Now, Shakespeare was the most objective dramatic writer who ever lived; while Milton was eminently and wholly a subjective and lyrical writer. It is true that Shakespeare was so great that he is one of the very few men of genius in whom appear both of these elements. In his plays he is so objective that he is wholly lost in his characters, and his personality absolutely disappears; in his sonnets he "unlocks his heart" and is lyrical and subjective; he there gives us his inmost self, and we seem to know him as we know a friend with whom we have lived in intimate relations for years. Still, he will be best remembered by his plays; and into them he put the grandeur and universality of his genius; so we must necessarily consider him as the greatest dramatic genius of all time. But he belonged to a group of dramatic poets of whom he was the greatest: Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, Webster,--any one of whom would make the fortune of the stage to-day. It was a great age of dramatic literature, and it came very naturally to meet a demand. The play then was what the novel is to-day. As people to-day have no sooner read a new novel than they want another, so, in Shakespeare's time, they had no sooner seen a new play than they ran to see another. Hence the amazing fertility of the dramatic writers. Thomas Heywood wrote the whole or a part of two hundred and twenty plays. The manager of one of the theatres bought a hundred and six new plays for his stage in six years; and in the next five years a hundred and sixty. The price paid to an author for a play would now be equal to about two or three hundred dollars. The dramatic element, as is natural, abounds in these writings, though in some of them the author's genius is plainly lyrical. Such, for example, is Massinger's, who always reminds me of Schiller. Both wrote plays, but in both writers the faculty of losing themselves in their characters is wanting. The nobleness of Schiller appears in all his works, and constitutes a large part of their charm. So in Massinger all tends to generosity and elevation. His worst villains are ready to be converted and turn saints at the least provocation. Their wickedness is in a condition of unstable equilibrium; it topples over, and goodness becomes supreme in a single moment. Massinger could not create really wicked people; their wickedness is like a child's moment of passion or willfulness, ending presently in a flood of tears, and a sweet reconciliation with his patient mother. But how different was it with Shakespeare! Consider his Iago. How deeply rooted was his villainy! how it was a part of the very texture of his being! He had conformed to it the whole philosophy of his life. His cynical notions appear in the first scene. Iago _believes_ in meanness, selfishness, everything that is base; to him all that seems good is either a pretense or a weakness. The man who does not seek the gratification of his own desires is a fool.