clothes, as starving beggars, called from slumber to a banquet. Our vanity is often but the show of fools, and our ambition but a drunken dream. So we sit at the feast of life; so we take those to be our servants who are only using us, who mock us while they bow and dupe us when they smile; so we play "fantastic tricks before high Heaven;" so are we unfitting and uncultivated guests in the solemn palace of the Universe; mean in the midst of grandeur; gross in the midst of beauty; and while loud in our boastings, immersed in our indulgence, we are brought again quickly to the sleep which closes the pageant and dissolves the vision.

Lastly, the comic spirit in Shakespeare has the power of imagination and sympathy. It has imagination in the wildest prodigality. It plays, when it chooses, with all the faculties of man, with all the turnings of life, with all the changes of nature, with all the phenomena of the universe; it coins the fantastic or the humorous out of all things; it quibbles in oddity; it grimaces in drollery; it riots in the Bacchanalianism of epithets; it reels in the intoxication of images ; it turns satire to jollity; it changes wit into a carnival of revelry; it becomes magnificent in the boldness of lies, and sublime in the inventive

ness of absurdity. But the deepest power of Shakespeare's comic spirit is in its sympathy. Often more acutely than lamentation, it pierces to our tears. In Shakespeare, as in life, indifference and ease of heart are constantly neighbors to calamity and despair. The clowns have their jest and their song at the grave which they open for Ophelia : so it is in life; and though we do not see the grin and grief always so near together in life as we see them in the play, yet in life, as in the play, there is everywhere mirth at the side of the sepulchre. Affliction is impressive when we behold it in the presence of the thoughtless; but still more so when we behold the thoughtless themselves made serious by its presence, proving the worth which lay within them, and which before had been unnoticed. The jesting of the fool in the teeth of Lear's misfortune is more dismal than a wail. It is bitterness coming itself out of the heart of grief. Its rebuke is the tribute of most loyal service. Most faithful love is in every sarcasm. The ragged wit has no taint of self in him; his regret never strays back to the days of his brilliant motley and his jocund feasts. He accompanies his uncrowned master with the full troop of his affections,—not one of that troop has Goneril or Regan

been able to curtail,

and lest in any way he

should be traitor, he does not leave even hispetulance behind; his criticisms come between the gusts of wind, and with the storm which beats on the head of desolated majesty his snatches of troubled song keep concert. And Lear was sorry for his loyal fool; even the serious Hamlet remembered with affection the jesting Yorick. So kindly should we ever think of those who make our hearts and tempers bright; who, without pomp of wisdom, help us to a cheerfulness which no proud philosophy can give; who, in the motley of checkered mirth and wit, sparkle on the resting-spots of life. Such men are rare, and as valuable as they are rare : the world wants them; wants them more than it wants men of startling genius; wants them more than it wants heroes or victors, for mirth is better than massacre, and it is surely better to hear laughter sounding aloud the jubilees of the heart, than the shout of battle and the yell of conquest. Precious, then, are those whose genius brings pleasure to the bosom and sunshine to the face, who not only call our thoughts into festive action, but brighten our affections into generous feeling. Though we may not loudly celebrate such men, we greatly miss them; and not in marble monuments, but in our

kindest memories, their names continue fresh. But laugh and make laugh as they may, they too have the destiny of grief; and unto them, as unto all men, come their passages of tragedy- the days of evil, the nights of weeping, and the need of pity.

SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGIC POWER.

Ν

IN entering on the subject of this lecture, I will

consider and illustrate but one preliminary fact it is that Shakespeare finds all the sources of his tragic power in the inward and elementary nature of man. Ultimately this may be the case with all tragic power; but immediately and directly it is so with Shakespeare's. The fact has mental proof in the force with which the tragic characters of Shakespeare penetrate our consciousness. They do not so much excite as they possess us. They so fill the being and the mind, that their existence for the time melts into ours. For the time their ideas, passions, fancies, crimes, virtues, sufferings, pleasures, seem like our own,

most personal and real. It is so when we revolt at the characters as when we admire them; when we detest as when we pity them. Nor is it different when Shakespeare acts on the imagination in relation to things which the eye hath

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