careful to discriminate the character of men as it is influenced by their country and their time. Owing to this innate catholicity of genius, Shakespeare grows yearly into a wider fame, and may yet, by the consent of Christendom, be regarded as the supreme poet of modern civilization. All Teutonic races admit such fact already; and, devoted as they severally are to their own national bards, they unanimously bow down to Shakespeare as the monarch-poet, the mastersinger of the world. Without discord or division, nay, with enthusiastic acclamation, he is so hailed, alike by scholars and the people, through the length and breadth of Germany and Scandinavia. The Latin nations do not offer so absolute a homage; but still they do offer homage, and homage that is neither cold nor doubtful.

Much in this growth of influence which Shakespeare's genius exercises in steady progress on the mind of the world, is, indeed, owing to his intellect and imagination; but if we would find the most vital cause for such growth of influence, we must seek it in Shakespeare's moral nature. "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin; " but the touch which makes it so is that of moral nature. In this it is that men have greatest unity in time, and, amidst the differences and contradictions of nations, governments, races, and

religions, come the nearest to an agreement in judgment and to the universality of a common consent. We have grave doubts whether the moral nature is not the central inspiration by which the human species is held together in the community of an elemental spiritual life. Without such life, we doubt if the manifold divisions of mankind could have a common intelligence, could have interchangeable ideas, could have translatable languages. We can find no medium for such enlarged communion in the mere impressions of sense, the forms of understanding, or the combinings of imagination. But whatever be the contrarieties among men, in thought or theory, in speech or imagery, in history or culture, in training, habits, manners, or beliefs, the sense of right and wrong is common to them all, and certain fundamental convictions of that sense are equally as common. The moral incongruities which objectors urge against the unity and reality of the moral nature in man have no force, except with those who examine humanity in its sharper angles, and leave unnoticed its wider spaces. The moral nature, as we have intimated, is the key to the whole of human nature; and without this key, the numberless diversities of men would be as meaningless to each other as forgotten hieroglyphics; human

minds would be in a state of spiritual chaos; the confusion of Babel would not stop in the word, it would pierce to the thought; and since then the thing signified never could be reached, the substitution of one sign for another would become impossible. It is not, therefore, that whatever contains an expression of the moral nature is the most impressive; it is also the most intelligible; and sometimes it is that alone which is intelligible. Listen to a technical discourse on some science, of which you are entirely ignorant; you are made only weary and impatient; but let the speaker burst into a flash of moral enthusiasm, which reveals the use, goodness, or beauty of his doctrine to humanity, — then not only does the speech electrify your heart, it brightens your intellect, and that which before had been dark and blank is filled with light and meaning. Listen to a dry legal argument, which, not understanding, or caring to understand, leaves you only drowsy; let the pleader, however, lay aside for a moment his citations and his inferences; let him arise to the grandeur of some noble principle; let him awaken the sleeping sympathies, or call the conscience into action; a soul of fire is put into his logic, which does not merely enkindle emotion, but illuminates intelligence. Listen to a political harangue on the merits of some party

measure in which you have not the slightest interest; but while you are longing for the close, the orator, with an unexpected impulse, carries you away into generous hopes for your country or for man; or plunges you, it may be, into solemn speculations, on the changes of the past, on the destinies of the future; a new life is now put into him to speak, a new life is put into you to hear. You listen to a polemical disquisition, and you wonder at the hairs which theologians split; you think of the Liliputians, and the mortal feuds which characterized the strife between their Bigendians and their Little-endians, and thus you lose yourself in your own meditations: but a sound that seems to come from the centre of man's everlasting soul startles you from your musing: the preacher has done with his scholastic trifles; he is now reasoning of righteousness, of temperance, of judgment to come, and urging on his hearers, with all the authority of eternal truth, the obligations they are under to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with their God. Thus is the moral nature the soul of all grand and permanent oratory; it is the living essence of all the higher eloquence; and while all that is technical, special, or merely speculative, no matter what amount of intellect it may contain, dies the death of all things temporal,

that which the moral nature nobly inspires lives the life of all things immortal. The representative orators of nations — ancient or modern· have, by the moral nature, for their audience the readers and the thinkers of all cultivated ages: in this, the speaking of Demosthenes and Cicero has its undying interest; in this, also, the speaking of Bossuet and Mirabeau, of Lord Chatham and Edmund Burke, of Plunket and Grattan, of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, has that most human element which can longest hold the attention of posterity.

And so it is with all in letters that directly concerns the life of man: it is the moral nature that gives imperishable soul to the speculations of Plato, to the reasonings of Aristotle, to all the thought which enters into the choice experience of our kind, and which no change in civilized conditions ever renders obsolete; it is in the moral nature that history and biography have their deepest import, — that art has its inward being; the moral nature forms a centre wherein meet the results of remote and opposite extremes, and there reveal to us the unity of wisdom, whether in the Confucius of ancient China or in the Franklin of modern America. But of all literature the moral nature is most essential to poetry. Wanting it, poetry wants the simplest