I greatly dislike beauties and selections in general; but as proof positive of his unrivalled excellence, I should like to try Shakspeare by this criterion. Make out your amplest catalogue of all the human faculties, as reason or the moral law, the will, the feeling of the coincidence of the two (a feeling 'sui generis et demonstratio clemontrationum') called the conscience, the understanding or prudence, wit, fancy, imagination, judgment,--and then of the objects on which these are to be employed, as the beauties, the terrors, and the seeming caprices of nature, the realities and the capabilities, that is, the actual and the ideal, of the human mind, conceived as an individual or as a social being, as in innocence or in guilt, in a play-paradise, or in a war-field of temptation;--and then compare with Shakspeare under each of these heads all or any of the writers in prose and verse that have ever lived! Who, that is competent to judge, doubts the result?--And ask your own hearts,--ask your own common-sense--to conceive the possibility of this man being--I say not, the drunken savage of that wretched sciolist, whom Frenchmen, to their shame, have honoured before their elder and better worthies,--but the anomalous, the wild, the irregular, genius of our daily criticism! What! are we to have miracles in sport?--Or, I speak reverently, does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man? [Footnote 1: Take a slight specimen of it. Je suis bien loin assurément de justifier en tout la tragédie d'Hamlet; _c'est une pièce grossière et barbare, qui ne serait pas supportée par la plus vile populace de la France et de l'Italie._ Hamlet y devient fou au second acte, et sa maîtresse folle au troisième; le prince tue le père de sa maîtresse, feignant de tuer un rat, et I'heröine se jette dans la rivière. On fait sa fosse sur le théâtre; des fossoyeurs disent des _quolibets_ dignes d'eux, en tenant dans leurs mains des têtes de morts; le prince Hamlet répond à leurs 'grossièretés abominables par des folies non moins dégoûtantes._ Pendant ce temps-là, un des acteurs fait la conquête de la Pologne. _Hamlet, sa mère, et son beau-père boivent ensemble sur le théâtre; on chante à table, on s'y querelle, on se bat, on se tue: on croirait que cet ouvrage est le fruit de I'imagination d'un sauvage ivre._ (Dissertation before Semiramis.) This is not, perhaps, very like Hamlet; but nothing can be more like Voltaire. Ed.] RECAPITULATION, AND SUMMARY OF THE CHARACTERISTICS OF SHAKSPEARE's DRAMAS. [1]