THE BOTANY OF SHAKESPEARE. 219 



becile " indicates how attempered and attenuated by spiritual faith 

 were the dictates of pure reason in his day, and the reason of Boileau, 

 as I have already observed, was strongly tinged with sestheticism. I 

 need not, with reference to eighteenth-century reason worship, go 

 further than to refer the curious of enlightenment on the subject to 

 the masterly works of Morley on the period in question, in which it is 

 precisely this unflinching devotion to reason or unreason (if the sage 

 of Chelsea will have it thus) which stimulates his calm and logical 

 temperament to positive enthusiasm. 



A last element of contrast between the centuries is of interest in 

 connection with the habitual mode of thought which Godwin and his 

 political disciple Shelley borrowed from eighteenth-century French 

 sources with reference to the true relations subsisting between laws 

 and morals. The seventeenth-century mind held tenaciously enough 

 to the theory that it is the moeurs of a nation that inspire the laws, 

 but the encyclopedists were inspired in their undying hope of 

 amelioration and human progress to perfectibility by the contrary 

 theory that men, after all, are only bad because the laws have made 

 them so. 



It may be conceded, then, that these broad relations of literary 

 movements one with the other, the conflict of converging tendencies, 

 and the more evident causes of the growth and decay of powerful 

 manifestations of a nation's thought, are of quite sufficient moment 

 to have merited fuller treatment at the hands of the eminent critic 

 who has in all other respects fulfilled his task so admirably, that having 

 regard to the necessary conditions of the subject, it would be above 

 criticism if anything could be. 



THE BOTANY OF SHAKESPEARE. 



BY THOMAS H. MACBREDE. 



THE universality of Shakespeare is the common remark of critics. 

 Other great men have been versatile; Shakespeare alone is uni- 

 versal. He alone of all great men seems to have been able to follow 

 his own advice, " to hold as it were the mirror up to Nature." On 

 the clear surface of his thought, as on a deep Alpine lake, the whole 

 shore lies reflected not alone the clouds, the sky, the woods, the 

 castles, the rocks, the mountain path by which the shepherd strolls; 

 not alone the broad highway by which may march the king in 

 splendor the peasant with his wain; but even the humbler objects by 

 the still water's edge, the trodden grass, the fluttering sedge, the 

 broken reed, the tiniest flower, all things, all Nature in action or 

 repose finds counterpart within the glassy depths. 



