healthier ways than those of the world, and interpreting to us the lessons of Nature."

But the author has an object in view as well—and he hopes a laudable one-in venturing to submit this little criticism to the public, and that is to open up, advertise, and discover to those of his fellow-countrymen who have never been at the pains to explore it, a very wonderful, intellectual soil, rich alike in minerals and general fertility, and to induce those who have merely glanced at it and passed by, imagining perhaps that it was too heavy, inaccessible, and possibly superior to their wants, to re-visit and gaze upon it once more. If they do, their hesitation will be amply rewarded, a new vista will open up before their eyes, and a beautiful and very wonderful picture will disclose itself. For all is there; love and passion, wit and humour, history and declamation, soliloquy, moving accidents, and tragedies by flood and field, almost everything that can be visually discovered, either in nature or in man, that the mind can conceive or the heart desire.

And here let it be stated at once that the author has no intention, even if he were capable of doing so, of writing a work, after the manner of Professor Dowden, on the "Mind and Art" of Shakespeare. The Professor's work is doubtless one of great thought, depth, and power, and his criticism on the "Art" of Shakespeare, at any rate, entitled to every respect; but when one trenches on the "mind" of another, and endeavours, so to speak, to locate fix and interpret it, one is treading on dangerous and uncertain ground, however great may be one's powers of criticism and intuition. It must be so from the very nature of the case, "Quot sententiæ tot homines" there are as many opinions as there are men- and the character

and writings of one man will never present themselves to, and affect two others, in precisely the same way. The higher are the powers, and the greater the personality of the critic, the more likely is he to project his own mind into the mind of the person criticised, and to confound the one with the other.

Again, the reader must be reminded that this work is not intended for professed Shakespearian critics and scholars; they can teach the writer more than he can teach them, nor for that numerous though relatively small class of habitual readers and devotees of Shakespeare and his works, who are well able to take care of themselves and need no guidance from any one.

But outside this charmed circle, though one cannot dogmatise on the point, as no adequate data exist from which accurate deductions can be drawn, there is undoubtedly a very large class of highly educated men, who hardly know a line of the writings of the greatest of their fellow-countryman.

One sometimes wonders how this can be; but the reason possibly is not far to seek, and may be attributed to two causes.

It seems strange, but it is true, and quite in keeping with the English character, that the teaching of the works of the greatest writer of any age or country are entirely neglected, or relegated to a very inferior position indeed in all the great schools and universities of the very land that gave him birth.

Future generations will probably look back with amazement and wonder, and ask how such a system could have been permitted, and could have endured for so long.

How, they will ask themselves, could a country like England, so bigoted and determined in its national

characteristics and idiosyncrasies, with all its love of compromise, actuality, and the concrete, of which Shakespeare is the greatest exponent, have permitted its teachers to continue, generation after generation, year by year, and year in and year out, drilling, and that almost at the point of the bayonet into the minds and bodies of its youth, composed for the most part of reluctant, unwilling, and unappreciative recipients, the difficult and often obscure pages of the writings of antiquity, and yet neglect to impart even the most superficial acquaintance with the works of their own great fellow-countryman, whose shoes' latchet, no ancient writer, when taken alone, is worthy even to unloose.

The big guns of the classical conclave may boom and thunder as they will, and exalt and expatiate on the literary wonders of old time, but it is more than doubtful-regarded, of course, from the standpoint of literature alone, and apart from any information and knowledge of the ancient world that they may impart -that if "Shakespeare" were obliterated at the expense of the rest, the world would be the richer for the exchange.

They talk very grandly of Homer. Well, admitting that Homer in imaginative and creative power is the equal of Shakespeare, he is his equal in quality alone but not in development. He more nearly resembles some magnificent boy in the childhood of the world of letters, who in maturity of thought in no way approaches the measure of the stature of Shakespeare himself.

But there is another reason though possibly a subordinate one, why Shakespeare is so much neglected, and that is the unappetising way in which until recently his works were usually presented to the public. They

were either published in large and expensive editions of many volumes, quite beyond the reach of most people, or in stout, tight-volumes, in double columns of small print, after the manner of the excellent "Globe" edition. What was wanted and what is now partially supplied, was the plays of Shakespeare printed separately in cheap form, after the manner of the "Tauchnitz" edition, produced at Leipzig in 1868.

But outside and beyond the two classes above referred to there is yet another and a larger class still, and perhaps a more important one, or one that will be more important as time goes on, that large body of hard-headed, intelligent, but half-educated workingmen, for whom the much criticised general education of the age, if it has done nothing else, has at least stimulated their curiosity as to what is going on around them in all directions, and in no direction perhaps more than in that of literature itself.

For it must be remembered that the world is entering on a new era, education, whether for good or evil, has come to stay, and is advancing by leaps and bounds. Men's eyes, yes, and women's eyes too, like those of Adam and Eve in the garden of old, are beginning to realise that they are naked intellectually as well as in other ways. They are looking around with reawakened curiosity, and wondering in what garments, intellectual and otherwise, they shall clothe themselves.

Well, with what better raiment could they possibly provide themselves, to begin with at any rate, than with that furnished by the greatest of their countrymen Shakespeare himself.

Back to Shakespeare from much of the sordid, shallow, and paltry literature of the day, is every bit as essential to the well-being and health of the individual mind, as back to the country, from the squalor and contraction.

of town life, is to the physique of the frequently worn out, broken, and disordered bodies of many of our town population.

The air of Shakespeare is invigorating, life-giving, and bracing, and a magnificent intellectual stimulant and tonic. It is nutritive and wholesome, and the grain whereby a man may live may be found therein. Whereas the current literature of the day, on which the lower classes delight to regale themselves, if reports be true, is somewhat towney and fetid, and does not even consume its own smoke, but disperses its inky vapours over all the surrounding land.

Shakespeare is never towney; he is central it is true, but his circle has an all-embracing and almost infinite circumference.

For the popular literature of the day-and this is corroborated and vouched for in many quarters-is anything but what it should be, and far from what it might be, in temper, taste, and tone. Listen to what a celebrated canon of the English Church recently said upon the subject :—

"I suppose no thoughtful person can regard with satisfaction the wave of morbid sensationalism that has crept over the national consciousness, creating an art, if one can call it so, which is full of intense vulgarity from which all true art is always and inevitably free, and which moves in a wholly different sphere, from that which gives us the phrases and situations of Measure for Measure, Othello, or Romeo and Juliet.

"You take up a leading journal, and you find there a whole column of large print descriptive of the last new play-a play so incomparably silly and sordid in plot and persons that you wonder how anybody could be found to write or to describe it.

"You take up the modern novel, good, bad, or