There is one other relation in which Shakspeare stands to the men of his times not less necessary to us now, which I forbear to insist on, as it will properly occupy us in the lecture-room. If these remarks shall in any way assist your object, their purpose will have been answered; if they enable you to study Shakspeare in a way more satisfactory to yourselves, because bearing more immediately on the deeper questions of your lives, I shall not regret my labour; though, I confess, that with the multitude of my avocations I could have wished that your choice had fallen on some other Professor. I have now only to wish you success, and to express my hopes that you may reap from this exercise the advantages which it offers. Of this I am certain, that no careful reading of Shakspeare or any other great poet can ever be wholly in vain.

SHAKSPEARE'S Romeo and Juliet' gives us the deepest insight into the strength and weakness of Elizabeth's reign, as 'Hamlet' does into that of her successor. Compare the first act of that drama with the last; consider the difference and the cause of it. With consummate skill the poet brings before his hearers the hollowness and confusion prevailing at the outset of the poem. How idle are those retainers loitering about the streets! how devoid of all serious employment! By their half-jesting, half-earnest biting of their thumbs, the whole city is set on fire; and their idleness and disorder are reflected through the whole town. Nobler characters appear upon the stage, but with the same radical defect. Escalus is a prince with no high sense of his authority; it is not connected in his mind with any nobler principle than the enforcement of peacenay, scarcely that. Then we have Romeo, whose love is the creature of his fancy, which he must keep alive by flying from his family to a grove of sycamores; he shuts up his windows in the daytime, and makes for himself an artificial light. Then we have the two Capulets, mother and father, devoid of all real love or respect for their child; evidently the mother does not know how old her daughter is. She has been left to the care of the nurse, and the wonder is that Juliet does not show the result in her conduct and conversation, as we have so clear an insight into her most secret thoughts. Even Juliet herself reflects in one way the hollowness of her parents. She is asked about her marriage, and makes an answer with a mock simplicity, which is not of the heart, and is far from her character, but such as any well-bred young lady might have made, who had known all the world and its ways, which Juliet did not: and this, be it observed, to her mother, not to her lover. Then we have Mercutio,

the man whose wit is the result of animal spirits, and therefore is a true exponent of his mind, such as it is; he has no seriousness in him, and no deep interest in anything earnest or serious. Singularly enough, he is always in a mistake; he does not and he cannot understand the true character of anyone with whom he is brought into collision. The whole world is manifestly a puzzle to him with all its contradictions; his own life is a puzzle; but he can find amusement in all, and that without being ill-natured. It is only when he comes to die that the reality breaks in upon him in those most bitter words, which all his spirits and his native politeness cannot keep down-'A plague of both your houses!' I need not pursue these remarks any further-my readers can do that for themselves. But what strange materials are these, and how unpromising, from which the poet intends to work out the deepest truths, and build up the most serious realities of this life! How very differently would they have been treated by an inferior dramatist!-by Ben Jonson or Massinger, for instance.

Now, compare this act with the last act of the play, and observe how all this confusion has disappeared. A solemn feeling and sense of order impresses itself upon us, notwithstanding the sorrow and suffering which all the actors in it have been working out for themselves. Observe, too, that that order is not of human creation; on the contrary, every one has been adding his quota of confusion to obscure and retard it. The friar the religious element-has been doing a little harm to secure what he considers a great good; he has been augmenting the evil which he wished to cure. He has been trying by evil to do good-to justify bad means by the benevolence of his intentions. The two lovers feel that love has changed their being; it has commended itself to their true and natural sympathies; they feel its necessity; and they, too, add to the confusion by a clandestine marriage. The parents, who have been negligent before, now add to their fault by forcing their daughter's consent to a marriage hateful to her, and unholy in itself. The respectable morality of Paris tends to the same end.

Yet this order has established itself-it has manifested itself-and that, too, out of strange elements, and in a way inscrutable to us! The disorder and hollowness in the outset of the play have given place to order and reality at the close; the city is at peace, the families are reconciled, the lovers are united, and in the same grave lie Romeo, Juliet, Paris, and Tybalt.

What has brought out this result? The wedded love of the man and the woman. Bitter it is undoubtedly, in some aspects, to human feelings and ordinary reasonings; but I think Shakspeare makes us feel that, ev even with all its bitterness, it harmonizes with a truth within us-it is a better and a happier state than the first. As the Mercutio of the first act might pass easily into the fanciful Romeo, and from Romeo, had he lived long enough, into Tybalt, so one feels in the last act that one touch of reality and true suffering has exalted even the most commonplace characters of the play into beings above themselves. There is no comparison between the interest felt for Mercutio and Paris; and yet the most simple words of

the latter, as he falls by the hand of Romeo, have more true feeling, and interest us more deeply, than all the wit and bickering of the former :

'Oh! I am slain. If thou be merciful,

Open the tomb, lay me with Juliet.'

Then observe that in proportion as this reality comes out in men, in proportion as the light and the fanciful are superseded by that which is true and earnest, in the same proportion are they brought into conformity with an order external to themselves. In that proportion the confusion disappears which had seemed to prevail around them. It is an abiding sense of the realities of this life which enables men to recognise more truly the realities of the next. Mere declaiming on the hollowness and vanity of things around us ends in total infidelity; if the present is a dream, the future is no better. Whilst the love of Romeo is merely fanciful, he is no true man; he is not true to himself, to his family, or to his friends. When the rest of the city is raging with party strife and bloodshed, he, a young man, the chief of his family, an Italian with hot blood in his veins, observing the blood on the ground, passes it over with the remark,—

"Where shall we dine? O me! what fray was here?

Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all.

Here's much to do with hate-but more with love.'

Words wonderfully prophetic, though not at that time to the mind that uttered them! But the moment he sees Juliet, his whole nature is changed-he has lost to find himself in her. His true passion makes him true to himself and to all around him. His love is no starveling, to need the artifices of the fancy. His eyes and his sympathies are open to all that is around him, to nature, and to his fellow-men-courteous to the nurse, witty with Mercutio, a true friend, a loyal gentleman. Intense as his love is, it has not overlaid but developed his better qualities. Even the love of Juliet cannot induce him to be untrue to his friendship, though there is a sore temptation to be so. He feels that even that love is lost if it makes him unmanly.

With what truth and skill has Shakspeare worked all this out! How has he again shown us what a poor shrunken thing this world is what a mere beggarly account of empty boxes,' where love is not! How deep a truth, and how much needed it to be insisted on in the age of Elizabeth! This wedded love was not what Bacon said of it,- Nuptial love maketh mankind, friendly love perfecteth it;' not as Rome had taught, a concession to man's weakness; not as the Elizabethan heroes would have persuaded themselves, a commonplace substitute for a mere ideal friendship, but the perfection of the sexes, the type of the deepest Christian verities, the foundation of whatever is sound, healthy, and lasting in the social and political relations of man.

Looking then at that time, and at other times in history, I cannot help feeling that this is a truth ever needful to be prominently stated; that whenever it is neglected, or disfigured, or placed upon an unnatural or erroneous basis, all sorts of error and confusion follow; it becomes the

root of every kind of derangement and bewilderment. This Milton felt, and this he taught when he wrote his 'Paradise Lost' as a commentary on his own age, and showed that the disobedience of Eve to the law of her husband was the prelude of Adam's disobedience, and the rupture of the marriage tie between God and man. This is obvious also from the fact, that marriage was eclipsed of its glory and highest sanctions in the old world, and does not reappear in them until Christ's incarnation. Of this remark the struggles of the old world furnish a wonderful illustration.

To conclude this overgrown note. Mr. Maurice has stated that by a careful consideration of this relation between the sexes, and from having the truth of it brought home to their minds by peculiar visitations, some men have been enabled to see in that great eternal verity of the Holy Trinity, not a mere doctrine to be believed, but a substantive reality, lying at the foundation of all the relations of life, and of this of marriage primarily. For as all things outward are of God, and in His Unity all things subsist, so on the relations of the Three Persons in One God all other relations depend. The old jurists and the schoolmen exemplify this remark. With a statement of the relations of the Three Persons in One God every one of them commences his work; on the truths contained in that profession every one raises the superstructure of all laws and all knowledge, divine as well as human. But there is, I think, another important conclusion to be drawn from the remark of Mr. Maurice, and it is this. The discredit thrown upon marriage by the Roman Church was one main reason why not only the schoolmen in their speculations, or rather in the treatment of them, are so far removed from our ordinary sympathies (a strange thing if you consider the men themselves, their unwearied patience, their strong labour, their gigantic self-denial, their superhuman strength of intellect)-but this discredit was the reason why the outward realities of life and the world of nature were to them a sealed book and a dead letter. They were unable to realise the visible. It was not until the Reformation restored marriage that it restored the intercourse between man and nature, thus giving the first impulse to that truth to which the great reformer Bacon dedicated all the powers of his mind, commercium mentis et rerum. From that time the book of nature has been to man the word of God; or, in the words of Hooker, an authenticall or an originall draught of the law written in the bosome of God Himselfe.'

297

THE ROYAL SUPREMACY, AND THE HISTORY OF ITS INTRODUCTION.

THE anxiety of the Episcopal Bench to get rid of Bishop Colenso by some legitimate means brings us once more face to face with the Act of Supremacy and its authors. Hitherto, Churchmen have upheld that Statute with as much vehemence and tenacity as if the existence of the Church itself depended upon it. The greatest of English theologians, from the days of Hooker, have flourished it in the face of their enemies as a weapon of proof not less effective against Romanism than Dissent. To the old thick-and-thin supporter of Church and State the royal supremacy seemed a tower of strength. He was not ashamed to be told that he belonged to a Church which owed its superiority solely to its political advantages. He would not have flinched from the assertion that the Reformation was a political movement; that the State Church was under greater obligations to the King than the Bishops. He rather gloried in the fact. He saw in this alliance a pledge that the powers of the State should be employed in securing for the Church a supremacy above all other religious societies. However they might fluctuate and decay he was perfectly secure. It was the business of the State, not his, to see that the Church sustained no damage, to prevent any attacks upon its outworks, and put down the promulgators of schism from within. It was a comfortable doctrine; it saved a world of thought, of labour, and of

From the National Review for October 1863, under the title: State Papers of Henry VIII. published by Royal Commission. Correspondence of Cromwell in the State Paper Office.'