measure, and scale, and tell of their age, and forces, and style; but this Shakespearean hulk is so vast, so wondrous, so peopled with creatures, who are real, yet unreal--that measure and scale count for nothing. We hear around it the tramp of armies and the blare of trumpets; yet these do not drown the sick voice of poor distraught Ophelia. We see the white banner of France flung to the breeze, and the English columbine nodding in clefts of the wall; we hear the ravens croak from turrets that lift above the chamber of Macbeth, and the howling of the rain-storms that drenched poor Lear; and we see Jessica at her casement, and the Jew Shylock whetting his greedy knife, and the humpbacked Richard raging in battle, and the Prince boy--apart in his dim tower--piteously questioning the jailer Hubert, who has brought “hot-irons” with him. Then there is Falstaff, and Dame Quickly, and the pretty Juliet sighing herself away from her moonlit balcony. These are all live people to us; we know them; and we know Hamlet, and Brutus, and Mark Antony, and the witty, coquettish Rosalind; even the poor Mariana of the moated grange. We do not see enough of this latter, to be sure, to give stereoscopic roundness; but the mere glimpse--allusion--is of such weight--has such hue of realness, that it buoys the dim figure over the literary currents and drifts of two hundred and odd years, till it gets itself planted anew in the fine lines of Tennyson;--not as an illusion only, a figment of the elder imagination chased down and poetically adopted--but as an historic actuality we have met, and so, greet with the grace and the knowingness of old acquaintanceship. If you tell me of twenty historic names in these reigns of Elizabeth and James--names of men or women whose lives and characters you know best--I will name to you twenty out of the dramas of Shakespeare whose lives and characters you know better.