It is sheer nonsense, with these and other such passages accessible to anybody, to go on repeating, as people seem determined to do, the hackneyed saying of the commentator Steevens, that "all that we know of Shakespeare is, that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon; married and had children there; went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote plays and poems; returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried."* It is our own fault, and not the fault of the materials, if we do not know a great deal more about Shakespeare than that; if we do not realize, for example, these distinct and indubitable facts about him-his special reputation among the critics of his time, as a man not so much of erudition as of prodigious natural genius; his gentleness and openness of disposition; his popular and sociable habits ; his extreme ease, and, as some thought, negligence in composition; and, above all, and most characteristic of all, his excessive fluency in speech. "He sometimes required stopping," is Ben Jonson's expression; and whoever does not see a whole volume of revelation respecting Shakespeare in that single trait, has no eye for seeing anything. Let no one ever lose sight of that phrase in trying to imagine Shakespeare.

Still, after all, we cannot be content thus. With regard to such a man we cannot rest satisfied with a mere picture of his exterior in its aspect of repose, or in a few of its common attitudes. We seek, as the phrase is, to penetrate into his heart to detect and to fix in everlasting portraiture that mood of his soul which was ultimate and characteristic; in which, so to speak, he came ready-fashioned from the Creator's hands; towards which he always sank when alone; and on the ground-melody of which all his thoughts and actions were but voluntary variations. As far short of such a result as would be any notion we could form of the poet Burns from a mere chronological outline of his life, together with a few stories

*This saying of Steevens, though still repeated in books, has lost its force with the public. The Lives of Shakespeare by Mr. Halliwell and Mr. Charles Knight, written on such different principles, have effectually dissipated the old impression. Mr. Knight, by his use of the principle of synchronism, and his accumulation of picturesque details, in his Biography of Shakespeare, has left the public without excuse, if they still believe in Steevens.

such as are current about his moral irregularities; so far short of a true appreciation of Shakespeare would be that idea of him which we could derive from the scanty fund of the external evidence.

And here it is, that, in proceeding to make up the deficiency of the external evidence by going to the only other available source of light on the subject, namely the bequeathed writings of the man himself, we find ourselves obstructed at the outset by an obvious difficulty, which does not exist to the same extent in most other cases. We can, with comparative ease, recognise Burns himself in his works; for Burns is a lyrist, pouring out his own feelings in song, often alluding to himself, and generally under personal agitation when he writes. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is a dramatist, whose function it was not to communicate, but to create. Had he been a dramatist of the same school as Ben Jonson, indeed, using the drama as a means of spreading, or, at all events, as a medium through which to insinuate, his opinions; and often indicating his purposes by the very names of his dramatis persona (as Downright, Merecraft, Eitherside, and the like)-then the task would have been easier. But it is not so with Shakespeare. Less than almost any man that ever wrote, does he inculcate or dogmatise. He is the very type of the poet. He paints, represents, creates, holds the mirror up to nature; but from opinion, doctrine, controversy, theory, he holds instinctively aloof. In each of his plays there is a “central idea," to use the favourite term of the German critics-that is, a single thought round which all may be exhibited as consciously or unconsciously crystallized; but there is no pervading maxim, no point set forth to be argued or proved. Of none of all the plays can it be said that it is more than any other a vehicle for fixed articles in the creed of Shakespeare.

One quality or attribute of Shakespeare's genius, we do, indeed, contrive to seize out of this very difficulty of seizing anything that quality or attribute of many-sidedness, of which we have heard so much for the last century and a half. The immense variety of his characters and conceptions, embracing as it does Hamlets and Falstaffs, Kings and Clowns,

Prosperos and Dogberrys, and his apparently equal ease in handling them all, are matters that have been noted by one and all of the critics. And thus, while his own character is lost in his incessant shiftings through such a succession of masks, we yet manage, as it were in revenge, to extract from the very impossibility of describing him an adjective which does possess a kind of quasi-descriptive value. It is as if of some one that had baffled all our attempts to investigate him, we were to console ourselves by saying that he was a perfect Proteus. We call Shakespeare "many-sided;" not a magazine, nor a lady at a literary party, but tells you that; and in adding this to our list of adjectives concerning him, we find a certain satisfaction, and even an increase of light.

But it would be cowardice to stop here. The old sea-god Proteus himself, despite his subtlety and versatility, had a real form and character of his own, into which he could be compelled, if one only knew the way. Hear how they served this old gentleman in the Odyssey.

"We at once,

Loud shouting, flew on him, and in our arms
Constrained him fast; nor the sea-prophet old
Called not incontinent his shifts to mind.
First he became a long-maned lion grim;
A dragon then, a panther, a huge boar,

A limpid stream, and an o'ershadowing tree.
We, persevering, held him; till, at length,
The subtle sage, his ineffectual arts

Resigning weary, questioned me and spoke."

And so with our Proteus. The many-sidedness of the dramatist, let it be well believed and pondered, is but the versatility in form of a certain personal and substantial being, which constitutes the specific mind of the dramatist himself. Precisely as we have insisted that Shakespeare's face, as the best portraits represent it to us, is no mere general face or face to let, but a good, decided, and even rather singular face; so, we would insist, he had as specific a character, as thoroughly a way of his own in thinking about things and going through his morning and evening hours, as any of ourselves. "Man is only many-sided," says Goethe, "when he strives after the highest because he must, and descends to the lesser because he

will;" that is, as we interpret, when he is borne on in a certain noble direction in all that he does by the very structure of his mind, while, at his option, he may keep planting this fixed path or not with a sportive and flowery border. By the necessity of his nature, Shakespeare was compelled in a certain earnest direction in all that he did; and it is our part to search through the thickets of imagery and gratuitous fiction amid which he spent his life, that this path may be discovered. As the lion, or the limpid stream, or the overshadowing tree, into which Proteus turned himself, was not a real lion, or a real stream, or a real tree, but only Proteus as the one or as the other; so, involved in each of Shakespeare's characters,in Hamlet, in Falstaff, or in Romeo,-involved in some deep manner in each of these diverse characters, is Shakespeare's own nature. If Shakespeare had not been precisely and wholly Shakespeare, and not any other man actual or conceivable, could Hamlet or Falstaff, or any other of his creations, have been what they are?

But how to evolve Shakespeare from his works, how to compel this Proteus into his proper and native form, is still the question. It is a problem of the highest difficulty. Something, indeed, of the poet's personal character and views we cannot help gathering, as we read his dramas. Passages again and again occur there, of which, from their peculiar effect upon ourselves, from their conceivable reference to what we know of the poet's circumstances, or from their evident superfluousness and warmth, we do not hesitate to aver, "There speaks the poet's own heart." But to show generally how much of the man has passed into the poet, and how it is that his personal bent and peculiarities are to be surely detected inhering in writings whose essential character it is to be arbitrary and universal, is a task from which a critic might well shrink, were he left merely to the ordinary resources of critical ingenuity, without any positive and ascertained clue.

In this case, however, all the world ought to know, there is a positive and ascertained clue. Shakespeare has left to us not merely a collection of dramas, the exercises of his creative phantasy in a world of ideal matter, but also certain poems

which are assuredly and expressly autobiographic. Criticism seems now pretty conclusively to have determined, what it ought to have determined long ago, that the Sonnets of Shakespeare are, and can possibly be, nothing else than a poetical record of his own feelings and experience a eonnected series of entries, as it were, in his own diary-during a certain period of his London life. This, we say, is conclusively determined and agreed upon; and whoever does not, to some extent, hold this view, knows nothing about the subject. Ulrici, who is a genuine investigator, as well as a profound critic, is, of course, right on this point. So, also, in the main, is M. Guizot, although he mars the worth of the conclusion by adducing the foolish theory of Euphuism—that is, of the adoption of an affected style of expression in vogue in Shakespeare's age-in order to explain away that which is precisely the most important thing about the sonnets, and the very thing not to be explained away; namely, the depth and strangeness of their pervading sentiment, and the curious hyperbolism of their style. In truth, it is the very closeness of the contact into which the right view of the sonnets brings us with Shakespeare, the very value of the information. respecting him to which it opens the way, that operates against it. Where we have so eager a desire to know, there we fear to believe, lest what we have once cherished on so great a subject we should be obliged again to give up; or lest, if our imaginations should dare to figure aught too exact and familiar regarding the traits and motions of so royal a spirit, the question should be put to us, what we can know of the halls of a palace, or the mantled tread of a king? Still the fact is as it is; these Sonnets of Shakespeare are autobiographic distinctly, intensely, painfully autobiographic, although in a style and after a fashion of autobiography so peculiar, that we can cite only Dante in his Vita Nuova, and Tennyson in his In Memoriam, as having furnished precisely similar examples of it.

We are not going to examine the Sonnets in detail here, nor to tell the story which they involve as a whole. We will indicate generally, however, the impression which, we think,