To woman he assigns the highest place as inspirer and saviour of man; when he shows her other than this, as in Lady Macbeth, he makes remorse half condone her sins and death conclude them. He seemed to be absolutely unconscious of any superiority in himself to others of his own calling. His poetic gift was like song to a nightingale that warbles for sheer delight and amorousness, in delicious ignorance of the entrancing beauty of its melody. What affects, or _should_ affect, us most deeply to-day is the deplorable fact that for three hundred years we have had no poet, no dramatist, to approach Shakespeare in any sense--neither in beauty of language, loftiness of thought, nor simple naturalness of expression. He towers among us as a veritable giant among pigmies--for the men of letters in all parts of the world at this epoch, men who are scrambling and pushing themselves forward to offer a very poor and inadequate “homage” to this mightiest genius of all time, are of such microscopic attainment when compared with him that one needs a mental lens to perceive them at all. These are they for whom Self is not only the keynote, but the whole tune. Some of them take pride in their “style”; whereas Shakespeare had no “style” save his own, which has become a living part of the English language. He defied laws and conventions and dramatic “unities”; he dared to be his own master; and fortunately there were no newspapers in his day to publish venomous criticisms which might have daunted or discouraged his efforts. The earliest newspaper, or _News Packet_, as it was called, was issued in 1619, three years after Shakespeare’s death. Shakespeare’s critics were the public--in fact, the “gallery.” He “played to the gallery,” and played “up”--never “down.” Moreover, he was apparently so indifferent to his own literary reputation that he made no effort to publish any of his works, and allowed them to be pirated wholesale. Only in the case of the two poems dedicated to the Earl of Southampton--“Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece”--does he seem to have taken any personal interest in his own productions.