like Beaumont, uncopiable lessons in drawing gentlemen such as are seen nowhere else but on the canvas of Titian; he could take Ulysses away from Homer and expand the shrewd and crafty islander into a statesman whose words are the pith of history.  But what makes him yet more exceptional was his utterly unimpeachable judgment, and that poise of character which enabled him to be at once the greatest of poets and so unnoticeable a good citizen as to leave no incidents for biography.  His material was never far-sought; (it is still disputed whether the fullest head of which we have record were cultivated beyond the range of grammar-school precedent!) but he used it with a poetic instinct which we cannot parallel, identified himself with it, yet remained always its born and question-less master.  He finds the Clown and Fool upon the stage,—­he makes them the tools of his pleasantry, his satire, and even his pathos; he finds a fading rustic superstition, and shapes out of it ideal Pucks, Titanias, and Ariels, in whose existence statesmen and scholars believe forever.  Always poet, he subjects all to the ends of his art, and gives in Hamlet the churchyard-ghost, but with the cothurnus on,—­the messenger of God’s revenge against murder; always philosopher, he traces in Macbeth the metaphysics of apparitions, painting the shadowy Banquo only on the o’erwrought brain of the murderer, and staining the hand of his wife-accomplice (because she was the more refined and higher nature) with the disgustful blood-spot that is not there.  We say he had no moral intention, for the reason, that, as artist, it was not his to deal with the realities, but only with the shows of things; yet, with a temperament so just, an insight so inevitable as his, it was impossible that the moral reality, which underlies the mirage of the poet’s vision, should not always be suggested.  His humor and satire are never of the destructive kind; what he does in that way is suggestive only,—­not breaking bubbles with Thor’s hammer, but puffing them away with the breath of a Clown, or shivering them with the light laugh of a genial cynic.  Men go about to prove the existence of a God!  Was it a bit of phosphorus, that brain whose creations are so real, that, mixing with them, we feel as if we ourselves were but fleeting magic-lantern shadows?

But higher even than the genius, we rate the character of this unique man, and the grand impersonality of what he wrote.  What has he told us of himself?  In our self-exploiting nineteenth century, with its melancholy liver-complaint, how serene and high he seems!  If he had sorrows, he has made them the woof of everlasting consolation to his kind; and if, as poets are wont to whine, the outward world was cold to him, its biting air did but trace itself in loveliest frost-work of fancy on the many windows of that self-centred and cheerful soul.

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