and expense of getting as much of the original as he could by unfair means, and vamping this up with inferior and older matter to meet the popular demand for reading copies. There is evidence of a like success of "King Lear." Since the time when these plays were produced there has been, we are called upon to believe, a great elevation of general intelligence, and there surely has been a great diffusion of knowledge; and yet it may be safely remarked that "Saratoga" and "Pique" and "The Golden Age," which ran their hundred nights and more, are not quite equal to "Hamlet" or to "King Lear," which, even with all their success, did not run anything like a hundred nights; and we may as safely believe that if "Hamlet" or "King Lear" were produced for the first time this winter in New York or in London, there would not be such a great and sudden demand for copies that extraordinary means would be taken by publishers to supply it. This superiority of the general public taste in dramatic literature during the Elizabethan era is one of the remarkable phenomena in literary history; and it is one that remains unaccounted for, and is, I think, altogether inexplicable, except upon the assumption that theatres nowadays rely for their support upon a public of low intellectual grade, and a taste for gross luxury and material splendor. In reading "Hamlet" there is little opportunity of comparing it instructively with any of its predecessors. Its principal personage is entirely unlike any other created by Shakespeare. The play is all Hamlet: the other personages are mere occasions for his presence and means of his development. But Polonius is something the same kind of man as old Capulet in "Romeo and Juliet;" and although there were opportunities enough for the noble Veronese father to utter sententiously the knowledge of the world which he had gained by living in it, see how comparatively meagre and superficial his "wise saws" are compared with the counsel that Polonius gives to his son and to his daughter, and to the King and Queen; although Polonius, with all his sagacity, is garrulous and a bore; in Hamlet's words, a tedious old fool. As to Hamlet's character, Shakespeare did not mean it to be altogether admirable or otherwise, but simply to be Hamlet--a perfectly natural and not very uncommon man, although he expresses natural and not uncommon feelings with the marvellous utterance of the great master of dramatic poetry. And Hamlet's character is not altogether admirable; but it is therefore none the less, but probably the more, deeply interesting. How closely packed the play is with profound truths of life philosophy is shown by the fact that it has contributed not only very much more--four or five times more--than any other poem of similar length to the storehouse of adage and familiar phrase, but at least twice as much as any other of Shakespeare's plays. I know two boys who, going to see the play for the first time, some years before the