closely, and yet, even in so doing,
gave, if possible, a greater evidence of real creative power than when
he borrowed a mere outline of a story from some Italian novelist. It is
most instructive to compare _Julius Caesar_ with Ben Jonson's _Catiline_
and _Sejanus_. Jonson was careful not to go beyond his text. In
_Catiline_ he translates almost literally the whole of Cicero's first
oration against Catiline. _Sejanus_ is a mosaic of passages from Tacitus
and Suetonius. There is none of this dead learning in Shakspere's play.
Having grasped the conceptions of the characters of Brutus, Cassius, and
Mark Anthony, as Plutarch gave them, he pushed them out into their
consequences in every word and act, so independently of his original,
and yet so harmoniously with it, that the reader knows that he is
reading history, and needs no further warrant for it than Shakspere's
own. _Timon of Athens_ is the least agreeable and most monotonous of
Shakspere's undoubted tragedies, and _Troilus and Cressida_, said
Coleridge, is the hardest to characterize. The figures of the old
Homeric world fare but hardly under the glaring light of modern
standards of morality which Shakspere turns upon them. Ajax becomes a
stupid bully, Ulysses a crafty politician, and swift-footed Achilles a
vain and sulky chief of faction. In losing their ideal remoteness the
heroes of the _Iliad_ lose their poetic quality, and the lover of Homer
experiences an unpleasant disenchantment.

It was customary in the 18th century to speak of Shakspere as a rude
though prodigious genius. Even Milton could describe him as "warbling
his native wood-notes wild." But a truer criticism, beginning in England
with Coleridge, has shown that he was also a profound artist. It is true
that he wrote for his audiences, and that his art is not every-where and
at all points perfect. But a great artist will contrive, as Shakspere
did, to reconcile practical exigencies, like those of the public stage,
with the finer requirements of his art. Strained interpretations have
been put upon this or that item in Shakspere's plays; and yet it is
generally true that some deeper reason can be assigned for his method in
a given case than that "the audience liked puns," or, "the audience
liked ghosts." Compare, for example, his delicate management of the
supernatural with Marlowe's procedure in _Faustus_. Shakspere's age
believed in witches, elves, and apparitions; and yet there is always
something