who was Shakespeare’s friend, and to a woman who disdained his love.  The reader may well avoid such classifications and read a few sonnets, like the twenty-ninth, for instance, and let them speak their own message.  A few are trivial and artificial enough, suggesting the elaborate exercises of a piano player; but the majority are remarkable for their subtle thought and exquisite expression.  Here and there is one, like that beginning

    When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
    I summon up remembrance of things past,

which will haunt the reader long afterwards, like the remembrance of an old German melody.

SHAKESPEARE’S PLACE AND INFLUENCE.  Shakespeare holds, by general acclamation, the foremost place in the world’s literature, and his overwhelming greatness renders it difficult to criticise or even to praise him.  Two poets only, Homer and Dante, have been named with him; but each of these wrote within narrow limits, while Shakespeare’s genius included all the world of nature and of men.  In a word, he is the universal poet.  To study nature in his works is like exploring a new and beautiful country; to study man in his works is like going into a great city, viewing the motley crowd as one views a great masquerade in which past and present mingle freely and familiarly, as if the dead were all living again.  And the marvelous thing, in this masquerade of all sorts and conditions of men, is that Shakespeare lifts the mask from every face, lets us see the man as he is in his own soul, and shows us in each one some germ of good, some “soul of goodness” even in things evil.  For Shakespeare strikes no uncertain note, and raises no doubts to add to the burden of your own.  Good always overcomes evil in the long run; and love, faith, work, and duty are the four elements that in all ages make the world right.  To criticise or praise the genius that creates these men and women is to criticise or praise humanity itself.

Of his influence in literature it is equally difficult to speak.  Goethe expresses the common literary judgment when he says, “I do not remember that any book or person or event in my life ever made so great an impression upon me as the plays of Shakespeare.”  His influence upon our own language and thought is beyond calculation.  Shakespeare and the King James Bible are the two great conservators of the English speech; and one who habitually reads them finds himself possessed of a style and vocabulary that are beyond criticism.  Even those who read no Shakespeare are still unconsciously guided by him, for his thought and expression have so pervaded our life and literature that it is impossible, so long as one speaks the English language, to escape his influence.

    His life was gentle, and the elements
    So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
    And say to all the world, “This was a man!”

V. SHAKESPEARE’S CONTEMPORARIES AND SUCCESSORS IN THE DRAMA