“But the work which we should have most pleasure in believing to represent the state of German opinions, is Dr. Ulrici’s ‘Essay on Shakspeare’s Dramatic Art, and his relation to Calderon and Goethe.’ This book seems to us to be not only one of the most solidly philosophical pieces of criticism which have issued from the Teutonic school, but on its own absolute merits, an unusually valuable contribution to the literature of Shakspeare’s works. The theory upon which the treatise rests is assuredly partial and imperfect; and also, so far as it goes beyond opinions already received, palpably unsound; but the aspect in which it presents the poet of all nations is one which has been too often overlooked among ourselves, and grossly misunderstood by some of the most celebrated of Ulrici’s countrymen. The general discussions, which make up a considerable part of the volume, we must be allowed to waive. We cannot, especially in the way of commentary on a German text-book, attempt to investigate either the essence of the drama in general, or the essential differences between the views of life suggested respectively by Christianity and Grecian Paganism. The religious test thus indicated is that to which the critic subjects both Shakspeare and the poets with whom he compares him. ‘_Shakspeare’s peculiar character_,’ says he, ‘_consists in the greater purity and clearness, decision and completeness, with which the Christian view of life is represented in his dramas. It consists especially in this, that every where the two great elements of human life, and of the history of the world, the divine guidance and the freedom of man, stand out in their legitimate authority, in organic connexion and reciprocal action, and thus in the whole fulness of their truth and reality._’ He insists, emphatically, that he recognizes in Shakspeare’s dramas, not indeed formally taught, either theologically or ethically, but embodied in the genuine form of poetical representation, the doctrines of the universal sinfulness of man, and of divine grace in his salvation; doctrines which, as he truly adds, are altogether left out of sight in Goethe’s view of life, and by Calderon either misunderstood or unpoetically used. All this must be to many of us not a little startling; _but there lies at the bottom of it a mighty truth_, not merely important in itself, but bearing a _close relation to the great dramatist’s cast of thought_; a truth which, in one sense or other, _does_ furnish _the clue to some of the most perplexing riddles in the poet’s works_. In following out his own system, Ulrici, as was to have been expected from its one-sidedness, has been led to many conclusions which cannot possibly be admitted; but _fewer of these are to be attributed to the essential parts of his theory_, than to the peculiar way in which he has worked it out. In several instances he has literally resolved the leading idea, in which he represents the unity of each drama to consist, in a substantive