I will only notice further, that a figure of speech of which S. Paul is fond, is also to be met with very frequently in Shakspeare; I mean the figure which grammarians have called Oxymoron. Of Scriptural examples it may suffice to refer to that sublime passage in the 2nd Epistle to the Corinthians, which ends thus-' as having nothing and [yet] possessing all things,' vi. 10. Of instances in our poet the reader probably will not desire to see more than the following sample :

Fairest Cordelia, thou art most rich, being poor;
Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised.

K. Lear, Act i. Sc. 1.

My long sickness

Of health and living now begins to mend,

And nothing brings me all things.

Timon of Athens, Act v. Sc. 2.

So, too, we have noble misery,' in Cymbeline, v. 3; and in the same play, iv. 3 :—

Wherein I am false, I am honest;

with which we may compare S. Paul, in the passage last referred to, as deceivers and [yet]

true.'

When Touchstone, in As you like it, says—

I do now remember a saying, The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows he is a fool ;—

is the saying he thus quotes derived from 1 Cor. iii. 18?

CONCLUSION.

HAVE now gone through the interesting and instructive task which I proposed to

myself; and the conclusion at which I have arrived is this:-Take the entire range of English literature; put together our best authors, who have written upon subjects not professedly religious or theological, and we shall not find, I believe, in them all united, so much evidence of the Bible having been read and used, as we have found in Shakspeare alone. This is a phenomenon which admits of being looked at from several points of view; but I shall be content to regard it solely in connection with the undoubted fact, that of all our authors, Shakspeare is also, by general confession, the greatest and the best. According to the testimony of Charles Lamb, a most competent judge in regard to all the literary elements of the question, our poet, 'in his divine mind and manners, surpassed not only the great men his contem

poraries, but all mankind.'* And looking at this superiority from my own point of view, I cannot but remark that, while most of the great laymen of that great Elizabethan age-Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, the poet Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Burleigh, Ben Jonson-have paid homage to Christianity, if not always in their practice, yet in the convictions of their understanding, and in the profession of their faith, none of them has done this so fully or so effectually as Shakspeare.

But I may go further. Not a little remarkable is it that those only have disputed the superior merit and excellency of our poet who have also denied the value and authority of Holy Scripture. The disparagement of such judges-I allude especially to Voltaire and David Hume—is an additional confirmation of the otherwise unanimous panegyric with which he has been honoured. It will appear scarcely credible at the present day that the accepted Historian of England, in speaking of England's greatest poet, should have given vent to criticisms such as these :

Shakspeare

A striking peculiarity of sentiment frequently hits; a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold. It is in vain we look [in him] for either purity or simplicity of diction. . . . Both he and Ben Jonson were equally deficient in taste and elegance, in harmony and The English theatre has ever since taken a strong tincture of Shakspeare; and thence it has proceeded that the

correctness.

*

Specimens of Dramatic Poets, Preface, vol. i. p. 7.

nation has undergone from all its neighbours THE REPROACH OF BARBARISM, from which its valuable productions in some other parts of learning would otherwise have exempted it.*

The author of these remarks upon Shakspeare has himself informed us that the volume which contained them, when first published, so far from being popular, was received with one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation,' on account of its political views: nor, if the rest of its contents had been equally erroneous with the passage which I have quoted, would it have deserved any better reception. And how did Hume console himself under the disappointment? He proceeded to write his Natural History of Religion, in which he gave the world to understand that, as he had looked in vain, in Shakspeare, for purity or simplicity of diction, for taste or elegance, for harmony or correctness, so he had been unable to derive anything but doubt, uncertainty, and suspense of judgment,' from the written Word of God! The concluding remark of the passage quoted above, in which Shakspeare and Ben Jonson are accused of having brought upon us as a nation the reproach of barbarism from all our neighbours,' is evidently founded upon the strictures of Voltaire,† who, not long before, had characterised our poet as a writer of monstrous Farces, called by him Tragedies,' had

* Hume's Hist. of England, Appendix to Reign of James I. + All that can be said in excuse for Voltaire's criticism has been fairly stated by Mr. C. Knight, in his Studies of Shakspeare, p. 540, sq.