With these before us, let us observe that names, chronology, geography, costumes, and customs are as nothing in his eyes. His aim is human philosophy: he places his living creations before us, dressing them, as it were, in any garments most conveniently at hand. These lose their grotesqueness as his characters speak and act. Paternal love and weakness, met by filial ingratitude; these are the lessons and the fearful pictures of Lear: sad as they are, the world needed them, and they have saved many a later Lear from expulsion and storm and death, and shamed many a Goneril and Regan, while they have strengthened the hearts of many a Cordelia since. Chastity and constancy shine like twin stars from the forest of Cymbeline. And what have we in Macbeth? Mad ambition parleying with the devil, in the guise of a woman lost to all virtue save a desire to aggrandize her husband and herself. These have a pretence of history; but Hamlet, with hardly that pretence, stands alone supreme in varied excellence. Ambition, murder, resistless fate, filial love, the love of woman, revenge, the power of conscience, paternal solicitude, infinite jest: what a volume is this! TABLE OF DATES AND SOURCES.--The following table, which presents the plays in chronological order,[32] the times when they were written, as nearly as can be known, and the sources whence they were derived, will be of more service to the student than any discursive remarks upon the several plays. Plays. Dates. Sources.