hen is the true secret of his power
and of his fame? This question is not difficult to answer.

First, these are due to his wonderful insight into human nature, and the
philosophy of human life: he dissects the human mind in all its
conditions, and by this vivisection he displays its workings as it lives
and throbs; he divines the secret impulses of all ages and
characters--childhood, boyhood, manhood, girlhood, and womanhood; men of
peace, and men of war; clowns, nobles, and kings. His large heart was
sympathetic with all, and even most so with the lowly and suffering; he
shows us to ourselves, and enables us to use that knowledge for our
profit. All the virtues are held up to our imitation and praise, and all
the vices are scourged and rendered odious in our sight. To read
Shakspeare aright is of the nature of honest self-examination, that most
difficult and most necessary of duties.

CREATION OF CHARACTER.--Second: He stands supreme in the creation of
character, which may be considered the distinguishing mark of the highest
literary genius. The men and women whom he has made are not stage-puppets
moved by hidden strings; they are real. We know them as intimately as the
friends and acquaintances who visit us, or the people whom we accost in
our daily walks.

And again, in this varied delineation of character, Shakspeare less than
any other author either obtrudes or repeats himself. Unlike Byron, he is
nowhere his own hero: unlike most modern novelists, he fashions men who,
while they have the generic human resemblance, differ from each other like
those of flesh and blood around us: he has presented a hundred phases of
love, passion, ambition, jealousy, revenge, treachery, and cruelty, and
each distinct from the others of its kind; but lest any character should
degenerate into an allegorical representation of a single virtue or vice,
he has provided it with the other lineaments necessary to produce in it a
rare human identity.

The stock company of most writers is limited, and does arduous duty in
each new play or romance; so that we detect in the comic actor, who is now
convulsing the pit with laughter, the same person who a little while ago
died heroically to slow music in the tragedy. Each character in Shakspeare
plays but one part, and plays it skilfully and well. And who has portrayed
the character of woman like Shakspeare?--the grand sorrow of the
repudiated Catharine, the incorruptible chastity of Isabella,