with the spirit and opinions
of his era, that without a certain comprehension of the men of
the Elizabethan period he cannot be understood fully. Indeed,
his greatness is to a large extent due to his sympathy with the men
around him, his power of clearly thinking out the answers to the
all-time questions, and giving a voice to them that his contemporaries
could understand;--answers that others could not for themselves
formulate--could, perhaps, only vaguely and dimly feel after. To
understand these answers fully, the language in which they were
delivered must be first thoroughly mastered.

11. I intend, therefore, to attempt to sketch out the leading features
of a phase of religious belief that acquired peculiar distinctness and
prominence during Shakspere's lifetime--more, perhaps, than it ever did
before, or has done since--the belief in the existence of evil spirits,
and their influence upon and dealings with mankind. The subject will be
treated in three sections. The first will contain a short statement of
the laws that seem to be of universal operation in the creation and
maintenance of the belief in a multitudinous band of spirits, good and
evil; and of a few of the conditions of the Elizabethan epoch that may
have had a formative and modifying influence upon that belief. The
second will be devoted to an outline of the chief features of that
belief, as it existed at the time in question--the organization,
appearance, and various functions and powers of the evil spirits, with
special reference to Shakspere's plays. The third and concluding
section, will embody an attempt to trace the growth of Shakspere's
thought upon religious matters through the medium of his allusions to
this subject.

* * * * *

12. The empire of the supernatural must obviously be most extended
where civilization is the least advanced. An educated man has to make a
conscious, and sometimes severe, effort to refrain from pronouncing a
dogmatic opinion as to the cause of a given result when sufficient
evidence to warrant a definite conclusion is wanting; to the savage,
the notion of any necessity for, or advantage to be derived from, such
self-restraint never once occurs. Neither the lightning that strikes
his hut, the blight that withers his crops, the disease that destroys
the life of those he loves; nor, on the other hand, the beneficent
sunshine or life-giving rain, is by him traceable to any known
physical