have liked the society of Mercutio better than that of a dreary divine, and preferred Ophelia or ‘that Juliet’ to a female philanthropist of sinewy aspect. And, seriously, if this world is not all evil, he who has understood and painted it best must probably have some good. If the underlying and almighty essence of this world be good, then it is likely that the writer who most deeply approached to that essence will be himself good. There is a religion of week-days as well as of Sundays, of ‘cakes and ale’ as well as of pews and altar cloths. This England lay before Shakespeare as it lies before us all, with its green fields, and its long hedgerows, and its many trees, and its great towns, and its endless hamlets, and its motley society, and its long history, and its bold exploits, and its gathering power, and he saw that they were good. To him, perhaps, more than to any one else, has it been given to see that they were a great unity, a great religious object; that if you could only descend to the inner life, to the deep things, to the secret principles of its noble vigour, to the essence of character, to what we know of Hamlet and seem to fancy of Ophelia, we might, so far as we are capable of so doing, understand the nature which God has made. Let us, then, think of him not as a teacher of dry dogmas, or a sayer of hard sayings, but as ‘A priest to us all, Of the wonder and bloom of the world’— a teacher of the hearts of men and women; one from whom may be learned something of that inmost principle that ever modulates ‘With murmurs of the air, And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns Of night and day and the deep heart of man.’ We must pause, lest our readers reject us, as the Bishop of Durham the poor curate, because he was ‘mystical and confused.’