The conclusion which we have thus reached vindicates that mood of mind towards the whole historical past which we find to have been actually the mood of all the great masters of literature whenever they have ranged back in the past for their themes. When Shakespeare writes of Richard II., who lived two hundred years before his own time, does he not overleap those two hundred years as a mere nothing, plunge in among Richard's Englishmen as intrinsically not different from so many great Elizabethans, make them talk and act as co-equals in whom Elizabethans could take an interest, and even fill the mouth of the weak monarch himself with soliloquies of philosophic melancholy and the kingliest verbal splendours? And so when the same poet goes back into a still remoter antique, as in the council of the Greek chiefs in his _Troilus and Cressida_. We speak of Shakespeare's anachronisms in such cases. There they are certainly for the critic to note; but they only serve to bring out more clearly his main principle in his art--his sense or instinct, for all historic time, of a grand over-matching synchronism. And, indeed, without something of this instinct--this sense of an intrinsic traditional humanity persisting through particular progressive variations, this belief in a co-equality of at least some minds through all the succession of human ages in what we call the historic period--what were the past of mankind to us much more than a history of dogs or ruminants? Nay, and with that measure with which we mete out to others, with the same measure shall it not be meted out to ourselves? If to be dead is to be inferior, and if to be long dead is to be despicable, to the generation in possession, shall not we who are in possession now have passed into the state of inferiority to-morrow, with all the other defunct beyond us, and will not a time come when some far future generation will lord it on the earth, and _we_ shall lie deep, deep down, among the strata of the despicable? THE END. LONDON; R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS. Footnotes: [1] _Fraser's Magazine_, Dec. 1844. [2] _British Quarterly Review_, November, 1852.--1. "Shakspeare and His Times." By M. Guizot. 1852.--2. "Shakspeare's Dramatic Art; and his Relation to Calderon and Goethe." Translated from the German of Dr. Hermann Ulrici. 1846.--3. "Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret." Translated from the German by John Oxenford. 2 vols. 1850. [3] According to Mr. Lewes, in his Life of Goethe, it is a mistake to fancy that Goethe was tall. He seemed taller than he really was.