It has been said that his dramas cast into the shade and made obsolete all that went before him; but, indeed, his great light equally overwhelms also all that has come after him. Where is the second Shakespeare of the stage? He still stands alone as the type of dramatic greatness and perfection, and is likely to continue so. When we recollect his marvellous characters--his Hamlet, his Macbeth, his Lady Macbeth, his Othello, his Shylock, his Lear, his Ophelia, his Beatrice, his Juliet, his Rosalind--the humours and follies of Shallow, Slender, Dogberry, Touchstone, Bottom, Launce, Falstaff--or his ideal creations, Ariel, Caliban, Puck, Queen Mab--we cannot hope for the appearance of any single genius who shall at once enrich our literature with such living and speaking characters, such a profound insight into the depths and eccentricities of human nature, and such a fervent and varied expression of all the sentiments that are dearest to our hearts. But when we survey in addition the vast extent of history and country over which he has roamed, gleaning thence the most kingly personages, the most tragic incidents, the most moving and thrilling as well as the most amusing sensations and fancies, our wonder is the greater. Greece has lent him its Pericles, its Timon, its Troilus and Cressida--Rome its Cæsar, Brutus, Antony, Coriolanus--Egypt its Cleopatra. Ancient Britain, Scotland, and Denmark; all the fairest cities of Italy--Venice, Verona, Mantua; the forests of Illyria and Belgium, and the isles of the Grecian seas, are made the perpetually shifting arena of his triumphs. Through all these he ranged with a free hand, and, with a power mightier than ever was wielded by any magician, recalled to life all that was most illustrious there, giving them new and more piquant effect from the sympathetic nearness into which he brought them with the spectator, and from the enchanting scenery with which he surrounded them. All this was done by the son of the woolcomber of Stratford--the youthful ranger of the woods of Charlecote, and the uplands of Clopton,--the merry frequenter of country wakes, and then the player of London, who, so far as we know, was never out of his native land in his life.