which is peculiarly a woman's, that no guilt or injury in the sufferer can blunt or chill.

12. Shakespeare has insight of womanhood, not as it is in its social transformations, but as it is in its innate life. Shakespeare has reached the heart of womanhood, which, in all eras and regions, is so essentially, so intuitively the same. If in nothing else, he would in this alone secure an immortal sympathy; and without the cordial approval of the womanly mind no genius can secure in literature a living perpetuity. Shakespeare's women are in the highest degree poetical, yet in the deepest sense true; and the poetry is but a profounder revelation of the truth. The fidelity of Shakespeare to the innermost feelings of woman is one of the wonders of his genius to women themselves. Mrs. Siddons marvelled at it. Feminine secrecies, which she thought no masculine imagination could divine, she found that Shakespeare had discovered; and this not alone in the maternal anguish of Constance, or the queenly grief of Katherine, but even in the stony dungeons of Lady Macbeth's bosom. Shakespeare's women are no fictions, no coinage of a heated brain drunk with the fumes of reverie, when the realities of society are lost in the loneliness of woods, or the realities of day forgotten in the fantasies of midnight. They are no such

attenuated illusions as are thus created, mixture of sunshine and vapor, shapes of mist and moonlight, — that play for a moment on the feelings, gleam dimly across the imagination, then leave no trace on the memory or the affections. Shakespeare's women are drawn from life drawn as nature makes them in substance, soul, and form. Each has the individualism of reality- the distinctness of personal existence. They are not, indeed, as they literally would be in the world of fact; but they are as they should be poetically in the world of genius. Yet all of them, from Mrs. Quickly to Miranda, are types of genuine womanhood. Being such, they are of all varieties. They are romantic, and full of visions; domestic, and full of duties; heroic, and full of lofty thoughts: but also they are selfish, and of mean desires; sensual, and of gross affections; proud and servile; haughty and submissive; truehearted and false-hearted; cold as snow on Jura, burning as fire in Etna; sensible and silly; some all alive with genius, others hardly able from dulness to keep awake; some with wit as bright as the sun on the foam of the wave, others with brains as thick as Tewksbury mustard; the good that are the silent blessings of existence, the wicked that are its convulsing tragedies. It would be vain to deny that woman, as well as

man, shares in the crimes that darken our race; and cases occur in which her good is so lost in depravity, that we shudder at the ruin of which our nature is capable; but these cases are most exceptional, and they stand out in broad contrast to the general tenor of female life. In Shakespeare we have womanhood fairly and broadly given, not satirized, not flattered; but with the soul of poetry and the truth of nature: and in Shakespeare, as in nature, womanhood shines forth as the grace and the glory of humanity.

SHAKESPEARE'S COMIC POWER.

UMOR is the quality of man alone. Man

HUM

is the only agent of it; and, directly or indirectly, he is its only object. We attach no idea of the humorous to merely material things. Beautiful or sublime, agreeable or disagreeable, they may be; but we never, for anything in themselves, regard them with a sense of humor. Minds suggest humor only by association. As beings below man are not in the sphere of humor, neither are beings above him; and thus the sphere of humor coincides with the sphere of humanity; human life furnishes the matter of humor, and also its inspiration. We demand aims at an ideal reproduction of human life. Actual life is full of grief and guilt. The mimic life of the drama idealizes these into tragedy. Actual life is also full of gayety and absurdity. These the drama idealizes into comedy. As the Shakespearian drama deals more profoundly with hu

man life than any other drama does, it contains more depth of tragedy and more depth of comedy. It is the Shakespearian comedy — or rather of the comic in the Shakespearian drama—that the present lecture has to treat. A complete view of so wide a subject I do not propose to offer : I shall confine myself to a single point of itthe ludicrous; and to the ludicrous mostly as it is embodied in character. character which we laugh at, in character which we laugh with, and in character which we laugh both at and with.

I shall consider it in

1. Taking first character which we laugh at. I have to remark that in such character it is the fool element that lays most hold on our attention. Much may be in it besides this, but this is what for the time affects us. I give the foremost place to the sensitive and confiding fool-the type of a very amiable, but, I apprehend, of a very small class; and of this class Launce is a very distinguished member - Launce of the dog. Poor Launce! he was a creature of poignant feelings, especially if you take his own word for it. He is very pathetic when he refers to his parting from home. "Nay," he says, "'twill be this hour ere I have done weeping: all the kind of Launces have this very fault. I have received my proportion like the prodigious son." Then look at the