no 



honour, ou the basis of all virtue and goodness, there is 

 now happily no real question. Mr. Emerson remarks, in 

 reference to his works, that he was strong as nature is 

 strong, without emphasis or assertion ; and this is no 

 doubt as true of his life. The moral beneficence im- 

 parted to all his most fully delineated scenic characters, 

 no less than the predominant and sustained tone of 

 morality in such plays as " Measure for Measure," " The 

 Merchant of Venice," is perhaps the best testimony of 

 his pure, noble, and loving nature. To contrast with the 

 insinuations and charges of immorality, obscenit}^ and 

 profanity, urged by GifFord, Birch, Bell, and others, there 

 is some accidental evidence borne by Coleridge and Dr. 

 Proctor, which, being spontaneous, is much to the pur- 

 pose. Coleridge remarks, " Shakspere at all times kept 

 the highroad of life. He has no innocent adulteries, no 

 interesting incests, no virtuous vice ; he never renders 

 that amiable which reason and religion teach us to 

 detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue." Dr. 

 Proctor adds, " he never tampered with truth, never 

 threw down the boundaries between vice and virtue, 

 never strove by voluptuous images to excite the passions, 

 nor by fallacious arguments to ensnare the mind or con- 

 fine the intellect." It is, however, a work of sujDcrero- 

 gation to defend, not only by external arguments, but by 

 extrinsic testimony, a question on which the plays must 

 be the best witness, their own noblest expositor. To the 

 dramas must we look for the proofs of their own moral 

 dignity. For the proof of those moral and religious con- 

 siderations, and of those Chiistian doctrines so marvel- 

 lously expoimded, so infinitely applied, so positively incul- 

 cated, that the German critics insist on. If as a literatm-e 

 it combined the utmost fertility of intellectual resource, 

 with an even more than human vigour, eloquence, hu- 

 mour, fancy, aoniracy of knowledge, aptness of illustra- 



