Lear as he bends over dead Cordelia. Macbeth,
hesitating on the verge of crime, throws out of the scale any dread of
future retribution,--assure him only of success _here_, and

"We 'd jump the life to come."

It is impossible to pass the exhaustless Shakspere without some further
word of inadequate comment. Apparently no one in his day guessed that
among the jostling throng of soldiers, statesmen, and philosophers this
obscure playwright was the intellectual king. But Time has more than
redressed the wrong, for now he is not only reverenced as a sovereign but
sometimes worshiped as an oracle. The prime secret of his power,
compared with the men before him and about him, is his return to reality.
It is the actual world, the actual men and women in it, that he portrays,
and not the puppets or shadows of a made-up world. It is a change of
standpoint such as Bacon made when he recalled philosophy from abstract
speculation to the study of concrete facts, and calmly told men that
their past achievements were as nothing compared to the truth they were
to attain with the new weapons. Shakspere has no thought of mankind's
advance, no method or system to offer, but as seer and artist he beholds
and portrays the universe about him. We get some idea of what the change
means when we compare the humanity which he depicts with the account of
mankind given by a logical theologian like Calvin; the simple, sharp
division between saints and sinners, against the mixed, particolored,
genuinely human people who touch our tears and laughter on the
dramatist's page. Or again, contrast his world with Dante's, where the
profoundest imagination and sensibility project themselves into a
phantasmagoria. In the change to Shakspere we are tempted to say that we
have lost heaven and escaped hell, but have taken fresh hold on earthly
life and found in it unmeasured richness and significance.

In reading Shakspere we are never confused or weakened as between virtue
and vice. In simply showing us this life as it is acted out by all kinds
of people, he shows perpetually the beauty of courage, truth, tenderness,
purity, and the ugliness of their opposites. Measure him at the most
critical point, chastity. His plays have plenty of coarseness; they have
touches, though very rarely, of voluptuous description; but they always
leave us with the sense that purity is noble and impurity is evil. It is
striking to note the tone in this respect of