When the King and Banquo approach the castle in which the King is to be murdered that night, no shadow falls athwart the threshold. So beautiful is the scene that the King says: "This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses." And Banquo adds: "This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve By his loved mansionry that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here; no jutty, frieze, Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle. Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed The air is delicate." Another notable instance is the porter scene immediately following the murder. So, too, the dialogue with the clown who brings the asp to Cleopatra just before the suicide, illustrates my meaning. I know of one paragraph in the Greek drama worthy of Shakespeare. This is in "Medea." When Medea kills her children she curses Jason, using the ordinary Billingsgate and papal curse, but at the conclusion says: "I pray the gods to make him virtuous, that he may the more deeply feel the pang that I inflict." Shakespeare dealt in lights and shadows. He was intense. He put noons and midnights side by side. No other dramatist would have dreamed of adding to the pathos--of increasing our appreciation of Lear's agony, by supplementing the wail of the mad king with the mocking laughter of a loving clown. X. THE ordinary dramatists--the men of talent--(and there is the same difference between talent and genius that there is between a stone-mason and a sculptor) create characters that become types. Types are of necessity caricatures--actual men and women are to some extent contradictory in their actions. Types are blown in the one direction by the one wind--characters have pilots. In real people, good and evil mingle. Types are all one way, or all the other--all good, or all bad, all wise, or all foolish. Pecksniff was a perfect type, a perfect hypocrite--and will remain a type as long as language lives--a hypocrite that even drunkenness could not change. Everybody understands Pecksniff, and compared with him Tartuffe was an honest man. Hamlet is an individual, a person, an actual being--and for that reason there is a difference of opinion as to his motives and as to his character. We differ about Hamlet as we do about Cæsar, or about Shakespeare himself. Hamlet saw the ghost of his father and heard again his fathers voice, and yet, afterward, he speaks of "the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns." In this there is no contradiction. The reason outweighs the senses. If we should see a dead man rise from his grave, we would not, the next day, believe that we did. No one can credit a miracle until it becomes so common that it ceases to be miraculous.