; in Massinger it is rank republicanism; in Beaumont and
Fletcher even _jure divino_ principles are carried to excess;--but
Shakespeare never promulgates any party tenets. He is always the
philosopher and the moralist, but at the same time with a profound
veneration for all the established institutions of society, and for those
classes which form the permanent elements of the State,--especially never
introducing a professional character, as such, otherwise than as
respectable. If he must have any name, he should be styled a philosophical
aristocrat, delighting in those hereditary institutions which have a
tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks, of
which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages. Hence,
again, you will observe the good nature with which he seems always to make
sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational
animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding up its
absurdities to its face; and sometimes you may trace a tone of almost
affectionate superiority, something like that in which a father speaks of
the rogueries of a child. See the good-humoured way in which he describes
Stephano passing from the most licentious freedom to absolute despotism
over Trinculo and Caliban. The truth is, Shakespeare's characters are all
_genera_ intensely individualised; the results of meditation, of which
observation supplied the drapery and the colours necessary to combine them
with each other. He had virtually surveyed all the great component powers
and impulses of human nature,--had seen that their different combinations
and subordinations were in fact the individualisers of men, and showed how
their harmony was produced by reciprocal disproportions of excess or
deficiency. The language in which these truths are expressed was not drawn
from any set fashion, but from the profoundest depths of his moral being,
and is therefore for all ages.

"Love's Labour's Lost."

The characters in this play are either impersonated out of Shakespeare's
own multiformity by imaginative self-position, or out of such as a country
town and schoolboy's observation might supply,--the curate, the
schoolmaster, the Armado (who even in my time was not extinct in the
cheaper inns of North Wales), and so on. The satire is chiefly on follies
of words. Biron and Rosaline are evidently the pre-existent state of
Benedict and Beatrice, and so, perhaps, is B