his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives—­as well those that they knew, as those which they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves.  The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his fancy.  Airy beings waited at his call, and came at his bidding.  Harmless fairies “nodded to him, and did him curtesies”:  and the night-hag bestrode the blast at the command of “his so potent art.”  The world of spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and women:  and there is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other; for if the preternatural characters he describes could be supposed to exist, they would speak, and feel, and act, as he makes them.  He had only to think of any thing in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it.  When he conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, “subject to the same skyey influences,” the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents which would occur in reality.  Thus the character of Caliban not only stands before us with a language and manners of its own, but the scenery and situation of the enchanted island he inhabits, the traditions of the place, its strange noises, its hidden recesses, “his frequent haunts and ancient neighbourhood,” are given with a miraculous truth of nature, and with all the familiarity of an old recollection.  The whole “coheres semblably together” in time, place, and circumstance.  In reading this author, you do not merely learn what his characters say,—­you see their persons.  By something expressed or understood, you are at no loss to decypher their peculiar physiognomy, the meaning of a look, the grouping, the bye-play, as we might see it on the stage.  A word, an epithet paints a whole scene, or throws us back whole years in the history of the person represented.  So (as it has been ingeniously remarked) when Prospero describes himself as left alone in the boat with his daughter, the epithet which he applies to her, “Me and thy crying self,” flings the imagination instantly back from the grown woman to the helpless condition of infancy, and places the first and most trying scene of his misfortunes before us, with all that he must have suffered in the interval.  How well the silent anguish of Macduff is conveyed to the reader, by the friendly expostulation of Malcolm—­“What! man, ne’er pull your hat upon your brows!” Again, Hamlet, in the scene with Rosencrans and Guildenstern, somewhat abruptly concludes his fine soliloquy on life by saying, “Man delights not me, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”  Which is explained by their answer—­“My lord, we had no such stuff in our thoughts.  But