own to futility and death. He was
always pre-eminently sane. While composing his transcendent _Lear_ and
_Othello_, he was suing Philip Rogers for L1 15s. 10d. While his fancy
roamed in the fairyland of _Midsummer Night's Dream_, his investments
were in the highest degree judicious.

Elizabethan life, whether in town or country, whether among earls or
tapsters, was infinitely more frank, varied, and picturesque than it can
ever be again. Men and women displayed more freely their natural
idiosyncrasies. Nor did the traveller rush at fifty miles an hour
through all this variegated world. He saw it lingeringly and intimately,
as Chaucer saw his Pilgrims, or Goldsmith his Village, or Scott his
Border peasants.

Bagehot says truly that, to have experiences, one must have the
experiencing nature. To make observations, one must have an observing
nature, and that nature Shakespeare possessed as no other man has
possessed it. He noted everything. So might another, but the superlative
merit of Shakespeare's observation is that he noted all and always with
humorous and universal sympathy, with an eye absolutely free from the
jaundice of Carlyle, as it was free from the bookish astigmatism of Ben
Jonson. His mental retina formed a perfect mirror to hold up to nature.
Whether it be true or not that he had seen a veritable Dogberry at
Grendon, Bucks, it is certain that he had seen the type somewhere. Best
of all, he had not seen it in irritation or contempt. If we are told
that Shakespeare presents "no entire and perfect hero, no entire and
perfect villain," it is simply because he had--like ourselves--never set
eyes on either of those monsters. He also never made the mistake of
reading himself into other men, any more than he made the artistic
mistake of unlocking his heart and taking a hundred and fifty sonnets to
do it. His clear objective picture is never vitiated by the desire to
preach. He has no system of ethics, politics, or anything else to teach.
Doubtless Shakespeare had his own views on all important matters of life
and death; but in the drama the artist's business is to present us with
the kaleidoscope of life, not to insist upon our interpreting it to
certain ends, of which he is to be the arbiter. You cannot, perhaps,
read _Lear_ without being a better man, or _Hamlet_ without being a
wiser; but you are permitted to be better and wiser in your own way, and
not in some way ready mapped out for you. Do not let us talk o