GEORGE MEREDITH, 1877 SHAKESPEARE is a well-spring of characters which are saturated with the comic spirit; with more of what we will call blood-life than is to be found anywhere out of Shakespeare; and they are of this world, but they are of the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination, and by great poetic imagination. They are, as it were-I put it to suit my present comparison-creatures of the woods and wilds, not in walled towns, not grouped and toned to pursue a comic exhibition of the narrower world of society. Jaques, Falstaff and his regiment, the varied troop of clowns, Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans and Fluellen-marvellous Welshmen!-Benedict [sic] and Beatrice, Dogberry, and the rest, are subjects of a special study in the poetically comic. On the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic Spirit. A lecture delivered at the London FREDERICK JAMES FURNIVALL, 1877 ALTOGETHER "a manly man" (as Chaucer says) this Shakespeare, strong, tender, humourful, sensitive, impressionable, the truest friend, the foe of none but narrow minds and base. And as we track his work from the lightness and fun of its rise, through the fairy fancy, the youthful passion, the rich imaginings, the ardent patriotism, the brilliant sunshine, of his first and second times, through the tender affection of his Sonnets, the whirlwind of passions in his Tragedies, and then to the lovely sunset of his latest plays, what can we do but bless his name, and be thankful that he came to be a delight, a lift and strength, to us and our children's children to all time-a bond that shall last for ever between all English-speaking, Englishreading men, the members of that great Teutonic brotherhood which shall yet long lead the world in the fight for freedom and for truth! Introduction to The Leopold Shakspere. 1877, p. cxvi. WALTER HORATIO PATER, 1878 And it is not As happens with every true dramatist, Shakespeare is for the most part hidden behind the persons of his creation. Yet there are certain of his characters in which we feel that there is something of self-portraiture. so much in his grander, more subtle and ingenious creations that we feel this-in "Hamlet" and "King Lear"—as in those slighter and more spontaneously developed figures, who, while far from playing principal parts, are yet distinguished by a peculiar happiness and delicate ease in the drawing of them; figures which possess, above all, that winning attractiveness which there is no man but would willingly exercise, and which resemble those works of art which, though not meant to be very great or imposing, are yet wrought of the choicest material. Mercutio, in "Romeo and Juliet," belongs to this group of Shakespeare's characters-versatile, mercurial people, such as make good actors, and in whom the "Nimble spirits of the arteries," the finer but still merely animal elements of great wit, predominate. A careful delineation of minor yet expressive traits seems to mark them out as the characters of his predilection; and it is hard not to identify him with these more than with others. Biron, in "Love's Labour's Lost," is perhaps the most striking member of this group. In this character, which is never quite in touch, never quite on a perfect level of understanding, with the other persons of the play, we see, perhaps, a reflex of Shakespeare himself, when he has just become able to stand aside from and estimate the first period of his poetry. "Love's Labour's Lost." Appreciations with an 1889, pp. 174-5. Essay on Style. See also "Shakspere's English Kings," ib., pp. 201-2. MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1879 LET me have the pleasure of quoting a sentence about Shakespeare, which I met with by accident not long ago in the Correspondant, a French review which not a dozen English people, I suppose, look at. The writer is praising Shakespeare's prose. "With Shakespeare," he says, "prose comes in whenever the subject, being more familiar, is unsuited to the majestic English iambic." And he goes on: "Shakespeare is the king of poetic rhythm and style, as well as the king of the realm of thought; along with his dazzling prose, Shakespeare has succeeded in giving us the most varied, the most harmonious verse which has ever sounded upon the human ear since the verse of the Greeks." M. Henry Cochin, the writer of this sentence, deserves our gratitude for it; it would not be easy to praise Shakespeare, in a single sentence, more justly. And when a foreigner and a Frenchman writes thus of Shakespeare, and when Goethe says of Milton, in whom there was so much to repel Goethe rather than to attract him, that "nothing has ever been done so entirely in the sense of the Greeks as Samson Agonistes," and that "Milton is in very truth a poet whom we must treat with all reverence," then we understand what constitutes a European recognition of poets and poetry as contradistinguished from a merely national recognition, and that in favour both of Milton and |