crime, as in virtue, what a man overcomes should enter into our estimate of the power exhibited in what he does. The question now comes up,--and we suppose it must be met, though we should like to evade it,--How, amid the individualities that Shakespeare has created, are we to detect the individuality of Shakespeare himself? In answer it may be said, that, if we survey his dramas in the mass, we find three degrees of unity;--first, the unity of the individual characters; second, the unity of the separate plays in which they appear; and third, the unity of Shakespeare's own nature, a nature which deepened, expanded, and increased in might, but did not essentially change, and which is felt as a potent presence throughout his works, binding them together as the product of one mind. He did not go out of himself to inform other natures, but he included these natures in himself; and though he does not infuse his individuality into his characters, he does infuse it into the general conceptions which the characters illustrate. His opinions, purposes, theory of life, are to be gathered, not from what his characters say and do, but from the results of what they say and do; and in each play he so combines and disposes the events and persons that the cumulative impression shall express his own judgment, indicate his own design, and convey his own feeling. His individuality is so vast, so purified from eccentricity, and we grasp it so imperfectly, that we are apt to deny it altogether, and conceive his mind as impersonal. In view of the multiplicity of his creations, and the range of thought, emotion, and character they include, it is a common hyperbole of criticism to designate him as universal. But, in truth, his mind was restricted, in its creative action, like other minds, within the limits of its personal sympathies, though these sympathies in him were keener, quicker, and more general than in other men of genius. He was a great-hearted, broad-brained person, but still a person, and not what Coleridge calls him, an "omnipresent creativeness." Whatever he could sympathize with, he could embody and vitally represent; but his sympathies, though wide, were far from being universal, and when he was indifferent or hostile, the dramatist was partially suspended in the satirist and caricaturist, and oversight took the place of insight. Indeed, his limitations are more easily indicated than his enlargements. We know what he has not done more surely than we know what he has done; for if we attempt to follow his genius in any of the numerous lines of direction along which it sweeps with such victorious ease, we soon come to the end of our tether, and are confused with a throng of thoughts and imaginations, which, as Emerson exquisitely says, "sweetly torment us with invitations to their own _inaccessible_ homes." But there were some directions which his genius did not take,--not so much from lack of mental power as from lack of