another part of the literary field. From the Bible to
Shakespeare. This, at first thought, may seem a long journey. There
appears but little congruity between the two. The only needed
connection is the similarity of attack. The same spirit has whetted
its sword against each; but the lack of similarity is more apparent
than real. The Bible is God's exhibit of human nature and its relation
to the Divine personality and plans. Shakespeare is man's profoundest
exhibit of man in his relation to present and future. The fields are
the same. They differ in extent. The profoundness of Shakespeare
seems a shoreward shallow when viewed alongside the Bible. The Bible
and Shakespeare have a further similarity, not one of character, but of
results.

Each has been a potential factor in the stability of the English
language. They each present the noble possibilities of the speech of
the Anglo-Saxon. Each has left its indelible impress on speech and
literature. Kossuth's mastery of English is by him attributed to the
Bible, Shakespeare, and Webster's Dictionary. These were his sole
masters, and sufficed to give him a command of language which ranks him
among the princes of our English speech. That the authorship of the
Iliad and the books of the Bible should be attacked is cause for little
surprise. They were works of antiquity. It is an observable tendency
of the mind to doubt a thing far removed in time. We lose sight of
evidence. We dispense with the leadership of reason, and let
inclination and imagination guide. This is a bias which antiquity must
meet and, if it may, master. If the Iliad and the Bible were
vulnerable in this regard, Shakespeare was not. He was a modern. His
thought is neither ancient nor mediaeval. He has the characteristics
of modern life, begotten of the hot-blooded era in which he lived. The
modern Shakespeare is a target for the iconoclast. It seems but a
stone's-cast from our time to the reign of Elizabeth and the day of the
English drama. The time was one of action in every department of
society. Conquest, colonization, literature, were beginning to render
the Saxon name illustrious. It was the epoch of chivalry and
chivalrous procedure, such as to create a species of literature and
bring it to a perfection which half-wrested the scepter of supremacy
from the hand of the Attic tragedy. In this literature there is a name
which dwarfs all others. Otway, Ford, Massinger, Webster,