om their outside, but in their rudiments and first principles. He
begins at the heart of a character, and unfolds it outwards, forming
and compacting all the internal parts and organs as he unfolds it; and
the development, even because it is a real and true development,
proceeds at every step, not by mere addition or aggregation of
particulars, but by digestion and vital assimilation of all the matter
that enters into the structure; there being, in virtue of the life
that pervades the thing, just such elements, and just so much of them,
sent to each organ, as is necessary to its formation. The result of
this wonderful process is, that the characters are all that they
appear to be, and a vast deal more besides: there is food for endless
thought and reflection in them: beneath and behind the surface, there
is all the substance that the surface promises or has room for,--an
inexhaustible stock of wealth and significance beyond what is directly
seen; so that the more they are looked into the more they are found to
contain.

Thus there is a sort of realistic verisimilitude in Shakespeare's
characters. It is as if they had been veritable living men and women,
and he had seen and comprehended and delivered the whole and pure
truth respecting them. Of course, therefore, they are as far as
possible from being mere names set before pieces of starched and
painted rhetoric, or mere got-up figures of modes and manners: they
are no shadows or images of fancy, no heroes of romance, no
theatrical personages at all; they have nothing surreptitious or
make-believe or ungenuine about them: they do not in any sort belong
to the family of poetical beings; they are not designs from works of
art; nay, they are not even _designs_ from nature; they are nature
itself. Nor are they compilations from any one-sided or sectional view
of mankind, but are cut out round and full from the whole of humanity;
so that they touch us at all points, and, as it were, surround us.
From all this it follows that there is no repetition among them:
though there are some striking family resemblances, yet no two of them
are individually alike: for, as the process of forming them was a real
growth, an evolution from a germ, the spontaneous result of creative
Nature working within them, so there could be no copying of one from
another. Accordingly, as in the men and women of Nature's own making,
different minds conceive different ideas of them, and have different
feel