ofusion in the brilliant fancies of the "Midsummer Night's
Dream"; and passion swept like a tide of resistless delight through
"Romeo and Juliet."

[Sidenote: His historical plays.]

Side by side however with these passionate dreams, these delicate
imaginings and piquant sketches of manners, had been appearing during
this short interval of intense activity a series of dramas which mark
Shakspere's relation to the new sense of patriotism, the more vivid
sense of national existence, national freedom, national greatness, which
gives its grandeur to the age of Elizabeth. England itself was now
becoming a source of literary interest to poet and prose-writer. Warner
in his "Albion's England," Daniel in his "Civil Wars," embalmed in verse
the record of her past; Drayton in his "Polyolbion" sang the fairness of
the land itself, the "tracts, mountains, forests, and other parts of
this renowned isle of Britain." The national pride took its highest
poetic form in the historical drama. No plays seem to have been more
popular from the earliest hours of the new stage than dramatic
representations of our history. Marlowe had shown in his "Edward the
Second" what tragic grandeur could be reached in this favourite field;
and, as we have seen, Shakspere had been led naturally towards it by his
earlier occupation as an adapter of stock pieces like "Henry the Sixth"
for the new requirements of the stage. He still to some extent followed
in plan the older plays on the subjects he selected, but in his
treatment of their themes he shook boldly off the yoke of the past. A
larger and deeper conception of human character than any of the old
dramatists had reached displayed itself in Richard the Third, in
Falstaff, or in Hotspur; while in Constance and Richard the Second the
pathos of human suffering was painted as even Marlowe had never dared to
paint it.

[Sidenote: His religious sympathies.]

No dramas have done so much for Shakspere's enduring popularity with his
countrymen as these historical plays. They have done more than all the
works of English historians to nourish in the minds of Englishmen a love
of and reverence for their country's past. When Chatham was asked where
he had read his English history he answered, "In the plays of
Shakspere." Nowhere could he have read it so well, for nowhere is the
spirit of our history so nobly rendered. If the poet's work echoes
sometimes our national prejudice and unfairness of temper, it is
ins