“Throughout that stupendous Third Act the good are seen growing better through suffering, and the bad worse through success.  The warm castle is a room in hell, the storm-swept heath a sanctuary...  The only real thing in the world is the soul with its courage, patience, devotion.  And nothing outward can touch that."[27]

Shakespeare makes no pessimists.  He shows how misfortune crowns life with new moral glory.  We rise from the gloom of King Lear, feeling that we would rather be like Cordelia than like either of her sisters or any other selfish character who apparently triumphs until life’s close.  And yet Cordelia lost everything, her portion of her father’s kingdom and her own life.  When we realize that Shakespeare found one hundred and ten lines in King Lear sufficient not only to confer immortality on Cordelia, but also to make us all eager to pay homage to her, in spite of the fact that the ordinary standard of the world has not ceased to declare such a life a failure, we may the better understand that his greatest power consisted in revealing the moral victories possible for this rough-hewn human life.

Shakespeare made a mistake about the seacoast of Bohemia and the location of Milan with reference to the sea, but he was always sure of the relative position of right and wrong and of the ultimate failure of evil.  In his greatest plays, for instance, in Macbeth, he sought to impress the incalculable danger of meddling with evil, the impossibility of forecasting the tragedy that might thereby result, the certainty that retribution would follow, either here or beyond “this bank and shoal of time.”

Mastery of his Mother Tongue.—­His wealth of expression is another striking characteristic.  In a poem on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson wrote:—­

  “Thou had’st small Latin and less Greek.”

Shakespeare is, however, the mightiest master of the English tongue.  He uses 15,000 different words, while the second greatest writer in our language employs only 7000.  A great novelist like Thackeray has a vocabulary of about 5000 words, while many uneducated laborers do not use over 600 words.  The combinations that Shakespeare has made with these 15,000 words are far more striking than their mere number.

Variety of Style.—­The style of Milton, Addison, Dr. Johnson, and Macaulay has some definite peculiarities, which can easily be classified.  Shakespeare, on the contrary, in holding the mirror up to nature, has different styles for his sailors, soldiers, courtiers, kings, and shepherds,—­for Juliet, the lover; for Mistress Quickly, the alewife; for Hamlet, the philosopher; and for Bottom, the weaver.  To employ so many styles requires genius of a peculiar kind.  In the case of most of us, our style would soon betray our individuality.  When Dr. Samuel Johnson tried to write a drama, he made all his little fishes talk like whales, as Goldsmith wittily remarked.