapers; or not
embodied so at all;--what matters that? That is not the real fruit of
it! The Arabian Caliph, in so far only as he did something, was
something. If the great Cause of Man, and Man's work in God's Earth,
got no furtherance from the Arabian Caliph, then no matter how many
scimitars he drew, how many gold piastres pocketed, and what uproar
and blaring he made in this world,--_he_ was but a loud-sounding
inanity and futility; at bottom, he _was_ not at all. Let us honour
the great empire of _Silence_, once more! The boundless treasury which
we do _not_ jingle in our pockets, or count up and present before men!
It is perhaps, of all things, the usefulest for each of us to do, in
these loud times.-- --

* * * * *

As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically
the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe,
its Inner Life; so Shakespeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer
Life of our Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies,
humours, ambitions, what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at
the world, men then had. As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece;
so in Shakespeare and Dante, after thousands of years, what our Modern
Europe was, in Faith and in Practice, will still be legible. Dante has
given us the Faith or soul; Shakespeare, in a not less noble way, has
given us the Practice or body. This latter also we were to have; a man
was sent for it, the man Shakespeare. Just when that chivalry way of
life had reached its last finish, and was on the point of breaking
down into slow or swift dissolution, as we now see it everywhere, this
other sovereign Poet, with his seeing eye, with his perennial singing
voice, w