With Shakespeare all this is just reversed.  His egg is a real egg, brimful of meat, and not an empty shell; and this, because the formation began at the centre, and the shell was formed last.  He gives us, not the mere imitations or appearances of things, but the very things themselves.  His characters have more or less of surface, but they are solids:  what is actually and directly shown, is often the least part of them, never the whole:  the rest is left to be inferred; and the showing is so managed withal as to start and propagate the inferring process in the beholder’s mind.

All which clearly implies that Shakespeare conceived his persons, not from their outside, but in their rudiments and first principles.  He begins at the heart of a character, and unfolds it outwards, forming and compacting all the internal parts and organs as he unfolds it; and the development, even because it is a real and true development, proceeds at every step, not by mere addition or aggregation of particulars, but by digestion and vital assimilation of all the matter that enters into the structure; there being, in virtue of the life that pervades the thing, just such elements, and just so much of them, sent to each organ, as is necessary to its formation.  The result of this wonderful process is, that the characters are all that they appear to be, and a vast deal more besides:  there is food for endless thought and reflection in them:  beneath and behind the surface, there is all the substance that the surface promises or has room for,—­an inexhaustible stock of wealth and significance beyond what is directly seen; so that the more they are looked into the more they are found to contain.

Thus there is a sort of realistic verisimilitude in Shakespeare’s characters.  It is as if they had been veritable living men and women, and he had seen and comprehended and delivered the whole and pure truth respecting them.  Of course, therefore, they are as far as possible from being mere names set before pieces of starched and painted rhetoric, or mere got-up figures of modes and manners:  they are no shadows or images of fancy, no heroes of romance, no theatrical personages at all; they have nothing surreptitious or make-believe or ungenuine about them:  they do not in any sort belong to the family of poetical beings; they are not designs from works of art; nay, they are not even designs from nature; they are nature itself.  Nor are they compilations from any one-sided or sectional view of mankind, but are cut out round and full from the whole of humanity; so that they touch us at all points, and, as it were, surround us.  From all this it follows that there is no repetition among them:  though there are some striking family resemblances, yet no two of them are individually alike:  for, as the process of forming them was a real growth, an evolution from a germ, the spontaneous result of creative Nature working within them, so there could be no copying of