east agreeable and most monotonous of Shakspere's undoubted tragedies,
and _Troilus and Cressida_, said Coleridge, is the hardest to
characterize. The figures of the old Homeric world fare but hardly
under the glaring light of modern standards of morality which Shakspere
turns upon them. Ajax becomes a stupid bully, Ulysses a crafty
politician, and swift-footed Achilles a vain and sulky chief of
faction. In losing their ideal remoteness, the heroes of the _Iliad_
lose their poetic quality, and the lover of Homer experiences an
unpleasant disenchantment.

{118}

It was customary in the 18th century to speak of Shakspere as a rude
though prodigious genius. Even Milton could describe him as "warbling
his native wood-notes wild." But a truer criticism, beginning in
England with Coleridge, has shown that he was also a profound artist.
It is true that he wrote for his audiences, and that his art is not
every-where and at all points perfect. But a great artist will
contrive, as Shakspere did, to reconcile practical exigencies, like
those of the public stage, with the finer requirements of his art.
Strained interpretations have been put upon this or that item in
Shakspere's plays; and yet it is generally true that some deeper reason
can be assigned for his method in a given case than that "the audience
liked puns," or, "the audience liked ghosts." Compare, for example,
his delicate management of the supernatural with Marlowe's procedure in
_Faustus_. Shakspere's age believed in witches, elves, and
apparitions; and yet there is always something shadowy or allegorical
in his use of such machinery. The ghost in _Hamlet_ is merely an
embodied suspicion. Banquo's wraith, which is invisible to all but
Macbeth, is the haunting of an evil conscience. The witches in the
same play are but the promptings of ambition, thrown into a human
shape, so as to become actors in the drama. In the same way, the
fairies in _Midsummer Night's Dream_ are the personified caprices of
the lovers, and they are unseen by the human characters, whose likes
and dislikes they control, save in the instance where {119} Bottom is
"translated" (that is, becomes mad) and has sight of the invisible
world. So in the _Tempest_, Ariel is the spirit of the air and Caliban
of the earth, ministering, with more or less of unwillingness, to man's
necessities.

Shakspere is the most universal of writers. He touches more men at
more points than Homer, or Dant