rough and vigorous stem, and the wide-spreading roots on which they depend, are present along with them, and share, in their places, the equal care of their Creator.

The Edinburgh Review, August 1817. Art. IX. "Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, by William Hazlitt." Vol. xxviii. p. 474.

WILLIAM HAZLITT, 1818
(1778-1830)

THE striking peculiarity of Shakespeare's mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had "a mind reflecting ages past," and present:-All the people that ever lived are there. There was no respect of persons with him. His genius alone shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar: "All corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave," are hardly hid from his searching glance. He was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives-as well those that they knew, as those

which they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves. The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his fancy. Airy beings waited at his call, and came at his bidding. Harmless fairies nodded to him, and did him curtesies: and the night-hag bestrode the blast at the command of "his so potent art." The world of spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and women: and there is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other; for if the preternatural characters he describes could be supposed to exist, they would speak, and feel, and act, as he makes them. He had only to think of any thing in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it. When he conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, "subject to the same skyey influences," the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents which would occur in reality.

"On Shakespeare and Milton," Lectures on The English Poets. 1818, pp. 91-3.

For a comment on this passage by William Minto, see p. 189.

The following occurs in Hazlitt's essay "On Dryden and Pope" (ib., pp. 137– 38):-The poet of nature is one who, from the elements of beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast, sympathises with whatever is beautiful, and grand, and impassioned in nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and depth, and harmony of his mind, may be said to hold communion with the very soul of nature; to be identified with and to foreknow and to record the feelings of all men at all times and places, as they are liable to the same impressions; and to exert the same power over the minds of his readers, that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are; he feels them in their universal interest, for he feels them as they

affect the first principles of his and our common nature. Such was Homer, such was Shakespeare, whose works will last as long as nature, because they are a copy of the indestructible forms and everlasting impulses of nature, welling out from the bosom as from a perennial spring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of their maker. The power of the imagination in them, is the representative power of all nature. It has its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuit

of the universe.

See also The Round Table, 1817-" On Posthumous Fame-whether Shakespeare was influenced by a love of it."

FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS, 1804

(1793-1835)

"Shakespeare."

I LOVE to rove o'er history's page,
Recall the hero and the sage;

Revive the actions of the dead,
And memory of ages fled:

Yet it yields me greater pleasure
To read the poet's pleasing measure.
Led by Shakespeare, bard inspired,
The bosom's energies are fired;
We learn to shed the generous tear
O'er poor Ophelia's sacred bier ;
To love the merry moonlit scene,
With fairy elves in valleys green ;
Or borne on fancy's heavenly wings,
To listen while sweet Ariel sings.

How sweet the native wood notes wild

Of him, the Muse's favourite child!
Of him whose magic lays impart

Each various feeling to the heart.

Poems. By Felicia Dorothea Browne, 1808, p. 48.

One of Mrs. Hemans' earliest tastes-relates her sister in her Memoirswas a passion for Shakespeare, which she read as her choicest recreation at six years old. The above lines were written when she was eleven years of age.