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and King Henry VIII. He is the Shakspere of Venus and Adonis and Romeo and Juliet, on his way to acquire some of the dark experience of Measure for Measure, and the bitter learning of Troilus and Cressida. Shakspere's writings assure us that in the main his eye was fixed on the true ends of life; but they do not lead us to believe that he was inaccessible to temptations of the senses, the heart, and the imagination. We can only guess the frailty that accompanied such strength, the risks that attended such high powers; immense demands on life, vast ardours, and then the void hour, the deep dejection. There appears to have been a time in his life when the springs of faith and hope had almost ceased to flow; and he recovered these not by flying from reality and life, but by driving his shafts deeper towards the centre of things. So Ulvsses was transformed into Prospero, worldly wisdom into spiritual insight. Such ideal purity as Milton's was not possessed nor sought by Shakspere; among these sonnets, one or two might be spoken by Mercutio, when his wit of cheveril was stretched to an ell broad. To compensate—Shakspere knew men and women a good deal better than did Milton, and probably no patches of his life are quite as unprofitably ugly as some which disfigured the life of the great idealist. His daughter could love and honour Shakspere's memory. Lamentable it is, if he was taken in the toils, but at least we know that he escaped all toils before the end. May we dare to conjecture that Cleopatra, queen and courtesan, black from " Phoebus' amorous pinches," a " lass unparalleled," has some kinship through the imagination with our dark lady of the virginal? "Would I had never seen her," sighs out Antony, and the shrewd onlooker Enobarbus replies, " O, sir, you had then left unseen a wonderful piece of work; which not to have been blest withal would have discredited your travel."

Shakspere did not, in Byron's manner, invite the world to