connection or care of disposition." he dismisses "Cymbeline" with the remark that he does not care "to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility; upon faults too evident for detection and too gross for aggravation." He is pleased to approve of "Romeo and Juliet," because "the incidents are numerous and important, the catastrophe irresistibly affecting, and the process of the action carried on with such probability, at least with such congruity to popular opinions, as tragedy requires" and, while on the whole, approving of "Othello," he can not help remarking that, "had the scene opened in Cyprus, and the preceding incidents been occasionally related, there had been little wanting to a drama of the most exact and scrupulous regularity." And so on every-where! Let the reader imagine one thus patronizing these mighty and deathless monographs to-day! Let him {030}imagine a better illustration, if he can, of what our Johnson's friend Pope called--in long meter--"fools rushing; in where angels feared to tread!" And let him confess to himself that these were not the times nor the men to raise the question. Is it not the fact that, until our own century, the eyes of the world were darkened, and men saw in these Shakespearean dramas only such stage plays, satisfying the acting necessities of almost any theater, as might have been written--not by "the soul" of any age; not by a man "myriad-minded" not by a "morning-star of song," or a "dear son of memory," but--by a clever playwright? The sort of days when an Addison could have been pensioned for his dreary and innocent "Campaign," and a Mr. Pye made poet-laureate of the laud where an unknown pen had once written "Hamlet were, consequently, _not_ the days for the discovery with which this century has crowned itself--namely, the discovery that the great first of poets lived in the age when England and America were one world by themselves, and that they must now draw together again to search for the master "who came"--to use, with all reverence, the words of Judge Holmes--"upon our earth, knowing all past, all present, and all future, to be leader, guide, and second gospel of mankind." But the fullness of time has come, and we now know that, whoever was the poet that he "kept," he was of quite another kidney than the manager of the theater, "William Shakespeare, who employed him to write Plays, and who wrote Revelations and Gospels instead.