This suggestion is interesting in the view that we find in the characters of the Elizabethan drama not types and qualities, but individuals strongly projected, with all their idiosyncrasies and contradictions.  These dramas touch our sympathies at all points, and are representative of human life today, because they reflected the human life of their time.  This is supremely true of Shakespeare, and almost equally true of Jonson and many of the other stars of that marvelous epoch.  In England as well as in France, as we have said, it was the period of the classic revival; but in England the energetic reality of the time was strong enough to break the classic fetters, and to use classic learning for modern purposes.  The English dramatists, like the French, used classic histories and characters.  But two things are to be noted in their use of them.  First, that the characters and the play of mind and passion in them are thoroughly English and of the modern time.  And second, and this seems at first a paradox, they are truer to the classic spirit than the characters in the contemporary French drama.  This results from the fact that they are truer to the substance of things, to universal human nature, while the French seem to be in great part an imitation, having root neither in the soil of France nor Attica.  M. Guizot confesses that France, in order to adopt the ancient models, was compelled to limit its field in some sort to one corner of human existence.  He goes on to say that the present “demands of the drama pleasures and emotions that can no longer be supplied by the inanimate representation of a world that has ceased to exist.  The classic system had its origin in the life of the time; that time has passed away; its image subsists in brilliant colors in its works, but can no more be reproduced.”  Our own literary monuments must rest on other ground.  “This ground is not the ground of Corneille or Racine, nor is it that of Shakespeare; it is our own; but Shakespeare’s system, as it appears to me, may furnish the plans according to which genius ought now to work.  This system alone includes all those social conditions and those general and diverse feelings, the simultaneous conjuncture and activity of which constitute for us at the present day the spectacle of human things.”

That is certainly all that any one can claim for Shakespeare and his fellow-dramatists.  They cannot be models in form any more than Sophocles and Euripides; but they are to be followed in making the drama, or any literature, expressive of its own time, while it is faithful to the emotions and feeling of universal human nature.  And herein, it seems to me, lies the broad distinction between most of the English and French literature of the latter part of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries.  Perhaps I may be indulged in another observation on this topic, touching a later time.  Notwithstanding the prevalent notion that the French poets are the sympathetic heirs of classic culture, it appears to me that they are not so imbued with the true classic spirit, art, and mythology as some of our English poets, notably Keats and Shelley.