I am not minded to say much of Shakespeare’s Arthur; there are one or two figures in the world of his work of which there are no words that would be fit or good to say.  Another of these is Cordelia.  The place they have in our lives and thoughts is not one for talk; the niche set apart for them to inhabit in our secret hearts is not penetrable by the lights and noises of common day.  There are chapels in the cathedral of man’s highest art as in that of his inmost life, not made to be set open to the eyes and feet of the world.  Love and death and memory keep charge for us in silence of some beloved names.  It is the crowning glory of genius, the final miracle and transcendent gift of poetry, that it can add to the number of these, and engrave on the very heart of our remembrance fresh names and memories of its own creation.

There is one younger child in this heavenly family of Shakespeare’s who sits side by side with Arthur in the secret places of our thought; there are but two or three that I remember among the children of other poets who may be named in the same year with them:  as Fletcher’s Hengo, Webster’s Giovanni, and Landor’s Caesarion.  Of this princely trinity of boys the “bud of Britain” is as yet the most famous flower; yet even in the broken words of childish heroism that falter on his dying lips there is nothing of more poignant pathos, more “dearly sweet and bitter,” than Giovanni’s talk of his dead mother and all her sleepless nights now ended for ever in a sleep beyond tears or dreams.  Perhaps the most nearly faultless in finish and proportion of perfect nature among all the noble three is Landor’s portrait of the imperial and right Roman child of Caesar and Cleopatra.  I know not but this may be found in the judgment of men to come wellnigh the most pathetic and heroic figure bequeathed us after more than eighty years of a glorious life by the indomitable genius of our own last Roman and republican poet.

We have come now to that point at the opening of the second stage in his work where the supreme genius of all time begins first to meddle with the mysteries and varieties of human character, to handle its finer and more subtle qualities, to harmonise its more untuned and jarring discords; giving here and thus the first proof of a power never shared in like measure by the mightiest among the sons of men, a sovereign and serene capacity to fathom the else unfathomable depths of spiritual nature, to solve its else insoluble riddles, to reconcile its else irreconcilable discrepancies.  In his first stage Shakespeare had dropped his plummet no deeper into the sea of the spirit of man than Marlowe had sounded before him; and in the channel of simple emotion no poet could cast surer line with steadier hand than he.  Further down in the dark and fiery depths of human pain and mortal passion no soul could search than his who first rendered into speech the aspirations and the agonies of a ruined and revolted