the Winter's Tale. A ripening to the very end; ripeness in the choice of theme, in the imaginative treatment, in the skill of the development, in the versification, in the depth of the philosophy, in the human pathos and sweetness that bathes each drama in an atmosphere of its own. And after this, no more! Nothing follows this autumn. We might, but for one line, apply to this our singer, Logan's beautiful lines to the cuckoo :— Sweet bird, thy bower is ever green, Thy sky is ever clear; There is no winter in Shakspeare's year, but always (and it deepens towards the close) there is sorrow in his song, and it gives to that song its peculiar and imperishable charm. And if there is warrant for all we have been noticing if I have rightly interpreted the effect of his successive plays upon the general readerI would urge that we have learned much about Shakspeare that is of rarest value. We may possess but a handful of facts about his private life we dare not identify him with this or that character in his dramas; but still he does reveal himself to us in those dramas. It is a real man that we note there, and he may become, as we study him, ever more real and more a friend to us as we test this reality. For we feel that we are in contact with a life and a growth. It is a living personality, having the same affections, organs, senses, even as we common men. He would not be one jot more real to us if all the facts of his domestic history had been collected and transmitted by some gossip-collector of his day, and if we were able to pronounce with confidence on the conduct of that odious Ann Hathaway who inveigled a mere boy into so deplorable a marriage. -to And as we take our leave of Shakspeare, quitting so early the stage, and the drama, and all the harassments of public life, to turn once more, "like the cony, to the place where he was kindled the family, the friends, the neighbours, the simple interests and duties of his native town-then, after some four years, to end in quietness his life, it is allowable once again to ask in the latest words of our own Laureate— What sight so lured him thro' the fields he knew As where earth's green stole into heaven's own hue, What sound was dearest in his native dells? Far-far-away. THE ETHICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKSPEARE ALTHOUGH with a natural reluctance to introduce a personal reminiscence into my lecture, I still feel that I must explain how this lecture came to be written. Some two years since it fell to my lot to contribute to the first number of my friend Mr. Lathbury's new journal, the Pilot, some remarks on Mr. Stephen Phillips's Tragedy, Paolo and Francesca (founded, of course, on the immortal episode in Dante's Inferno). Dante had treated the theme, as he treated all such, from the one Christian and Catholic standpoint. The crime of the lovers, that is to say, was regarded as "sin," and as incurring the dread punishment of sin. In using the subject for dramatic purposes, the purely didactic treatment was, from the nature of the case, impossible. But what, as I ventured to think, repelled the reader in Mr. Phillips's drama was that, though dealing with a tragedy arising out of the profoundest temptations and sorrows of poor human nature, he had all but entirely omitted the moral element altogether. The very existence of a moral law, or even of a moral sense, seemed ignored. And I went on to contrast this method with that of Shakspeare. I did not take this course for the superfluous purpose of contrasting the general merits as a dramatist of Shakspeare and Mr. Phillips, but simply as contrasting their respective attitudes towards the personages in their plays, out of whose characters and acts the plots of those plays were developed. And I submitted that though a dramatist, never speaking in his own person but always in the person of his characters, cannot express directly his own opinion of them and their actions, still, in the instance of Shakspeare, the poet's treatment of his theme never left in the reader or spectator any reasonable doubt as to where the author's sympathies lay. I contended that in all of Shakspeare's maturer dramas the existence of the moral law and the moral sense was never lost sight of; and indeed pervaded, and gave its chief interest and charm to the play as a whole. For taking this line I was taken to task by critics, who maintained that such reasoning is beside the mark. Both methods-Shakspeare's and Mr. Phillips's-it is urged, are equally legitimate; although, as one critic was bold enough to say, Shakspeare's method was in fact only carried off by his prodigious genius, and in any lesser poet would have been intolerable. Mr. Phillips's school of tragic drama, we were reminded, is that of Maeterlinck, not of Shakspeare. It is his business to "adorn a tale," but not to "point a moral," directly or indirectly. In treating dramatically Dante's famous story of the unhappy lovers, he has nothing to do with the innocence or guilt-still less with the righteousness or sinof the principal actors. All he had to do was to show with truth and skill, and also with all available poetic adornment, how the web of destiny was woven round them, and how a power they could not control was driving them on to the fatal end. "What," it was asked, "can Canon Ainger want more? Does he want the poet to have appended a moral to the play, pronouncing his own judgment on the characters ? Or would he have liked moral sentiments to have been placed here and there in the mouths of the characters themselves, whereby the same end might be attained?" I hope I have not unfairly represented the attitude of at least one of my courteous opponents. Another, a very distinguished journalist and editor, has suggested that probably, and naturally, clerical bias is answerable for my opinions. But I can honestly say that I did not arrive at those opinions by that path. When I had read Paolo and Francesca, with sincere admiration for its many notable qualities, its mostly pure and eloquent verse, and its dramatic skill, I found myself asking at the end, Why is it that, having satisfied my curiosity as to the author's treatment |