aves it a
riddle to the last without heeding the common theological solutions
around him. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little
life is rounded with a sleep."

[Sidenote: His political sympathies.]

Nor were the political sympathies of the poet those of the coming time.
His roll of dramas is the epic of civil war. The Wars of the Roses fill
his mind, as they filled the mind of his contemporaries. It is not till
we follow him through the series of plays from "Richard the Second" to
"Henry the Eighth" that we realize how profoundly the memory of the
struggle between York and Lancaster had moulded the temper of the
people, how deep a dread of civil war, of baronial turbulence, of
disputes over the succession to the throne, it had left behind it. Men
had learned the horrors of the time from their fathers; they had drunk
in with their childhood the lesson that such a chaos of weakness and
misrule must never be risked again. From such a risk the Crown seemed
the one security. With Shakspere as with his fellow-countrymen the Crown
is still the centre and safeguard of the national life. His ideal
England is an England grouped around a noble king, a king such as his
own Henry the Fifth, devout, modest, simple as he is brave, but a lord
in battle, a born ruler of men, with a loyal people about him and his
enemies at his feet. Socially the poet reflects the aristocratic view of
social life which was shared by all the nobler spirits of the
Elizabethan time. Coriolanus is the embodiment of a great noble; and the
taunts which Shakspere hurls in play after play at the rabble only echo
the general temper of the Renascence. But he shows no sympathy with the
struggle of feudalism against the Crown. If he paints Hotspur with a
fire which proves how thoroughly he could sympathize with the rough,
bold temper of the baronage, he suffers him to fall unpitied before
Henry the Fourth. Apart however from the strength and justice of its
rule, royalty has no charm for him. He knows nothing of the "right
divine of kings to govern wrong" which became the doctrine of prelates
and courtiers in the age of the Stuarts. He shows in his "Richard the
Second" the doom that waits on a lawless despotism, as he denounces in
his "Richard the Third" the selfish and merciless ambition that severs
a ruler from his people. But the dread of misrule was a dim and distant
one. Shakspere had grown up under the reign of Elizabeth; he had known
no ru