gentle charm of girlhood, not now with the rapture of the lover, but with the wise and tender solicitude of a father; it is not Romeo and Juliet, but Prospero and Miranda, Leontes and Perdita. And, furthermore, these plays are redolent of the charm of country life, of green fields and gardens and flowers. We are in the country again, as in the days of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Perdita's garden is even lovelier than the bank whereon sometime Titania slept. The plays are as wise as ever; and Shakespeare's grasp of character as firm, and his sense of beauty I think deeper than in the earlier plays; but the glow of passion is cooled and all three plays, whatever the suspicion or harshness in the earlier Acts, all end as with a deep and long-drawn breath of quiet content.

Now I am well aware of the folly of trying to find in Shakespeare's plays any close transcript of the events of his personal career; yet no one can convince me that the general tone of all these last plays is not that of Shakespeare's renewed family life at Stratford-on-Avon. I find no sure evidence that there was ever any estrangement or jealousy between Shakespeare and his wife during his long years in London; but if there had been, I am sure it was over by 1610. That such a play as The Winter's Tale could have been written in that society which the experience of Solomon pronounces worse than "a continual dropping in a very rainy day," that would be stranger than any miracle. No, I feel sure that the record of those latest years, as interpreted by these plays, may make us certain that Shakespeare, like Wordworth's Happy Warrior, was after all, certainly in these later years,

a Soul whose master-bias leans

To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes,

and that however wide the circuit of his work, he closes it at last with pictures of those affections that bloom fair in the garden of home.

The image we can thus form of the man must at best be somewhat vague, lacking in those specific and picturesque

features in which character is most easily read; but I think we can be sure of its main outlines,-a positive, well-balanced man, of strong passions under firm control, genial and interested in all sorts of people, with marvelous powers of observation and an imagination to interpret all he saw into lasting forms of life and beauty. And I think one's conception of Shakespeare's character loses something of breadth and truth when we try to separate the man from the poet, as I have half unconsciously been doing. For we tend to forget that there were not two Shakespeares. The poet who ruled a vast demesne on the heights of Parnassus was the same man who owned a house and corner lot in Stratford-on-Avon. The dramatist whose speech delights us by an affluence of power and beauty such as none of his contemporaries could approach, is the same man who could lean over the gate of New Place of a morning to jest with Dogberry or chat with Goodman Verges. And in opposition to all that has been said about the impossibility of knowing anything of William Shakespeare, I must say that I think one rises from a study of his life and work with something like a sense of personal acquaintance with the man. One feels at least as old Ben Jonson said, that he was honest and of an open and free nature, a man to know.

One other question there is, which on this day1 we cannot forbear to ask. Was Shakespeare a religious man? We get no answer from the recorded facts of his life. The tradition that he disliked the Puritans, based mostly on a misinterpretation of some one or two pages in Twelfth Night and All's Well, and the tradition that he died a Roman Catholic, first heard of a hundred years after his death in the talk of a gossipy clergyman, are both valueless. I think the answer to the question must depend on the meaning we give to the question itself. If religion be only, as Matthew Arnold once defined it, morality touched with emotion,-then we may perhaps venture to call Shakespeare a religious man. He certainly recognized the nature and the imperative demands

'This paper was first delivered as an address in celebration of the tercentenary of Shakespeare's death. [L. B. G.]

of morality; he saw that the highest values in life are always moral values. We may be sure also that he was a reverent man. We shall find in his plays no flippant or contemptuous references to religious belief or practice, save on the lips of men who were themselves shallow or base. More than this, there is evidence enough in such plays as Hamlet that Shakespeare had pondered the meanings and the mystery of life. He could have been no stranger to those thoughts that are beyond the reaches of our souls. What solutions he ever reached for those deepest problems that vex the thinking soul, we do not know; it seems to me likely that he put them aside as insoluble, and in his later years sought quiet and content within the realm of positive knowledge. We may well be slow in pronouncing upon any man's religion; that is a matter between himself and his God. But we may not uncharitably say that in reading Shakespeare's pages we long for one thing, and for one thing only. With this allembracing knowledge that seems to include almost the whole realm of human nature, could we but have a little faith. If the vision that saw so clearly and justly all the facts of human life could have had some faith in things unseen. Surely of such faith the saintly Cordelia, the noble Hermione, the gentle Desdemona, the Hamlet of Luther's Wittenberg might have known something. But among the very latest words of the great magician who created them all are these, which sound with a solemn pathos down the centuries,

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

He was true to the facts of knowledge only. He showed the human soul as it is; he carried it through all the tangled web of circumstance, the struggles of good and evil, the joys and pains that make up this life of ours here, quite down to the moment when the fevered play is quite played out; "the rest is silence." We need one other book beside our Shakespeare; we need our Bible.

T

THE LITERATURE OF THE AGE OF

QUEEN ANNE

I

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AGE

HE group of men of letters whose life and work form for us the center of interest during the period from

1700 to 1750 were all at work, and most of them were doing their best work, during the reign of Anne (17021714); but all of them outlived her. Addison was first to go, in 1719; after him, in the next twenty-five years, Prior, Steele, Defoe, Gay, Pope, the great Dean Swift in 1745, and, last of all, Bolingbroke, in 1751. The lifetime of this generation of men really decides the limits of the period.

It may be admitted, at the outset, that this age of Queen Anne is not one of the inspiring ages of history. It was not an age of faith, of heroism, or of imagination. Moralists, reformers, poets have little good to say of it. That "withered, unbelieving, second-hand eighteenth century," says Carlyle after his sweeping fashion. And it is true that this age, if looked at from the outside after the fashion of the picturesque historian, presents some unhandsome features. If it was not flagrantly immoral, irreligious, it was very worldly and without lofty ideals. The Elizabethan enthusiasm, the Puritan zeal had passed; the new philanthropic and reforming zeal had not yet come. Our ancestors of the Queen Anne time, in fact, were suspicious of anything that looked like enthusiasm, as disturbing the balance of sense and reason, but their society and morals suffered sadly for lack of it. The rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. The young lord in the country hunted and drank and bullied and swore, and voted for the Tories and shouted for Church and State,-you can see him in Fielding; the young lord in town diced and drank at White's,

and lounged in the coffee-houses, showed his person and his toilet at the play, fought a duel now and then in Leicester Fields, and voted for the Whigs and shouted for Marlborough and the Protestant Succession,-you may see him in the Tatler and Spectator, a good many of him.

Gaming was high. My Lady Cowper says, in 1715, that no one thinks of setting down less than £200 at White's. The stage, though a little better than in the days of Charles II, was yet bad enough. I think a modern audience would hardly sit out one of Mr. Congreve's rattling comedies. Old Parson Adams in the novel wasn't far wrong when he averred that the only play of his day fit for a Christian to see was Mr. Steele's Conscious Lovers, though that, to be sure, was as good as a sermon.

Englishmen were getting to drink deep, too. What an enormous amount there is swallowed in one of Fielding's novels, for instance. Temperance didn't always accompany the other virtues. Our friend Dick Steele was too often in his cups, and grave Mr. Addison has been known to keep him company. My Lord Oxford vexed Queen Anne by coming into her presence tipsy rather too often, and you might have seen Mr. Secretary St. John of a morning with a wet handkerchief around his head trying to cool his brain from last night's drinking before he began the day's correspondence. The lower classes, especially, with the increase of poverty in town were becoming more and more addicted to this degrading vice. Early in the century the baleful habit of gin-drinking, unknown in England before, spread like a blight over London. "Retailers," says Lecky, "hung out painted boards announcing that their customers could be made drunk for a penny, dead drunk for two-pence, and should have straw for nothing." And after all it is perhaps the prevailing low tone of moral feeling, the absence of any quick sensibility in moral matters, that depresses you most as you look at the surface of this society. Fielding is not immoral at heart. But look, for instance, into some of those books that seriously profess to be written in the interest of morality,-say Richardson's novels,