He recognized the fact that society is swayed by selfish interests oftener than by a devotion to high ideals. He read history with a microscopic eye. Dowden, one of his most acute interpreters, says, " Shakspeare studied and represented in his art the world which lay before him. If he prophesied the future it was not in the ordinary manner of prophets, but only by completely embodying the present, in which the future was con-

142 NEW YORK STATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION.

cerned." In his day the mdb had not learned self-control, moral dignity, a discrimination between the transient and permanent in politics. Has it learned this lesson yet? His immortal works exhibit no world-weariness, no blase pessimism. He saw the eternal relations of cause and effect. He admired the intellectual powers and tremendous personalities of great historical characters like Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Richard IH, but he also saw their limitations, moral delinquencies and weaknesses which led inevitably to the snares into which they fell. He had a profound sympathy with human life ; he was a lover of rectitude, nobility of character, self-sacrifice, manliness, womanliness. Above all, he taught the everlasting and all embracing equity with which the universe throbs. In the end, no cheat, no lie, no injustice prospers. The sinner is a self-punisher. At last, by action of the inexorable, inescapable moral order, " the wheel is come full circle ;" evil is strangled. To such an equitable intellect, the idea of a Platonic Republic or Bacon's "New Atlantis" would be as impossible as impracticable. He knew too well the plasticity of human adjustments, the shifting, fleeting, rising and sinking of the social order, the possibilities of disturbance and recoil that ever lie at the core of a placid and smug order of things, to attempt any speculative panacea for the evils of society.