to the most deformed:  a prodigal dispenses these riches; but the impression is, that he is as inexhaustible as Nature herself.  And not one of these figures is like another in features:  there are groups which have a family likeness, but no two individuals resembling each other:  they become known to us progressively, as we find it with living acquaintance:  they make different impressions on different people, and are interpreted by each according to his own feelings.  Hence, in the explanation of Shakespeare’s characters, it would be an idle undertaking to balance the different opinions of men, or to insist arbitrarily on our own:  each can only express his own view, and must then learn whose opinion best stands the test of time.  For, on returning to these characters at another time, our greater ripeness and experience will ever lay open to us new features in them.  Whoever has not been wrecked, with his ideals and principles, on the shore of life, whoever has not bled inwardly with sorrow, has not suppressed holy feelings, and stumbled over the enigmas of the world, will but half understand Hamlet.  And whoever has borne the sharpest pains of consciousness will understand Shakespeare’s characters like one of the initiated; and to him they will be ever new, ever more admirable, ever richer in significance:  he will make out of them a school of life, free from the danger of almost all modern poetry, which is apt to lead us astray, and to give us heroes of romance, instead of true men.—­GERVINUS.

                        “That which he hath writ
    Is with such judgment labour’d and distill’d
    Through all the needful uses of our lives,
    That, could a man remember but his lines,
    He should not touch at any serious point,
    But he might breathe his spirit out of him.”

Shakespeare, it is true, idealizes his characters, all of them more or less, some of them very much.  But this, too, is so done from the heart outwards, done with such inward firmness and such natural temperance, that there is seldom any thing of hollowness or insolidity in the result.  Except in some of his earlier plays, written before he had found his proper strength, and before his genius had got fairly disciplined into power, there is nothing ambitious or obtrusive in his idealizing; no root of falsehood in the work, as indeed there never is in any work of art that is truly worthy the name.  Works of artifice are a very different sort of thing.  And one, perhaps the main, secret of Shakespeare’s mode in this respect is, that the ideal is so equally diffused, and so perfectly interfused with the real, as not to disturb the natural balance and harmony of things.  In other words, his poetry takes and keeps an elevation at all points alike above the plane of fact.  Therewithal his mass of real matter is so great, that it keeps the ideal mainly out of sight.  It is only by a special act of reflection that one discovers there is any