To all these prodigalities, analysis, synthesis, creation in flesh and bone, revery, fancy, science, metaphysics, add history,--here the history of historians, there the history of the tale; specimens of everything,--of the traitor, from Macbeth the assassin of his guest, up to Coriolanus, the assassin of his country; of the despot, from the intellectual tyrant Cæsar, to the bestial tyrant Henry VIII.; of the carnivorous, from the lion down to the usurer. One may say to Shylock: "Well bitten, Jew!" And, in the background of this wonderful drama, on the desert heath, in the twilight, in order to promise crowns to murderers, three black outlines appear, in which Hesiod, through the vista of ages, perhaps recognizes the Parcæ. Inordinate force, exquisite charm, epic ferocity, pity, creative faculty, gayety (that lofty gayety unintelligible to narrow understandings), sarcasm (the cutting lash for the wicked), star-like greatness, microscopic tenuity, boundless poetry, which has a zenith and a nadir; the _ensemble_ vast, the detail profound,--nothing is wanting in this mind. One feels, on approaching the work of this man, the powerful wind which would burst forth from the opening of a whole world. The radiancy of genius on every side,--that is Shakespeare. "Totus in antithesi," says Jonathan Forbes. [Footnote 1: And as the sun does not reach the blind, so the spirits of which I was just speaking have not the gift of heavenly light. An iron wire pierces and fastens together their eyelids, as it is done to the wild hawk in order to tame it. --_Purgatory, chap. XIII._] CHAPTER III. One of the characteristics which distinguish men of genius from ordinary minds, is that they have a double reflection,--just as the carbuncle, according to Jerome Cardan, differs from crystal and glass in having a double refraction. Genius and carbuncle, double reflection, double refraction; the same phenomenon in the moral and in the physical order. Does this diamond of diamonds, the carbuncle, exist? It is a question. Alchemy says yes, chemistry searches. As for genius, it exists. It is sufficient to read one verse of Æschylus or Juvenal in order to find this carbuncle of the human brain. This phenomenon of double reflection raises to the highest power in men of genius what rhetoricians call antithesis,--that is to say, the sovereign faculty of seeing the two sides of things. I dislike Ovid, that proscribed coward, that licker of bloody hands, that fawning cur of exile, that far-away flatterer disdained by the tyrant, and I hate the _bel esprit_ of which Ovid is full; but I do not confound that _bel esprit_ with the powerful antithesis of Shakespeare.