te characters who act and speak and are as
much alive to us as the men and women we daily meet, to teach mankind
the profoundest philosophy, the littleness of the great, the greatness
of humility and truth, and to inculcate by immortal examples the highest
and purest morality.

And so England found at last the greatness of her greatest son in the
"father of German literature," and the nineteenth century affirmed the
judgment of Lessing. Among Germans, it needs only to name Wieland,
Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Ulrici, and Gervinus; among Englishmen,
Coleridge, who said, "No one has ever yet produced one scene conceived
and expressed in the Shaksperean idiom"; and Charles Knight, who has
exploded the traditions of Rowe and Stevens about the deer stealing, the
wife desertion and the testamentary insult, and conclusively shown that
"the theory of Shakspere's first employment in repairing the plays of
others is altogether untenable, supported only by a very narrow view of
the great essentials of a dramatic work, and by verbal criticism which,
when carefully examined, fails even in its own petty assumptions."

But English criticism is not conclusive for us without the indorsement
of American scholars. Let me quote what Emerson says:--"He is the father
of German literature. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought are
Shaksperean. His mind is the horizon beyond which we at present do not
see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. He cannot step from
his tripod, and give us anecdotes of his inspiration. He is
inconceivably wise; the others conceivably. A good reader can, in a
sort, nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence, but not into
Shakspere's."

And Lowell has uttered what seemed the final estimate:--"Those
magnificent crystallizations of feeling and phrase, basaltic masses,
molten and interfused by the primal fires of passion, are not to be
reproduced by the slow experiments of the laboratory striving to parody
creation with artifice.... Among the most alien races he is as solidly
at home as a mountain seen from many sides by many lands, itself
superbly solitary, yet the companion of all thoughts and domesticated in
all imaginations."

All this weight of opinion has not served to settle the question of the
sovereignty of Shakspere. It is hardly needful to mention the action
brought by Ignatius Donnelly to prove that Francis Bacon was the author
of work which excels the "Novum Organum," for that action was