To the honoured and lamented son of our beloved and glorious Master, whom neither I nor any better man can ever praise and thank and glorify enough, belongs all the credit of discerning for himself and discovering for us all the truth that Julius Caesar is at all points equally like the greatest works of Shakespeare’s middle period and unlike the works of his last.  It is in the main a play belonging to the same order as King Henry IV.; but it differs from our English Henriade—­as remarkably unlike Voltaire’s as Zaire is unlike Othello—­not more by the absence of Falstaff than by the presence of Brutus.  Here at least Shakespeare has made full amends, if not to all modern democrats, yet assuredly to all historical republicans, for any possible or apparent preference of royal to popular traditions.  Whatever manner of man may have been the actual Roman, our Shakespearean Brutus is undoubtedly the very noblest figure of a typical and ideal republican in all the literature of the world.  “A democracy such as yours in America is my abhorrence,” wrote Landor once to an impudent and foul-mouthed Yankee pseudosopher, who had intruded himself on that great man’s privacy in order to have the privilege of afterwards informing the readers of a pitiful pamphlet on England that Landor had “pestered him with Southey”; an impertinence, I may add, which Mr. Landor at once rebuked with the sharpest contempt and chastised with the haughtiest courtesy.  But, the old friend and lifelong champion of Kossuth went on to say, his feelings were far different towards a republic; and if on the one point, then not less certainly on the other, we may be assured that his convictions and his prepossessions would have been shared by the author of Coriolanus and Julius Caesar.

Having now come perforce to the inevitable verge of Hamlet, I hasten to declare that I can advance no pretension to compete with the claim of that “literary man” who became immortal by dint of one dinner with a bishop, and in right of that last glass poured out for him in sign of amity by “Sylvester Blougram, styled in partibus Episcopus, necnon the deuce knows what.”  I do not propose to prove my perception of any point in the character of Hamlet “unseized by the Germans yet.”  I can only determine, as the Church Catechism was long since wont to bid me, “to keep my hands from picking and stealing, and my tongue” not only “from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering”—­though this itself is a form of abstinence not universally or even commonly practised among the rampant rout of rival commentators—­but also, now as ever throughout this study, from all conscious repetition of what others have said before me.