of mystery, of wonder, a world of shifting visions, a world of hopeless anachronisms, a world in which anything may happen next.  The pretences of reality are indeed usually preserved, but only the pretences.  Cymbeline is supposed to be the king of a real Britain, and the real Augustus is supposed to demand tribute of him; but these are the reasons which his queen, in solemn audience with the Roman ambassador, urges to induce her husband to declare for war: 

             Remember, sir, my liege,
    The Kings your ancestors, together with
    The natural bravery of your isle, which stands
    As Neptune’s park, ribbed and paled in
    With rocks unscaleable and roaring waters,
    With sands that will not bear your enemies’ boats,
    But suck them up to the topmast.  A kind of conquest
    Caesar made here; but made not here his brag
    Of ‘Came, and saw, and overcame’; with shame—­
    The first that ever touched him—­he was carried
    From off our coast, twice beaten; and his shipping—­
    Poor ignorant baubles!—­on our terrible seas,
    Like egg-shells moved upon the surges, crack’d
    As easily ’gainst our rocks; for joy whereof
    The famed Cassibelan, who was once at point—­
    O giglot fortune!—­to master Caesar’s sword,
    Made Lud’s town with rejoicing fires bright
    And Britons strut with courage.

It comes with something of a shock to remember that this medley of poetry, bombast, and myth will eventually reach the ears of no other person than the Octavius of Antony and Cleopatra; and the contrast is the more remarkable when one recalls the brilliant scene of negotiation and diplomacy in the latter play, which passes between Octavius, Maecenas, and Agrippa on the one side, and Antony and Enobarbus on the other, and results in the reconciliation of the rivals and the marriage of Antony and Octavia.

Thus strangely remote is the world of Shakespeare’s latest period; and it is peopled, this universe of his invention, with beings equally unreal, with creatures either more or less than human, with fortunate princes and wicked step-mothers, with goblins and spirits, with lost princesses and insufferable kings.  And of course, in this sort of fairy land, it is an essential condition that everything shall end well; the prince and princess are bound to marry and live happily ever afterwards, or the whole story is unnecessary and absurd; and the villains and the goblins must naturally repent and be forgiven.  But it is clear that such happy endings, such conventional closes to fantastic tales, cannot be taken as evidences of serene tranquillity on the part of their maker; they merely show that he knew, as well as anyone else, how such stories ought to end.