Kansas University Weekly.
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unanimous in praise and adoration, as in respect to Charles Lamb. Every word written upon the subject by those who knew him seems to breath a spirit of brotherly affection and tenderness.
Yet his life was not a happy one. There was too much care and anxiety about it. He was too intimately connected with grief to be really happy, though his sympathy for man and his hospitable solicitude for his guests made him often a genial companion. Faults he no doubt had, but in the midst of a life so trying and so nobly lived, of a character so sweet, let us forget them. Only the misanthrope can find pleasure in tracing a noble man's foibles.
FREDERICK H. WOOD.
--work may be applied. Thanks to these modern harpies the most debauched roue may be found to have written a bible which, first carefully expurgated, they feed to a hungering crowd of saints. The poet is dead; he lived dishonored but wrote immortally; he has sought his long rest, but his commentators live to comment forgetful of the man among men whose life they violate, and build up gross theories distorted from his soul-outpouring.
Snider's System: A Chapter of Atrabilious Criticism.
"Tragedy is a great literary effort designed, not to be read or meditated upon, but to be represented before a mixed audience," is the sane statement of Boucicault quoted by Mr. Appleton Morgan in his most excellent and manly book, "Shakspeare in Fact and Criticism."
The poet of Tragedy is not a prophet, no more is he a closet meditator, a moralizer, a deviser of abstruse ethical systems. It is for him to portray life in its grave, sad complexities, its pains and its pangs, its inevitable sorrows and sufferings, and at the last its sweet repose. He need not for this be a pessimist nor a fatalist. Rather he should be a Stoic, whose sternness is tempered by broad sympathy, who can realize that the wicked are not always punished by means visible to the world, that the righteous are a portion of the eternal Good, the oftimes chastened beloved.
It is a sad irony of fate that a great poet must be followed by hundreds of Lilliputian, commentary mechanics who, with square and compass, would measure the distance of his art. Utterly devoid of literary appreciation, poetic sense, and saving humor they mass their dwarfish intellects and magnified perceptions for the manufacture of theories to which the poet's
Of these cruel sacrifices to polemic mania William Shakspere is the greatest English example. He has been made to teach everything that he did not teach by those that have not understood what he did teach—life. Says Taine, in a luxury of French appreciation: "His master faculty is an impassioned imagination, freed from the shackles of reason and morality. He abandons himself to it, and finds in man nothing he would care to lop off. He accepts nature and finds it beautiful in its entirety. He finds it in its littlenesses, its deformities, its weaknesses, its excesses, its irregularities, and in its rages; he exhibits man at his meals, in bed, at play, drunk, mad, sick; he adds that which ought not to be seen to that which passes on the stage. He does not dream of ennobling, but of copying human life, and aspires only to make his copy more energetic and more striking than the original."
A type of these "thus saith the preacher" interpreters, who would make Shaksperian ethics a mere calculative system of rewards and punishments is Denton J. Snider. He has invented an ingenious system of retributive justice to which he forces each of Shakspere's characters, separately and collectively and much against their will, to comply. The prime canon of the faith is that upon the doer is returned the deed. The dead is not allowed to rest in peace by this book of revelation. His past must be investigated to show cause for mortality, for surely death implies a cause, and this cause must be wrong done by the dead.
"An innocent person may perish in the world of accident, but not in the ethical world of which Shakspere gives the picture." In Cor-