their themes, his genius gave to the
entire series an inner harmony, and a continuity corresponding to that
which is distinctive of the national life, such as not unnaturally
inspired certain commentators with the wish to prove it a symmetrically
constructed whole. He thus brought this peculiarly national species to a
perfection which made it difficult, if not impossible, for his later
contemporaries and successors to make more than an occasional addition
to his series. None of them was, however, found able or ready to take up
the thread where Shakespeare had left it, after perfunctorily attaching
the present to the past by a work (probably not all his own) which must
be regarded as the end rather than the crown of the series of his
_histories_.[181] But to furnish such supplements accorded little with
the tastes and tendencies of the later Elizabethans; and with the
exception of an isolated work,[182] the national historical drama in
Shakespeare reached at once its perfection and its close. The ruder form
of the old chronicle history for a time survived the advance made upon
it; but the efforts in this field of T. Heywood,[183] S. Rowley,[184]
and others are, from a literary point of view, anachronisms.

Of Shakespeare's other plays the several groups exercised a more direct
influence upon the general progress of our dramatic literature. His
Roman tragedies, though following their authorities with much the same
fidelity as that of the English _histories_, even more effectively
taught the great lesson of free dramatic treatment of historic themes,
and thus pre-eminently became the perennial models of the modern
historic drama. His tragedies on other subjects, which necessarily
admitted of a more absolute freedom of treatment, established themselves
as the examples for all time of the highest kind of tragedy. Where else
is exhibited with the same fulness the struggle between will and
obstacle, character and circumstance? Where is mirrored with equal power
and variety the working of those passions in the mastery of which over
man lies his doom? Here, above all, Shakespeare as compared with his
predecessors, as well as with his successors, "_is_ that nature which
they paint and draw." He threw open to modern tragedy a range of
hitherto unknown breadth and depth and height, and emancipated the
national drama in its noblest forms from limits to which it could never
again restrict itself without a consciousness of having reno