powers, and they have but unimportant influence over him.  They can affect his comfort, but they cannot control his fate.  But all this is merely an adapting and elaborating of ideas which had been handed down from father to son for many generations.  Shakspere’s Puck is only the Puck of a hundred ballads reproduced by the hand of a true poet; no original thought upon the connection of the visible with the invisible world is imported into the creation.  All these facts tend to show that when Shakspere wrote “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” that is, at the beginning of his career as a dramatic author, he had not broken away from the trammels of the beliefs in which he had been brought up, but accepted them unhesitatingly and joyously.

123.  But there is a gradual toning down of this spirit of unbroken content as time wears on.  Putting aside the historical plays, in which Shakspere was much more bound down by his subject-matter than in any other species of drama, we find the comedies, in which his room for expression of individual feeling was practically unlimited, gradually losing their unalloyed hilarity, and deepening down into a sadness of thought and expression that sometimes leaves a doubt whether the plays should be classed as comedies at all.  Shakspere has been more and more in contact with the disputes and doubts of the educated men of his time, and seeds have been silently sowing themselves in his heart, which are soon to bring forth a plenteous harvest in the great tragedies of which these semi-comedies, such as “All’s Well that Ends Well” and “Measure for Measure,” are but the first-fruits.

124.  Thus, when next we find Shakspere dealing with questions relating to supernaturalism, the tone is quite different from that taken in his earlier work.  He has reached the second period of his thought upon the subject, and this has cast its attendant gloom upon his writings.  That he was actually battling with questions current in his time is demonstrated by the way in which, in three consecutive plays, derived from utterly diverse sources, the same question of ghost or devil is agitated, as has before been pointed out.  But it is not merely a point of theological dogma which stamps these plays as the product of Shakspere’s period of scepticism, but a theory of the influence of supernatural beings upon the whole course of human life.  Man is still incapable of influencing these unseen forces, or bending them to his will; but they are now no longer harmless, or incapable of anything but temporary or trivial evil.  Puck might lead night wanderers into mischance, and laugh mischievously at the bodily harm that he had caused them; but Puck has now disappeared, and in his stead is found a malignant spirit, who seeks to laugh his fiendish laughter over the soul he has deceived into destruction.  Questions arise thick and fast that are easier put than answered.  Can it be that evil influences have the upper hand in this world? that, be a man never so honest, never