Once more, though in a somewhat different and I would fain believe, in a more instructive form, I have undertaken the task of criticizing the works of that great dramatist whose own name has become their best and most expressive epithet. The task will be genial in proportion as the criticism is reverential. Assuredly the Englishman, who without reverence, who without proud and affectionate reverence, can utter the name of William Shakespeare, stands disqualified for the office. He wants one at least of the very senses, the language of which he is to employ, and will discourse at best, but as a blind man, while the whole harmonious creation of light and shade with all its subtle interchange of deepening and dissolving colours rises in silence to the silent fiat of the uprising Apollo. However inferior in ability I may be to some who have followed me, I am proud that I was the first in time who publicly demonstrated to the full extent of the position, that the supposed Irregularity and extravagancies of Shakespeare were the mere dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it had not the dimensions of the swan. In all the successive Courses delivered by me, since my first attempt at the Royal Institution, it still remains, my object, to prove that in all points from the most important to the most minute, the Judgment of Shakespeare is commensurate with his Genius,—nay, that his Genius reveals itself in his Judgment, as in its most exalted form. And the more gladly do I recur to the subject from the clear conviction, that to judge aright, and with distinct consciousness of the grounds of our Judgment, concerning the works of Shakespeare, implies the power and the means of judging rightly of all other works of intellect, those of abstract science alone excepted.

We commence with The Tempest, as a specimen of the Romantic Drama. But whatever play of Shakespeare's we had selected, there is one preliminary point to be first settled, as the indispensable condition not only of just and genial criticism, but of all consistency in our opinions—This point is contained in the words, probable, natural.