ty there is little of disagreement.
Three hundred years ago Ben Jonson wrote

... I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor muse can praise too much,--

and the critic of to-day is saying the same thing, only he uses two
volumes instead of two lines to say it. It is true an occasional
voice, like that of Tolstoy's, will be heard in protest, but the
protest and the critic are both likely to be forgotten before the
consensus of three centuries shall be set aside.

Shakspere lives and shall live as long as the human race shall delight
in the study of the human heart, not because of the chastity and
clearness of his diction, not because of the supremacy of his
imagination, nor because of the variety of his melodious verse,--not
even because of the matchless combination of all these charms; but the
Bard of Stratford lives and shall live because his sanity enabled him
to see the "God of things as they are," and his passion penetrated
into the deepest sorrows and rose to the highest aspirations of the
human heart,--and throughout all this sympathizing with goodness and
while despising the depraved yet pitying with a heart of love.

No system-maker or formula-builder can account for Shakspere. Genius
is ever a miracle. However, we can study the environment in which
genius moves and has its being. When we ask ourselves how does it
happen that the plays of Shakspere breathe such a wholesome and
vigorous morality, we are led to two conclusions,--first, that the
England of Shakspere's time was a wholesome and vigorous England;
second, that the man Shakspere was sound to the core.

The close of the sixteenth century is one of the most remarkable
periods in the history of the world. Indeed, so striking is the
intellectual activity of this age that lately an eminent scientist
advanced the hypothesis that some electric influence, some magnetic
current must have let itself loose to work upon the destinies of the
world in the production of great men. For in that period in Italy we
find Tasso, the greatest of modern epic poets; then too lived Galileo
and Kepler, the astronomers; in France we find the philosophic
essayist, Montaigne; in Spain the world-renowned Cervantes, the author
of the immortal Don Quixote; in England both Bacon and Shakspere,
beside a host of other writers, generals, admirals and artists. This
same age is the most flourishing period in Mahometan India; so, too,
in China, in Japan, and