of Shakspeare,--if we omit that side of Shakspeare's mind which confronts the other world, and out of which Hamlet sprang,--and his men and women are even more real, and more easily matched in the living and breathing world. For in Shakspeare's characters, as in his language, there is surplusage, superabundance; the measure is heaped and running over. From his sheer wealth, he is often the most _un_dramatic of writers. He is so frequently greater than his occasion, he has no small change to suit emergencies, and we have guineas in place of groats. Romeo is more than a mortal lover, and Mercutio more than a mortal wit; the kings in the Shakspearian world are more kingly than earthly sovereigns; Rosalind's laughter was never heard save in the Forest of Arden. His madmen seem to have eaten of some "strange root." No such boon companion as Falstaff ever heard chimes at midnight. His very clowns are transcendental, with scraps of wisdom springing out of their foolishest speech. Chaucer, lacking Shakspeare's excess and prodigality of genius, could not so gloriously err, and his creations have a harder, drier, more realistic look, are more like the people we hear uttering ordinary English speech, and see on ordinary country roads against an ordinary English sky. If need were, any one of them could drive pigs to market. Chaucer's characters are individual enough, their idiosyncrasies are sharply enough defined, but they are to some extent literal and prosaic; they are of the "earth, earthy;" out of his imagination no Ariel ever sprang, no half-human, half-brutish Caliban ever crept. He does not effloresce in illustrations and images, the flowers do not hide the grass; his pictures are masterpieces, but they are portraits, and the man is brought out by a multiplicity of short touches,--caustic, satirical, and matter of fact. His poetry may be said to resemble an English country road, on which passengers of different degrees of rank are continually passing,--now knight, now boor, now abbot: Spenser's, for instance, and all the more fanciful styles, to a tapestry on which a whole Olympus has been wrought. The figures on the tapestry are much the more noble-looking, it is true; but then they are dreams and phantoms, whereas the people on the country road actually exist.