"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not: and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues."[3] With that for our text, let us approach some characters of Shakspeare. * * * * * When the requisition of the English government for the surrender of Mason and Slidell in the Trent affair was made through Lord Lyons, Judge Hoar rode out to see an old Concord farmer whom he highly respected, to tell him the news, which he did with considerable excitement. The farmer listened coolly, and said, "Well, if those fellows are really going in for the rebels and slavery, you tell Lord Lyons he may have my copy of Shakspeare." But I suspect that New England farmers are content to be patriotic without cultivating the poet's page. Shakspeare may be everywhere extensively owned without being mentally possessed. We need a Shakspearian piety. Formerly the Bible and a copy of Josephus or some protracted commentary stood within reach of the household, and the leaves were turned by Religion herself who found her own meaning in every text and the meaning inexhaustible. If the volume of Shakspeare could attract a sympathy so loyal and grave as that, Religion would find in him, too, her counterpart. But we do not read Shakspeare yet in spiritual faith, as Bibles are pondered for their consecrated sense. Literature swarms with books of criticism which exhaust invention for theories of his life, profession, and intent; and the various editions of his works are liberally patronized. But where are the devotees whose morning orison is the wonderful liturgy of his imagination, with responses that are intoned by human nature itself, the acknowledgment that mind and heart are surprised by their own detection, yet with as little fear and as much confidence as we repay to omniscience? This is rare, this persistent recurrence of the soul to his enlightening, this praying before the shrine of every verse in which a thought, a passion, a humor, a delight, a beauty, is the saint. Must we have, then, professorships of Shakspeare to instruct the youth and inculcate this natural piety? Rather let every household accuse its own indifference, and endow its hearts to make him more widely felt and understood. For there are sweetness and light, wisdom and conscience and self-knowledge slumbering unmined below those covers. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 3: French Gentleman in "All's Well that Ends Well," iv. 3.] DOGBERRY, MALVOLIO, TROILUS AND CRESSIDA (AJAX), BOTTOM, TOUCHSTONE. DOGBERRY.