We have followed Shakespeare's course of dramatic production down to the time when he began to embody in the work by which he earned his bread and made his fortune the results of an intuitive knowledge of human nature and a profound reflection upon it never surpassed, if ever equalled, and which, even if possessed, have never been united in any other man with a power of expression so grand, so direct, so strong, and so subtle. "Twelfth Night," "Henry V.," and "As You Like It" mark the close of his second period, which ended with the sixteenth century. His third period opens with "Hamlet," which was written about the year 1600. But here I will say that the division of his work into periods, and the assignment of his plays to certain years, is only inferential and approximative. We are able to determine with an approach to certainty about what time most of his plays were written; but we cannot fix their date exactly. Nor is it of very great importance that we should do so. There are some people who can fret themselves and others as to whether a play was written in 1600 or in 1601, as there are others who deem the question whether its author was born on the 23d of April in one year, and died on the same day of the same month in another, one of great importance. I cannot so regard it. A few days in the date of a man's birth or death, a few months in the production of a play--these are matters surely of very little moment. What is important to the student and lover of Shakespeare is the order of the production of his works; and this, fortunately, is determinable with a sufficient approach to accuracy to enable us to know about at what age he was engaged upon them, and what changes in his style and in his views of life they indicate. In the first ten years of the seventeenth century, between his thirty-seventh and forty-seventh year, he produced "Hamlet," "Measure for Measure," his part of "Pericles," "All's Well that Ends Well," "King Lear," "Macbeth," "Julius Cæsar," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Troilus and Cressida," "Cymbeline," "Coriolanus," and "Othello." These, with other works, were the fruit of his mind in its full maturity and vigor. Think of it a moment! what a period it was! As my eye lights upon the back of the eleventh volume of my own edition and the eighth of the Cambridge edition, and I read "HAMLET, KING LEAR, OTHELLO," I am moved with a sense of admiration and wonder which, if I allow it to continue, becomes almost oppressive; and I also take pleasure in the result of a convenience of arrangement that brought into one volume these three marvellous works--the three greatest productions of man's imagination, each wholly unlike the others in spirit and in motive.