rest of those poetical coiners: he only
rubbed off the rust, purified and brightened it, so that history herself
has been known to receive it back as sterling.

Truth, wherever manifested, should be sacred: so Shakspeare deemed, and
laid no profane hand upon her altars. But tragedy--majestic tragedy, is
worthy to stand before the sanctuary of Truth, and to be the priestess
of her oracles. "Whatever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue
amiable or grave, whatsoever hath passion or admiration in all the
changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily
subtleties and refluxes of man's thought from within;"[66]--whatever is
pitiful in the weakness, sublime in the strength, or terrible in the
perversion of human intellect, these are the domain of Tragedy. Sibyl
and Muse at once, she holds aloft the book of human fate, and is the
interpreter of its mysteries. It is not, then, making a mock of the
serious sorrows of real life, nor of those human beings who lived,
suffered and acted upon this earth, to array them in her rich and
stately robes, and present them before us as powers evoked from dust and
darkness, to awaken the generous sympathies, the terror or the pity of
mankind. It does not add to the pain, as far as tragedy is a source of
emotion, that the wrongs and sufferings represented, the guilt of Lady
Macbeth, the despair of Constance, the arts of Cleopatra, and the
distresses of Katherine, had a real existence; but it adds infinitely to
the moral effect, as a subject of contemplation and a lesson of
conduct.[67]

I shall be able to illustrate these observations more fully in the
course of this section, in which we will consider those characters which
are drawn from history; and first, Cleopatra.

Of all Shakspeare's female characters, Miranda and Cleopatra appear to
me the most wonderful. The first, unequalled as a poetic conception; the
latter, miraculous as a work of art. If we could make a regular
classification of his characters, these would form the two extremes of
simplicity and complexity; and all his other characters would be found
to fill up some shade or gradation between these two.

Great crimes, springing from high passions, grafted on high qualities,
are the legitimate source of tragic poetry. But to make the extreme of
littleness produce an effect like grandeur--to make the excess of
frailty produce an effect like power--to heap up together all that is
most unsubstantial, frivol