You scorn the hypocrisy of pretending to be better than you are, and that very scorn fixes you in what you are.  ’He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still.’  That is the epitaph on German honesty.  I have drifted away from Shakespeare, who knew nothing of the sea of troubles that England would one day take arms against, and who could not know that on that day she would outgo his most splendid praise and more than vindicate his reverence and his affection.  But Shakespeare is still so live a mind that it is vain to try to expound him by selected texts, or to pin him to a mosaic of quotations from his book.  Often, if you seek to know what he thought on questions which must have exercised his imagination, you can gather it only from a hint dropped by accident, and quite irrelevant.  What were his views on literature, and on the literary controversies which have been agitated from his day to our own?  He tells us very little.  He must have heard discussions and arguments on metre, on classical precedent, on the ancient and modern drama; but he makes no mention of these questions.  He does not seem to have attached any prophetic importance to poetry.  The poets who exalt their craft are of a more slender build.  Is it conceivable that he would have given his support to a literary academy,—­a project which began to find advocates during his lifetime?  I think not.  It is true that he is full of good sense, and that an academy exists to promulgate good sense.  Moreover his own free experiments brought him nearer and nearer into conformity with classical models. Othello and Macbeth are better constructed plays than Hamlet.  The only one of his plays which, whether by chance or by design, observes the so-called unities, of action and time and place, is one of his latest plays—­The Tempest.  But he was an Englishman, and would have been jealous of his freedom and independence.  When the grave-digger remarks that it is no great matter if Hamlet do not recover his wits in England, because there the men are as mad as he, the satire has a sympathetic ring in it.  Shakespeare did not wish to see the mad English altered.  Nor are they likely to alter; our fears and our hopes are vain.  We entered on the greatest of our wars with an army no bigger, so we are told, than the Bulgarian army.  Since that time we have regimented and organized our people, not without success; and our soothsayers are now directing our attention to the danger that after the war we shall be kept in uniform and shall become tame creatures, losing our independence and our spirit of enterprise.  There is nothing that soothsayers will not predict when they are gravelled for lack of matter, but this is the stupidest of all their efforts.  The national character is not so flimsy a thing; it has gone through good and evil fortune for hundreds of years without turning a hair.  You can make a soldier, and a good soldier, of a humorist; but you cannot militarize him.  He remains a free thinker.