SHAKESPEARE AND HIS RELATIONSHIP TO

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND RACE.

THERE are two kinds of centres in human history and society that are not only immoveable in a world of change, but which intensify their power of attraction, as the mathematicians say, with the square of the distance which it traverses. There are the central principles of institutions that reach through the ages, and are fastened to by different nations as a safe moorage for their laws and customs. And the nations that thus moor to these central principles fasten themselves to the same holding, like so many ships held by their hawsers to the same head-block. And this common holding not only creates intimate relations between them, but tends to assimilate them to each other. In so as far they build their institutions upon the same foundation principles, they become like so many families connected with each other by ties of blood. Thus, for instance, the common law of England has woven into its texture and strength threads of truth, justice, and equity, reeled out of the ethics of all the ages back to the tables of the Decalogue, fresh from the mount, and on the other side of Moses back to Noah fresh from the ark. And the common law of the American Union is as much like this common law of England as the tablets of the Decalogue put up in our churches are like the tables of stone which Moses brought down from Mount Sinai fresh from the finger of God.

Now this identity of common law in the two great nations constitutes a relationship between them stronger than mere ties of blood. For if blood is thicker than water, spirit is thicker than blood in the sense of affinity; for it is the spirit breathing in their common institutions that gives the same breath and the same pulse to nations.

Then there is another kind of centre which even great nations may moor to, and find it a firm and fast holding for friendly relations. That centre is the memory of a great man, their common inheritance, a memory which they hold in joint ownership, as co-heirs to a precious kohi-noor, which they cannot divide if they would, and which, if severed in twain, would lose its lustre. Such an immediate jewel to both hemispheres of the English-speaking race is the genius and memory of Shakespeare. No other man produced by that race so completely belongs to its life and language. He lived and wrote just at the right and only time to be owned by all their expanding and sea-divided populations; and he

is the only great English poet that they can call their own by the right of birth. The grand stature of his genius arises on the high road of English history just below that point where England put forth the first branch path of her being. The keel of the "Mayflower" and the coffin of Shakespeare were on the stocks at the same time. The company that bore him to his last sleeping-place by the gentle Avon equalled in number the Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers awaiting in Holland for passage in that small vessel to the wild world beyond the ocean. They carried to that wide, wild world but few English books, for few had been printed. The first of these was the Bible, and the second was Shakespeare. He was the first English poet that ever lighted the scattered and humble firesides of the New World with the lustre of his genius. Many of the solemn, strongwilled men who went out in the "Mayflower," and more who followed them, knew Shakespeare; some of them may have seen him. The sun of his fame had just begun to arise towards its present altitude when they crossed the Atlantic; and they carried its light in their souls, and set it a-glow in their language and life in America. You can hardly find a sermon preached in New England in the seventeenth century that does not disclose in its diction and intellectual structure the reflection of his thoughts and the shaping of his style.

Thus Shakespeare is the only great English poet that Americans can call their own as equal co-heirs to his memory. When we journey back to the birth-land of our nation, he first and alone stands on the threshold of "Our Old Home," to welcome us to its hearthstone with the songs he sang by its side, to which the family of the English race listened when they all dwelt together under one roof-tree, and under one mother's smile. Milton was an Englishman when we were Americans, and our right and title to his memory we hold by courtesy. But in Shakespeare we have a birthright ownership, which grows nearer and dearer from age to age. Four years after he was carried to his grave one of the Pilgrim Fathers from the "Mayflower" may have read, by the light of his pine-knot torch, near Plymouth Rock, the first verse or line from Shakespeare's pen ever read in the western world. Now there are more than forty millions on that continent who speak the language which he clothed with such majesty and might, and of which he was the grandest master and teacher. Full one half the constituency of his fame is now in the western hemisphere; full one-half of his readers are on that side of the Atlantic, and they are rapidly increasing from year to year.

On particular occasions, when we estimate the breadth and depth of the

popular appreciation of Shakespeare, it may be natural and proper to ask, "Has his fame culminated? Is it descending from its high meridian into the afternoon and evening twilight of a waning reputation? Will coming generations hold him at our estimation? Did the tastes and times in which he lived make him? and will the times and tastes of some near or distant future unmake him?" What elements have we for the solution of these questions? We have the terms of that geometrical progression by which his reputation has attained to its present hold upon the world. We find this to be an established fact that his reputation has steadily increased with the square of the distance from his death to the present time. Nothing can be more certain than this, that the light of his genius had hardly begun to dawn upon even the educated public in England until he had lain in his grave fifty years. The fact that not one of those hundreds of letters he wrote survived that period of oblivion proves the estimation in which he was held even in literary circles of his time. All these letters must have gone into the waste-paper basket, or to grocers and dealers in butter and cheese, for parcels which the purchaser did not deem worth an extra farthing for the precious wrapper in which they were enclosed. For the first hundred years after his death his readers were confined to the educated classes of his countrymen, and they were comparatively few in number. Few of them dreamt that he would ever be brought down to the level of the common people, or they be raised to his. But what is the promise of the day in which we live in this respect? Why, we see all kinds of cheap illustrated editions of his works printed expressly for the masses, some issued in penny portions for the cottage firesides of the kingdom as well as for the family circles of the middle classes. In fact, the light of his genius, like the light of stars travelling through immense spaces, has just begun to shine upon the millions' born and bending to labour in field and factory, mine and mountain. They have progressed in mental grasp and appetite until they have come up abreast of his grandest thoughts. Such is the present of Shakespeare's fame; such is its promise for the future. There are eighty millions who speak the language which he made so rich and strong for their thought and speech when the whole English race did not number twice the present population of the city of London. For two hundred years he has been travelling from class to class. He has just reached the great hard-handed masses of labour. For the first time in two centuries, he has been introduced to a new world of readers, a world that may some day offer the largest market for "thoughts that breathe and words that burn." Even

if the tastes of the educated classes in some distant future shall change, and their appreciation of Shakespeare shall wane or waver, he will find among the self-multiplying millions of the sons of toil in both hemispheres honest and reverent heirs to his memory, who shall keep it green with fragrant life through all the ages yet to be.

THE TWENTY:FOURTH OF MAY.

THIS is an anniversary which the whole English nation within, and the whole English race beyond the seas should remember and mark with peculiar interest. It is the birth-day of Queen Victoria, to whose life and character, I believe, not only England, but other nations, owe much, and more perhaps than they have ever recognised. Whoever holds up a good and pure character, even in a village community, holds up a standard of measurement which unconsciously raises those who contemplate it from day to day and year to year. For it is a standard which measures the moral stature of every man and woman who stands up against it; just as a short man feels how short he is when he stands up against a neighbour who is head and shoulders above him. But there is this difference, which is a very wide one. No one, by taking thought and wishing it most earnestly, can add an inch to his physical stature; whereas, by taking the right thought and the right steps, he can add many inches to his moral height. Now Queen Victoria has held up before the courts, the kings, queens and princes, and aristocracies of Europe, the standard of a pure and elevated character, and I believe this standard has tended to raise them all, more or less. Such a character operates upon them something like a conscience which reproves every low morality which they indulge. They know and feel that conduct and customs which once made no blur or blot upon the reputation of royal courts, would now stare out upon the world with the ugliest features in the sunlight of that purer morality which emanates from the character and the court of Queen Victoria. Then, as an American, I can join most heartily in the associations that connect her name with this anniversary. In no country in the world outside these home-islands is her character held at a higher estimate than in the United States. In no country in the world are those characteristics which distinguish her from those who have worn a crown before her more clearly recognised, honoured and revered, than

among us. One trait of her disposition, one peculiar act of her woman's nature, will be ever held in loyal memory by millions of Americans. It was a widow's word of sympathy and condolence to an American widow -the widowed wife of Abraham Lincoln-comforting her under the awful catastrophe which had fallen upon her and a sorrowing nation.

Then the whole of Christendom should feel deeply indebted to her for the influence she put forth to avert a deluge of destruction that threatened Europe. Although that influence was as noiseless and gentle as a whisper, it had a power with great nations which they could not resist.

THE PENNY POST OF ENGLAND.

It is not in arithmetic, nor rhetoric, nor poetry, nor prose, to give a complete idea of the benefits the Penny Post of England has conferred upon all classes of the people. Owing to the circumscribed area of “the three kingdoms," this postal system works more nearly like one of the great and beautiful agencies of nature than any thing else a human government ever put its hand to. Indeed, it works like the dew, and with the dew. The distillery of the still skies above, and the distillery of the Penny Post beneath, work hand in hand through the quiet hours of the night; one dropping out of the starlit atmosphere gentle dews, the other dropping for the sleeping families of the land the welcome thoughts of wakeful memory-thoughts that are to ten thousand breakfast circles in the morning what the dews are to ten thousand fields listening in thirsty silence for their fall. If London were the local centre, every family in England would be within a night's gallop of the iron horse with the London mail-bag strapped to his back; so that, at the usual breakfast hour, the postman might drop in a letter to season the morning meal in the most distant home in the realm.

No citizen of a foreign country, sojourning in England, can fail to admire the quiet and beautiful working of this postal system; and thousands of foreigners have admired it to a practical effect. They have carried back to their own countries descriptions and impressions of its dispensation which have moved their governments to adopt the same system at different degrees of approximation. Cheap postage is the order of the day everywhere. Even the countries lying beyond the boundary-line of Christian civilization are copying slowly the example of England; and the day may yet come, after the nations have saved some