How, aside from any _opinion_ as to their value, beauty, or eloquence, there are two characteristics of {205}the Shakespearean works which, under the calmest and most sternly judicial treatment to which they could possibly be subjected, are so prominent as to be beyond gainsay or neglect. These two characteristics are--1. The encyclopaedic universality of their information as to matters of fact; and, 2. The scholarly refinement of the style displayed in them. Their claim to eloquence and beauty of expression, after all, is a question of taste; and we may conceive of whole peoples--as, for example, the Zulus or the Ashantees--impervious to any admiration for the Shakesperean plays on that account. But this familiarity with what, at their date, was the Past of history, and--up to that date--the closed book of past human discovery and research which we call Learning; is an open and indisputable fact; and the New-Zealander who shall sit on a broken arch of London Bridge and muse over the ruins of British civilization, if he carry his researches back to the Shakespearean literature, will be obliged to find that its writer was in perfect possession of the scholarship antecedent to his own date, and of the accumulated learning of the world down to his own actual day. Moreover, this scholar would not be compelled to this decision only by a careful examination of the entire Shakespearean opera. He will be forced to so conclude on an examination of any one, or, at the most, of any given group of single plays. Let him open at random, and fall upon, let us say, the "Julius Cæsar." * * See in this connection "The English of Shakespeare illustrated in a Philological commentary on his 'Julius Cæsar.' By G. L. Craik." London. Chapman & Hall. 1857.