stage; and therefore the other personages, such as may,
speak Ulyssean, with, of course, such personal allusion and peculiar
trick as a dramatist of Shakespeare's skill could not leave them without
for difference. For example, no two men could be more unlike in
character than Achilles and Ulysses, and yet the former, having asked
the latter what he is reading, he, uttering his own thought, says as
follows with the subsequent reply:

_Ulyss._--A strange fellow here
Writes me: That man, how dearly ever parted,[9]
How much in having, or without or in,
Cannot make boast to have that which he hath
Nor feels not what he owes but by reflection,
As when his virtues shining upon others
Heat them, and they retort that heat again
To the first giver.

_Achil._--This is not strange, Ulysses.
The beauty that is borne here in the face
The bearer knows not, but commends itself
To others' eyes; nor doth the eye itself,
That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself,
Not going from itself; but eye to eye opposed,
Salutes each other with each other's form,
For speculation turns not to itself
Till it hath travelled and is mirror'd there
Where it may see itself. This is not strange at all.

Now these speeches are made of the same metal and coined in the same
mint; and they both of them have the image and superscription of William
Shakespeare. No words or thoughts could be more unsuited to that bold,
bloody egoist, "the broad Achilles," than the reply he makes to Ulysses;
but here Shakespeare was merely using the Greek champion as a lay figure
to utter his own thoughts, which are perfectly in character with the
son of Autolycus. Ulysses thus flows over upon the whole serious part of
the play. Agamemnon, Nestor, AEneus, and the rest all talk alike, and all
like Ulysses. That Ulysses speaks for Shakespeare will, I think, be
doubted by no reader who has reached the second reading of this play by
the way which I have pointed out to him. And why, indeed, should Ulysses
not speak for Shakespeare, or how could it be other than that he should?
The man who had written "Hamlet," "King Lear," "Othello," and "Macbeth,"
if he wished to find Ulysses, had only to turn his mind's eye inward;
and thus we have in this drama Shakespeare's only piece of introspective
work.

But there is another personage who gives character to this drama, and
who is of a very different sort. Thersi