I have said that Shakespeare does not put his personal views, sentiments, and preferences, in a word, his individuality, into his characters.  These stand, morally, on their own bottom; he is but the describer of them, and so is not answerable for what they do:  he holds the mirror up to them, or rather to nature in them; they do not hold it up to him:  we see them in what he says, but not him in what they say.  And, of course, as we may not impute to him, morally, their vices, so neither have we any right to credit him, morally, with their virtues.  All this, speaking generally, is true; and it implies just the highest praise that can possibly be accorded to any man as a dramatic poet.  But, true as it is generally, there is nevertheless enough of exception to build a strong argument upon as to his moral principles, or as to his theory of what is morally good and noble in human character.

I have already mentioned Henry the Fifth as the one of his characters into whom the Poet throws something of his own moral soul.  He delivers him both as Prince Hal and as King in such a way, that we cannot but feel he has a most warm and hearty personal admiration of the man; nay, he even discovers an intense moral enthusiasm about him:  in the Choruses, where he ungirds his individual loves from the strict law of dramatic self-aloofness, and lets in a stream from his own full heart, he calls him “the mirror of all Christian kings,” and ascribes to him such qualities, and in such a way, as show unequivocally his own cherished ideal of manhood, and in what course the current of his personal approval ran.  Here, then, we have a trustworthy exhibit of the Poet’s moral principles; here we are left in no doubt as to what moral traits of character he in heart approved, whether his own moral character exemplified them or not.  What sort of a man he represents this his favorite hero to be; how modest in his greatness, how great in his modesty; how dutiful and how devout; how brave, how gentle, how generous, how affable, how humane; how full of religious fervor, yet how bland and liberal in his piety; with “a tear for pity, and a hand open as day for melting charity”; how genuine and unaffected withal these virtues grow in him; in short, how all alive he is with the highest and purest Christian ethos which the old “ages of faith” could breathe into a man;—­all this must stand over till I come to the plays wherein he is delineated.

Something further to the same point may be gathered, not so much from the Poet’s treatment of particular good characters, as from the general style of character which he evidently prefers to draw in that class, and from the peculiar complexion and grain of goodness which he ascribes to them.  Antonio the Merchant, Orlando, the Sebastian of Twelfth Night, Horatio, Kent, Edgar, Ferdinand, Florizel, Posthumus, Pisanio, are instances of what I mean.  All these indeed differ very widely from each other as individuals;