in avoiding an appearance of mysticism in his style, not very attractive to the English reader, and in bringing illustrations from particular passages of the plays themselves, of which Schlegel’s work, from the extensiveness of his plan, did not admit.  We will at the same time confess, that some little jealousy of the character of the national understanding was not without its share in producing the following undertaking, for ‘we were piqued’ that it should be reserved for a foreign critic to give ‘reasons for the faith which we English have in Shakespeare’.  Certainly, no writer among ourselves has shown either the same enthusiastic admiration of his genius, or the same philosophical acuteness in pointing out his characteristic excellences.  As we have pretty well exhausted all we had to say upon this subject in the body of the work, we shall here transcribe Schlegel’s general account of Shakespeare, which is in the following words: 

’Never, perhaps, was there so comprehensive a talent for the delineation of character as Shakespeare’s.  It not only grasps the diversities of rank, sex, and age, down to the dawnings of infancy; not only do the king and the beggar, the hero and the pickpocket, the sage and the idiot, speak and act with equal truth; not only does he transport himself to distant ages and foreign nations, and pourtray in the most accurate manner, with only a few apparent violations of costume, the spirit of the ancient Romans, of the French in their wars with the English, of the English themselves during a great part of their history, of the Southern Europeans (in the serious part of many comedies) the cultivated society of that time, and the former rude and barbarous state of the North; his human characters have not only such depth and precision that they cannot be arranged under classes, and are inexhaustible, even in conception:—­no—­this Prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical world of spirits; calls up the midnight ghost; exhibits before us his witches amidst their unhallowed mysteries; peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs:—­and these beings, existing only in imagination, possess such truth and consistency, that even when deformed monsters like Caliban, he extorts the conviction, that if there should be such beings, they would so conduct themselves.  In a word, as he carries with him the most fruitful and daring fancy into the kingdom of nature,—­on the other hand, he carries nature into the regions of fancy, lying beyond the confines of reality.  We are lost in astonishment at seeing the extraordinary, the wonderful, and the unheard of, in such intimate nearness.