the finer but still merely animal elements of great wit, predominate. A careful delineation of minor yet expressive traits seems to mark them out as the characters of his predilection; and it is hard not to identify him with these more than with others. Biron, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” is perhaps the most striking member of this group. In this character, which is never quite in touch, never quite on a perfect level of understanding, with the other persons of the play, we see, perhaps, a reflex of Shakespeare himself, when he has just become able to stand aside from and estimate the first period of his poetry. “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” _Appreciations with an Essay on Style._ 1889, pp. 174-5. See also “Shakspere’s English Kings,” _ib._, pp. 201-2. MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1879 (1822-1888) Let me have the pleasure of quoting a sentence about Shakespeare, which I met with by accident not long ago in the _Correspondant_, a French review which not a dozen English people, I suppose, look at. The writer is praising Shakespeare’s prose. “With Shakespeare,” he says, “prose comes in whenever the subject, being more familiar, is unsuited to the majestic English iambic.” And he goes on: “Shakespeare is the king of poetic rhythm and style, as well as the king of the realm of thought; along with his dazzling prose, Shakespeare has succeeded in giving us the most varied, the most harmonious verse which has ever sounded upon the human ear since the verse of the Greeks.” M. Henry Cochin, the writer of this sentence, deserves our gratitude for it; it would not be easy to praise Shakespeare, in a single sentence, more justly. And when a foreigner and a Frenchman writes thus of Shakespeare, and when Goethe says of Milton, in whom there was so much to repel Goethe rather than to attract him, that “nothing has ever been done so entirely in the sense of the Greeks as _Samson Agonistes_,” and that “Milton is in very truth a poet whom we must treat with all reverence,” then we understand what constitutes a European recognition of poets and poetry as contradistinguished from a merely national recognition, and that in favour both of Milton and of Shakespeare the judgment of the high court of appeal has finally gone. _Essays in Criticism._ Second Series: Wordsworth. 1888, pp. 129-31. Reprinted from Preface to _The Poems of Wordsworth_, chosen and edited by Matthew Arnold. 1879. For a comment on Shakespeare’s double faculty of interpreting the physiognomy and movement of the outward world, and the ideas and laws of man’s moral and spiritual nature, see _Essays in Criticism_, 1865, p. 108. ANONYMOUS ?_c._ 1880