ONE OF THE GREAT MASTER SPIRITS. 319 Shakspeare during his life never thought of living after death. What now to him is my song of admiration? In admitting all suppositions, in reasoning on the truths or the errors with which the human mind is penetrated or imbued, what were to Shakspeare a renown whose echoes cannot reach him? If a christian, amidst eternal felicity, can he care for the nothingness of this world? If a deist, freed from the clouds of matter, clouds lost in the splendour of God, does he bestow one glance on the grain of sand that he has left? If an atheist--he sleeps, without breathing or awaking, the sleep called death. Nothing then is more vain than glory beyond the tomb, at least unless it has kept friendship alive, unless it has been useful to virtue, serviceable to distress, and unless it be given us to enjoy in heaven the sense of one consoling, generous, liberating idea, left by us upon earth! PART THE THIRD. LITERATURE UNDER THE FIRST TWO STUARTS AND DURING THE COMMONWEALTH. WHAT ENGLAND OWES TO THE STUARTS. WITH the name of Stuart the idea of a long tragedy is conveyed to the mind. We ask ourselves. Ought not Shakspeare to have been born in their era? No! involved in revolutionary commotions, he would not have found leisure for the development of his varied genius. Perhaps even, becoming a political man, he would have produced nothing. Facts would have consumed his life. Great Britain owes to the race of Stuart two things, inestimable for any nation:-strength and liberty. James I in bringing the Scottish |