ture he did include. His sympathetic
insight was both serious and humorous; and he thus equally escaped the
intolerance of taste and the intolerance of intelligence. What we would
call the worst criminals and the most stupid fools were, as mirrored in
his mind, fairly dealt with; every opportunity was afforded them to
justify their right to exist; their words, thoughts, and acts were
viewed in relation to their circumstances and character, so that he made
them inwardly known, as well as outwardly perceived. The wonder of all
this would be increased, if we supposed, for the sake of illustration,
that the persons and events of all Shakespeare's plays were historical,
and that, instead of being represented by Shakespeare, they were
narrated by Macaulay. The result would be that the impression received
from the historian of every incident and every person would be
different, and would be wrong. The external facts might not be altered;
but the falsehood would proceed from the incapacity or indisposition of
the historian to pierce to the heart of the facts by sympathy and
imagination. There would be abundant information, abundant eloquence,
abundant invective against crime, abundant scorn of stupidity and folly,
perhaps much sagacious reflection and judicial scrutiny of evidence; but
the inward and essential truth would be wanting. What external statement
of the acts and probable motives of Macbeth and Othello would convey the
idea we have of them from being witnesses of the conflict of their
thoughts and passions? How wicked and shallow and feeble and foolish
would Hamlet appear, if represented, not in the light of Shakespeare's
imagination, but in the light of Macaulay's epigrams! How the historian
would "play the dazzling fence" of his rhetoric on the indecision of the
prince, his brutality to Ophelia, his cowardice, his impotence between
contending motives, and the chaos of blunders and crimes in which he
sinks from view! The subject would be even a better one for him than
that of James II.; yet the very supposition of such a mode of treatment
makes us feel the pathos of the real Hamlet's injunction to the friend
who strives to be his companion in death:--

"Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
_To tell my story_."

If the historian would thus deal with the heroes, why, such "small deer"
as Bardolph and Master Slender would of course be puffed out of
existence wi