tinct throughout with English humour, with our English love of hard
fighting, our English faith in goodness and in the doom that waits upon
triumphant evil, our English pity for the fallen. Shakspere is
Elizabethan to the core. He stood at the meeting-point of two great
epochs of our history. The age of the Renascence was passing into the
age of Puritanism. Rifts which were still little were widening every
hour, and threatening ruin to the fabric of Church and State which the
Tudors had built up. A new political world was rising into being; a
world healthier, more really national, but less picturesque, less wrapt
in the mystery and splendour that poets love. Great as were the faults
of Puritanism, it may fairly claim to be the first political system
which recognized the grandeur of the people as a whole. As great a
change was passing over the spiritual sympathies of men. A sterner
Protestantism was invigorating and ennobling life by its morality, its
seriousness, its intense conviction of God. But it was at the same time
hardening and narrowing it. The Bible was superseding Plutarch. The
"obstinate questionings" which haunted the finer souls of the Renascence
were being stereotyped into the theological formulas of the Puritan. The
sense of a divine omnipotence was annihilating man. The daring which
turned England into a people of "adventurers," the sense of
inexhaustible resources, the buoyant freshness of youth, the
intoxicating sense of beauty and joy, which created Sidney and Marlowe
and Drake, were passing away before the consciousness of evil and the
craving to order man's life aright before God.

From this new world of thought and feeling Shakspere stood aloof. Turn
as others might to the speculations of theology, man and man's nature
remained with him an inexhaustible subject of interest. Caliban was
among his latest creations. It is impossible to discover whether his
religious belief was Catholic or Protestant. It is hard indeed to say
whether he had any religious belief or no. The religious phrases which
are thinly scattered over his works are little more than expressions of
a distant and imaginative reverence. But on the deeper grounds of
religious faith his silence is significant. He is silent, and the doubt
of Hamlet deepens his silence, about the after-world. "To die," it may
be, was to him as it was to Claudio, "to go we know not whither." Often
as his questionings turn to the riddle of life and death he le