OF THE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, WITH AN ESSAY TOWARD THE EXPRESSION OF HIS GENIUS, AND AN ACCOUNT OF THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA. BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE. BOSTON: LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. HARVARD Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by RICHARD GRANT WHITE, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & Co., CAMBRIDGE. SIR, I venture, without your knowledge, to inscribe this volume to you as an individual recognition of your longcontinued and signal services to the Republic. Through all your public life the unrelenting foe of wrong and of oppression, one of the earliest and most earnest advocates of the cause of freedom, a statesman who recognized his responsibility to a higher law than that of state necessity, you have yet endeavored to secure the blessings of liberty to all by peaceful methods, and to obtain for all the protection of the law without the violation of the law. Called to the Department of State at a period when our foreign relations were fraught with peril and environed with difficulty, you have so administered them, that, while you calmly maintained the internal sovereignty and the external rights of the government you represented, the jealous ministers of rival nations publicly acknowledged your fairness and your candor, and were able only to cavil at those assertions of the unabated power and dignity of the Republic, which, made with unflinching confidence in an hour of unprecedented trial, touched the hearts of your countrymen as the expression of a faith That which was then in very deed the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen, but which events have shown to be well founded. Just men may have misunderstood you, but your only enemies have been the enemies of right and of your country. At the hands of some of these, you have lately suffered in common with the good President whom we yet mourn. your life was sought with his was an additional testimony to your faithfulness and your ability. Men seek to kill only whom they fear and hate. That you escaped this murderous attempt made by assassins who struck at your country through you, was an occasion of rejoicing to true men throughout the land. This book, although purely literary in its character, may be fitly dedicated to a statesman in whom the cause of education has ever found an advocate equally zealous and discreet, and whose pen has gained him an enviable place in the world of letters. That you may live long in the service of your country, and that, while the undying interest of the subject of this volume wins it readers, this page may do a little toward preserving in the minds of your countrymen a memory of how much they and freedom owe you, are the hearty wishes of Your grateful fellow-citizen, R. G. W. |