“Of wit, there are many kinds. One, altogether French, which is but reason, a foe to paradox, scorner of folly, a sort of incisive common sense, having no occupation but to render truth amusing and evident, the most effective weapon with an intelligent and vain people: such was the wit of Voltaire and the drawing-rooms.” The conclusion is thus forced upon us that this is by no means the wit of Shakespeare. M. Taine falls into a mistake common to many persons who understand Shakespeare but imperfectly. It is that of attributing to him a certain style: “Let us, then, look for the man, and in his style. The style explains the work.” Ordinary writers have a style easily recognizable after slight study, but Shakespeare has fifty styles, certainly at least one for every character of marked individualism. This is not M. Taine’s view, for he says: “Shakespeare’s style is a compound of furious expressions. No man has submitted words to such a contortion. Mingled contrasts, raving exaggerations, apostrophes, exclamations, the whole fury of the ode, inversion of ideas, accumulation of images, the horrible and the divine jumbled into the same line; it seems, to my fancy, as though he never writes a word without shouting it” (p. 308). If there is one peculiarity or merit of Shakespeare which, more than another, has received the general assent of critics and scholars, it is his eminently objective power. It is looked upon as a striking proof of the great dramatist’s deep, clear insight into the depths of the human heart, that he never thrusts his individuality into his conception of characters. He never mistakes the operations of his own mind for those of others, and never confounds his personality with that of any of his dramatic personages. Every page of Milton’s writings, it is said, exhibits a full-length portrait of the author. Byron’s heroes, Lara, Conrad, Manfred, and the rest, might interchange reflections and speeches, and not seriously interfere with each other’s identity, and the sentimental rubbish and trashy sophistry poured out from the mouths of any of Bulwer’s men and women might answer for all of them. But nothing that Romeo says could by possibility enter the mind of Hamlet, and King Lear has not a line which would be fitting in the mouth of Othello. But M. Taine is not of this way of thinking. His theory is diametrically opposed to this, and he finds Shakespeare eminently subjective. He is always Shakespeare. “These characters are all of the same family. _Good or bad, gross or delicate, refined or awkward, Shakespeare gives them all the same kind of spirit which is his own_” (p. 317). Hamlet is Shakespeare, the melancholy Jaques[10] is Shakespeare, Othello is Shakespeare, and--Falstaff is Shakespeare!