If you were asked to point out the special features in which Shakespeare's plays are so transcendently excellent, you would mention, perhaps, among others, this, that his stories are not put together, and his characters are not conceived, to illustrate any particular law or principle. They teach many lessons, but not any one prominent above another; and when we have drawn from them all the direct instruction which they contain, there remains still something unresolved--something which the artist gives, and which the philosopher cannot give. It is in this characteristic that we are accustomed to say Shakespeare's supreme _truth_ lies. He represents real life. His dramas teach as life teaches--neither less nor more. He builds his fabrics as nature does, on right and wrong; but he does not struggle to make nature more systematic than she is. In the subtle interflow of good and evil--in the unmerited sufferings of innocence--in the disproportion of penalties to desert--in the seeming blindness with which justice, in attempting to assert itself, overwhelms innocent and guilty in a common ruin--Shakespeare is true to real experience. The mystery of life he leaves as he finds it; and, in his most tremendous positions, he is addressing rather the intellectual emotions than the understanding,--knowing well that the understanding in such things is at fault, and the sage as ignorant as the child. Only the highest order of genius can represent nature thus. An inferior artist produces either something entirely immoral, where good and evil are names, and nobility of disposition is supposed to show itself in the absolute disregard of them--or else, if he is a better kind of man, he will force on nature a didactic purpose; he composes what are called moral tales, which may edify the conscience, but only mislead the intellect. The finest work of this kind produced in modern times is Lessing's play of 'Nathan the Wise.' The object of it is to teach religious toleration. The doctrine is admirable--the mode in which it is enforced is interesting; but it has the fatal fault, that it is not true. Nature does not teach religious toleration by any such direct method; and the result is--no one knew it better than Lessing himself--that the play is not poetry, but only splendid manufacture. Shakespeare is eternal; Lessing's 'Nathan' will pass away with the mode of thought which gave it birth. One is based on fact; the other, on human theory about fact. The theory seems at first sight to contain the most immediate instruction; but it is not really so.