glorious Master, whom
neither I nor any better man can ever praise and thank and glorify
enough, belongs all the credit of discerning for himself and discovering
for us all the truth that _Julius Caesar_ is at all points equally like
the greatest works of Shakespeare's middle period and unlike the works of
his last. It is in the main a play belonging to the same order as _King
Henry IV_.; but it differs from our English Henriade--as remarkably
unlike Voltaire's as _Zaire_ is unlike _Othello_--not more by the absence
of Falstaff than by the presence of Brutus. Here at least Shakespeare
has made full amends, if not to all modern democrats, yet assuredly to
all historical republicans, for any possible or apparent preference of
royal to popular traditions. Whatever manner of man may have been the
actual Roman, our Shakespearean Brutus is undoubtedly the very noblest
figure of a typical and ideal republican in all the literature of the
world. "A democracy such as yours in America is my abhorrence," wrote
Landor once to an impudent and foul-mouthed Yankee pseudosopher, who had
intruded himself on that great man's privacy in order to have the
privilege of afterwards informing the readers of a pitiful pamphlet on
England that Landor had "pestered him with Southey"; an impertinence, I
may add, which Mr. Landor at once rebuked with the sharpest contempt and
chastised with the haughtiest courtesy. But, the old friend and lifelong
champion of Kossuth went on to say, his feelings were far different
towards a republic; and if on the one point, then not less certainly on
the other, we may be assured that his convictions and his prepossessions
would have been shared by the author of _Coriolanus_ and _Julius Caesar_.

Having now come perforce to the inevitable verge of _Hamlet_, I hasten to
declare that I can advance no pretension to compete with the claim of
that "literary man" who became immortal by dint of one dinner with a
bishop, and in right of that last glass poured out for him in sign of
amity by "Sylvester Blougram, styled _in partibus Episcopus_, _necnon_
the deuce knows what." I do not propose to prove my perception of any
point in the character of Hamlet "unseized by the Germans yet." I can
only determine, as the Church Catechism was long since wont to bid me,
"to keep my hands from picking and stealing, and my tongue" not only
"from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering"--though this itself is a form
of abstinence not