In a much higher sense than Francis Bacon, William Shakspeare was the historian of humanity, and great prophet of human progress. Bunsen regards his "Histories" as the only modern epos, in its true sense, a poetical relation to the eternal order manifested in national developments. They are the Romanic "Divina Commedia," the Spanish "Cid," and the Germanic "Nibelungen" united and dramatized. A new and sublimer act was about to open on the vast stage of Providence, and dramatic literature was the fitting organ of the epos in an age teeming with energetic life, and ripe for the sublimest realities. The "myriad-minded" artist appeared in his serene sphere, to show how society, as it moves under divine guidance, illustrates moral truths more accurately, completely, and strikingly, than any dissertation could reveal it. In his portraitures it is difficult to decide which is more remarkable, the fidelity of abstract ideas to nature, or the vivid imaginativeness of conception by which the highest truth is announced. Living greatness and intellectual power coalesce in both imaginary characters and actual scenes, as the consummate style of Leonardo da Vinci, or Michael Angelo resulted from the blending of spiritual feeling with natural forms. He stood like a magician above the world, penetrating at a glance the profoundest depths, mysteries, and perplexities of human nature, and having power at will to summon into open day all the foulest as well as fairest working of human passion. With masterly sagacity, he used the whole world of man, past, present, and to come, instinctively anticipating what he was not permitted actually to behold. Some have daringly intimated that Shakspeare, like Dantè, was a solitary comet which, having traversed the constellation of the ancient firmament, returns to the feet of the Deity, and says to him like the thunder, "Here am I." Not so. Dantè appeared in an age of darkness, comparatively. The compass had then scarcely enabled the mariner to steer through the familiar expanse of the Mediterranean. America and the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope were yet undiscovered. The feudal system still pressed with all the weight of its darkness upon enslaved Europe. The inventor of gunpowder had not changed the whole system of war, nor had the introduction of printing created a complete metamorphosis in society at large. But when in western England the mother of Shakspeare gave birth to her obscure son, the age of regeneration and reformation had already dawned, that age in which the principal discoveries of modern times were accomplished, the true system of the universe ascertained, the heavens and the earth explored, the sciences cultivated, and the practical arts carried to a pitch of perfection which they had never before attained. Great deeds were done, and great men constituted colonies which repaired to the woods of New England to sow the seeds of a fertile independence, and establish the empire of universal