influence of his country nurture and education, and when a mature man, settling down into the old life again after a long and victorious struggle with the world, with his accumulated store of experience—­we find plays which are perfectly saturated with fairy-lore:  “The Dream” and “The Tempest.”  These are the poles of Shakspere’s thought in this respect; and in the centre, imbedded as it were between two layers of material that do not bear any distinctive stamp of their own, but appear rather as a medium for uniting the diverse strata, lie the great tragedies, produced while he was in the very rush and swirl of town life, and reflecting accurately, as we have seen, many of the doubts and speculations that were agitating the minds of men who were ardently searching out truth.  It is worth noting too, in passing, that directly Shakspere steps out of his beaten path to depict, in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” the happy country life and manners of his day, he at the same time returns to fairyland again, and brings out the Windsor children trooping to pinch and plague the town-bred, tainted Falstaff.

[Footnote 1:  For an elaborate and masterly investigation of the question of the chronological order of the plays, which must be assumed here, see Mr. Furnivall’s Introduction to the Leopold Shakspere.]

118.  But this is not by any means all that this subject reveals to us about Shakspere; if it were, the less said about it the better.  To look upon “The Tempest” as in its essence merely a return to “The Dream”—­the end as the beginning; to believe that his thoughts worked in a weary, unending circle—­that the Valley of the Shadow of Death only leads back to the foot of the Hill Difficulty—­is intolerable, and not more intolerable than false.  Although based upon similar material, the ideas and tendencies of “The Tempest” upon supernaturalism are no more identical with those of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” than the thoughts of Berowne upon things in general are those of Hamlet, or Hamlet’s those of Prospero.  But before it is possible to point out the nature of this difference, and to show that the change is a natural growth of thought, not a mere retrogression, a few explanatory remarks are necessary.

There is no more insufficient and misleading view of Shakspere and his work than that which until recently obtained almost universal credence, and is even at the present time somewhat loudly asserted in some quarters; namely, that he was a man of considerable genius, who wrote and got acted some thirty plays more or less, simply for commercial purposes and nothing more; made money thereby, and died leaving a will; and that, beyond this, he and his works are, and must remain, an inexplicable mystery.  The critic who holds this view, and finds it equally advantageous to commence a study of Shakspere’s work by taking “The Tempest” or “Love’s Labour’s Lost” as his text, is about as judicious as the botanist who would enlarge upon the structure of the seed-pod without first explaining the preliminary stages of plant growth, or the architect who would dilate upon the most convenient arrangement of chimney-pots before he had discussed the laws of foundation.  The plays may be studied separately, and studied so are found beautiful; but taken in an approximate chronological order, like a string of brilliant jewels, each one gains lustre from those that precede and follow it.