consequence in the world’s affairs, preferably even of historic fame.  The canon erred in mistaking one means of securing credible intensity or richness for the many which are possible.  The end in view is to represent human qualities at their acme.  In other times as a matter of fact persons highly placed were most likely to exhibit such development; birth, station, and their opportunities for unrestrained and conspicuous action made them examples of the compass of human energy, passion, and fate.  New ages brought other conditions.  Shakspere recognized the truth of the matter, and laid the emphasis where it belongs, upon the humanity of the king, not on the kingly office of the man.  Said Henry V:  “I think the king is but a man as I am; the violet smells to him as it doth to me; the element shows to him as it doth to me; all his senses have but human conditions; his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his appetites are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with like wing.”  Such, too, was Lear in the tempest.  And from the other end of the scale hear Shylock:  “Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, appetites, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?  If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Rank and race are accidents; the essential thing is that the type be highly human, let the means of giving it this intensity and richness be what they may.

It is true that the type may seem defective in the point that it is at best but a fragment of humanity, an abstraction or a combination of abstracted qualities.  There was never such an athlete as our Greek sculptor’s, never a pagan god nor Virgin Mother, nor a hero equal to Homer’s thought, so beautiful, brave, and courteous, so terrible to his foe, so loving to his friend.  And yet is it not thus that life is known to us actually? does not this typical rendering of character fall in with the natural habit of life?  What man, what friend, is known to us except by fragments of his spirit?  Only one life, our own, is known to us as a continuous existence.  Just as when we see an orange, we supply the further side and think of it as round, so with men we supply from ourselves the unseen side that makes the man completely and continuously human.  Moreover, it is a matter of common experience that men, we ourselves, may live only in one part, and the best, of our nature at one moment, and yet for the moment be absorbed in that activity both in consciousness and energy; for that moment we are only living so; now, if a character were shown to us only in the moments in which he was living so, at his best and in his characteristic state as the soldier, the priest, the lover, then the ideal abstraction of literature