characters as intellectual beings, is that they are individuals and no more; faithful or grotesque portraits of reality, they are not touched with that purple light which affords insight into universal relations and hidden causes. [Sidenote: not poetic creations.] His failure is shewn by its effect: his characters are not so conceived as to lead the mind to the comprehension of anything beyond their own individual peculiarities, or to elevate it into that region of active and conceptive contemplation into which it is raised by the finest class of poetry: he exhibited reality as reality, and not in its relation to possibility; he even diverges into the investigation of causes, instead of seeing them at a glance, and indicating them by effects; he anatomised human life, and hung up its dry bones along the walls of his study. In the close obedience which Shakspeare rendered to each of these two canons, borne in upon his mind by the instantaneous suggestions of his happy genius, we may discover the origin of his tremendous power. [Sidenote: Shakspere's power lay in subordinating Fancy and Passion to Intellect.] To commence at the point where his adherence to the first and subsidiary rule is most slightly manifested, it is to be noticed, that his works are marked throughout by a predominance of the qualities of the understanding over the fancy and the passions. This is not true of the fundamental conception of the work, nor of the relations by which his characters are united into the dramatic groupes; in these particulars the poetical faculty is allowed to work freely: but it is after the initial steps have been taken under her guidance, that the rule is committed to the sterner power of intellect. The stir of fancy often breaks through the restraints which hold it in check; the warmth of feeling effervesces very unfrequently. [Sidenote: All his characters have quiet good sense.] [Sidenote: Shakspere's shrewdness in his minor scenes.] The poet's personages [97:1]are all more or less marked by an air of quiet sense, which is extremely unusual in poetry, and incompatible with the unnecessary or frequent display of feeling; and accordingly, his less important scenes, whether they be gay or serious, occupied in the business of the drama, or devoted to an exchange of witty sallies, possess, where they aim at nothing higher, at least a degree of intellectual shrewdness, which very often savours of worldly coldness. [Sidenote: His soberness gives force to his passion.] Viewed merely as increasing the effect of his passionate scenes, this prevailing sobriety of tone gives him an incalculable advantage: passion in his works bursts out when it is let loose, like the spring of a mastiff unchained. [Sidenote: Shakspere's sober rationality.] It is of this quality, his sober rationality, that we are apt to think when we acknowledge his truth of representation; and the excellence is indispensable to truth in any sense, because the want of it gives birth