hould seem at times to accept for himself, and even to
enforce by reiteration of argument upon his conscience and his reason,
some such conviction or suspicion as to his own character, tells much
rather in disfavour than in favour of its truth. A man whose natural
temptation was to swerve, whose inborn inclination was to shrink and
skulk aside from duty and from action, would hardly be the first and last
person to suspect his own weakness, the one only unbiassed judge and
witness of sufficiently sharp-sighted candour and accuracy to estimate
aright his poverty of nature and the malformation of his mind. But the
high-hearted and tender-conscienced Hamlet, with his native bias towards
introspection intensified and inflamed and directed and dilated at once
by one imperative pressure and oppression of unavoidable and unalterable
circumstance, was assuredly and exactly the one only man to be troubled
by any momentary fear that such might indeed be the solution of his
riddle, and to feel or to fancy for the moment some kind of ease and
relief in the sense of that very trouble. A born doubter would have
doubted even of Horatio; hardly can all positive and almost palpable
evidence of underhand instigation and inspired good intentions induce
Hamlet for some time to doubt even of Ophelia.

III.

The entrance to the third period of Shakespeare is like the entrance to
that lost and lesser Paradise of old,

With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms.

Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony, Timon, these are names indeed
of something more than tragic purport. Only in the sunnier distance
beyond, where the sunset of Shakespeare's imagination seems to melt or
flow back into the sunrise, do we discern Prospero beside Miranda,
Florizel by Perdita, Palamon with Arcite, the same knightly and kindly
Duke Theseus as of old; and above them all, and all others of his divine
and human children, the crowning and final and ineffable figure of
Imogen.

Of all Shakespeare's plays, _King Lear_ is unquestionably that in which
he has come nearest to the height and to the likeness of the one tragic
poet on any side greater than himself whom the world in all its ages has
ever seen born of time. It is by far the most AEschylean of his works;
the most elemental and primaeval, the most oceanic and Titanic in
conception. He deals here with no subtleties as in _Hamlet_, with no
conventions as in _Othello_: there is no question of "a