for theatrical variety, complication and suspense, rather than to any moral purpose of emphasising horror at ingratitude. The clown, who accompanies the king, abounds in phrases, which are not all of them in place and significant. But if to set about picking holes in the beauties of Shakespeare's plays has seemed to us a superfluous and tiresome occupation, such too, from another point of view and in addition pedantic and irreverent, seems to be the investigation of defects that we observe in them; they are opaque points, which the eye does not observe in the splendour of such a sun. Another judgment which also has vogue refers to a constitutive or general defect in Shakespeare's poetry, a certain limit or barrier in it, a narrowness, albeit an ample and a rich narrowness. We must distinguish two forms of this judgment, the first of which might be represented by the epigrams of Platen, who, while recognising Shakespeare's power to move the heart and the strength of his characterisation, declared that "so much truth is a fatal gift," and that Shakespeare draws so incisively, only because he cannot veil his personages in grace and beauty. He greatly admired even what is painful in Shakespeare, looking upon it as beautiful, and was full of admiration for his comical figures, such as Falstaff and Shylock, "an incomparable couple"; but he denied to Shakespeare true tragic power, which "must open the deepest of wounds and then heal them." The second of these forms is the commonest, and Mazzini may stand as its representative. He maintained that Shakespeare was a poet of the real, not of the ideal, of the isolated individual, not of society; that he was not dominated by the thought of duty and responsibility towards mankind, as expressed in politics and history, that his was a voice rather of the Middle Ages than of modern times, which found their origin in Schiller, the poet of humanity and Providence. Even Harris's book concludes with a series of reservations: he says that Shakespeare was neither a philosopher nor a sage; that he never conceived a personage as contesting and combating his own time; that he had only a vague idea of the spirit by which man is led to new and lofty ideals in every historical period; that he was unable to understand a Christ or a Mahomet; that instead of studying, he ridiculed Puritanism and so remained shut up in the Renaissance, and that for these reasons, in spite of _Hamlet;_ he does not belong to the modern world, that the best of a Wordsworth or of a Tolstoi is outside him, and so on. We may perfectly admit all this and it may even be of use in putting a curb upon such hyperbole and such superlatives as those of Coleridge, to the effect that Shakespeare was _anér myriónous,_ the myriad-minded man (although even this myriad-mindedness may seem to be but a very ample narrowness, if myriads be taken as a finite number).