thing, at any rate, is certain about the wood near Athens—­it is full of life.  The persons that haunt it—­though most of them are hardly more than children, and some of them are fairies, and all of them are too agreeable to be true—­are nevertheless substantial creatures, whose loves and jokes and quarrels receive our thorough sympathy; and the air they breathe—­the lords and the ladies, no less than the mechanics and the elves—­is instinct with an exquisite good-humour, which makes us as happy as the night is long.  To turn from Theseus and Titania and Bottom to the Enchanted Island, is to step out of a country lane into a conservatory.  The roses and the dandelions have vanished before preposterous cactuses, and fascinating orchids too delicate for the open air; and, in the artificial atmosphere, the gaiety of youth has been replaced by the disillusionment of middle age.  Prospero is the central figure of The Tempest; and it has often been wildly asserted that he is a portrait of the author—­an embodiment of that spirit of wise benevolence which is supposed to have thrown a halo over Shakespeare’s later life.  But, on closer inspection, the portrait seems to be as imaginary as the original.  To an irreverent eye, the ex-Duke of Milan would perhaps appear as an unpleasantly crusty personage, in whom a twelve years’ monopoly of the conversation had developed an inordinate propensity for talking.  These may have been the sentiments of Ariel, safe at the Bermoothes; but to state them is to risk at least ten years in the knotty entrails of an oak, and it is sufficient to point out, that if Prospero is wise, he is also self-opinionated and sour, that his gravity is often another name for pedantic severity, and that there is no character in the play to whom, during some part of it, he is not studiously disagreeable.  But his Milanese countrymen are not even disagreeable; they are simply dull.  ‘This is the silliest stuff that e’er I heard,’ remarked Hippolyta of Bottom’s amateur theatricals; and one is tempted to wonder what she would have said to the dreary puns and interminable conspiracies of Alonzo, and Gonzalo, and Sebastian, and Antonio, and Adrian, and Francisco, and other shipwrecked noblemen.  At all events, there can be little doubt that they would not have had the entree at Athens.

The depth of the gulf between the two plays is, however, best measured by a comparison of Caliban and his masters with Bottom and his companions.  The guileless group of English mechanics, whose sports are interrupted by the mischief of Puck, offers a strange contrast to the hideous trio of the ‘jester,’ the ‘drunken butler,’ and the ’savage and deformed slave,’ whose designs are thwarted by the magic of Ariel.  Bottom was the first of Shakespeare’s masterpieces in characterisation, Caliban was the last:  and what a world of bitterness and horror lies between them!  The charming coxcomb it is easy to know and love; but the ‘freckled whelp hag-born’ moves us mysteriously to pity and to terror, eluding us for ever in fearful allegories, and strange coils of disgusted laughter and phantasmagorical tears.  The physical vigour of the presentment is often so remorseless as to shock us.  ‘I left them,’ says Ariel, speaking of Caliban and his crew: