at others, he suffers ambiguous expressions to escape in the presence of women, and even from women themselves.  This species of indelicacy was probably not then unusual.  He certainly did not indulge in it merely to please the multitude, for in many of his pieces there is not the slightest trace of this sort to be found; and in what virgin purity are many of his female parts worked out!  When we see the liberties taken by other dramatic poets in England in his time, and even much later, we must account him comparatively chaste and moral.  Neither must we overlook certain circumstances in the existing state of the theatre.  The female parts were not acted by women, but by boys; and no person of the fair sex appeared in the theatre without a mask.  Under such a carnival disguise, much might be heard by them, and much might be ventured to be said in their presence, which in other circumstances would have been absolutely improper.  It is certainly to be wished that decency should be observed on all public occasions, and consequently also on the stage.  But even in this it is possible to go too far.  That carping censoriousness which scents out impurity in every bold sally, is, at best, but an ambiguous criterion of purity of morals; and beneath this hypocritical guise there often lurks the consciousness of an impure imagination.  The determination to tolerate nothing which has the least reference to the sensual relation between the sexes, may be carried to a pitch extremely oppressive to a dramatic poet and highly prejudicial to the boldness and freedom of his compositions.  If such considerations were to be attended to, many of the happiest parts of Shakespeare’s plays, for example, in Measure for Measure, and All’s Well that Ends Well, which, nevertheless, are handled with a due regard to decency, must be set aside as sinning against this would-be propriety.

Had no other monuments of the age of Elizabeth come down to us than the works of Shakespeare, I should, from them alone, have formed the most favorable idea of its state of social culture and enlightenment.  When those who look through such strange spectacles as to see nothing in them but rudeness and barbarity cannot deny what I have now historically proved, they are usually driven to this last resource, and demand, “What has Shakespeare to do with the mental culture of his age?  He had no share in it.  Born in an inferior rank, ignorant and uneducated, he passed his life in low society, and labored to please a vulgar audience for his bread, without ever dreaming of fame or posterity.”

In all this there is not a single word of truth, though it has been repeated a thousand times.  It is true we know very little of the poet’s life; and what we do know consists for the most part of raked-up and chiefly suspicious anecdotes, of about such a character as those which are told at inns to inquisitive strangers who visit the birthplace or neighborhood of a celebrated man.  Within a very