or
religious passion is dominant. He could not, of course,--he, the poet of
feudalism,--overlook religion as an element of the social organization
of Europe, but he did not seize Christian ideas in their essence, or
look at the human soul in its direct relations with God. And just think
of the field of humanity closed to him! For sixteen hundred years,
remarkable men and women had appeared, representing all classes of
religious character, from the ecstasy of the saint to the gloom of the
fanatic; yet his intellectual curiosity was not enough excited to
explore and reproduce their experience. Do you say that the subject was
foreign to the purpose of an Elizabethan playwright? The answer is, that
Decker and Massinger attempted it, for a popular audience, in "The
Virgin Martyr"; and though the tragedy of "The Virgin Martyr" is a
huddled mass of beauties and deformities, its materials of incident and
characters, could Shakespeare have been attracted to them, might have
been organized into as great a drama as Othello. Again, Marlowe, in his
play of "Dr. Faustus," has imperfectly treated a subject which in
Shakespeare's hands would have been made into a tragedy sublimer than
Lear could he have thrown himself into it with equal earnestness.
Marlowe, from the fact that he was a positive atheist, and a brawling
one, had evidently at some time directed his whole heart and imagination
to the consideration of religious questions, and had resolutely faced
facts from which Shakespeare turned away.

Shakespeare, also, in common with the other dramatists of the time,
looked at the Puritans as objects of satire, laughing _at_ them instead
of gazing _into_ them. They were doubtless grotesque enough in external
appearance; but the poet of human nature should have penetrated through
the appearance to the substance, and recognized in them, not merely the
possibility of Cromwell, but of the ideal of character which Cromwell
but imperfectly represented. You may say that Shakespeare's nature was
too sunny and genial to admit the Puritan. It was not too sunny or
genial to admit Richards, and Iagos, and Gonerils, and "secret, black,
and midnight hags."

It may be doubted also if Shakespeare's affinities extended to those
numerous classes of human character that stand for the reforming and
philanthropic sentiments of humanity. We doubt if he was hopeful for the
race. He was too profoundly impressed with its disturbing passions to
have faith in