feeling that here at least was a monarch of mind. The most unobservant must be impressed with so grand a presence, however incapable of analysing the source of their sentiments. To the skilled and experienced phrenologist, however, all this presents a volume of unwonted significance; the organisation of the man being far greater than the works of the author, the former indicating the possible, and the latter only manifesting the actual of this rarely gifted being. By the first, we mount up, so far as is possible on the merely material plane, to the wellhead of causation; through the last we are limited simply to the sphere of effects, as conditioned by circumstances.

Let it never be supposed that the soul of any man can be bound up between the covers of a book, least of all, such a one as we are now contemplating. It were, indeed a rather ample world as we take it, that would fully contain him and his aspirations. For here in very truth, if anywhere, was a mind of the very highest, that is the creative order, a veritable poet in the grander sense of that great epithet, whose works were but a fragmentary index of his capability. The intellect of Shakspeare was perhaps more nearly universal, than that of any masterspirit who has emerged to the surface, and been exposed to the critical investigation of posterity. In him perception and memory, thought and imagination, were all effectually developed, and beautifully proportioned. From the refinement of his temperament, and the harmony of his organisation, he probably possessed the truest soulmirror ever accorded to man. He reflected faithfully what he perceived accurately. There was no distortion in his images; no undue exaggeration of one feature with a corresponding diminution of another. His ideas were transcripts from nature, and hence were not only true to his own age, but will be equally true to all time. Thus it is we feel that his characters are veritable men and women, not as is so often the case in dramatic composition, mere stage automata without any reality behind them. Not that this lifelike accuracy of portraiture could have been produced by the intellect alone, however richly endowed this portion of his nature might have been. To produce such a result, as already observed, it was necessary that there should be a corresponding harmony in the moral and affectional elements of his being, which might thus co-operate with the intellectual, and constitute, in their tripartite union, the perfection of human character and capability.

The true poet must be no merely literary scribbler, the mechanical maker of harmonious verses. This faculty of good writing constitutes indeed but one of the lower necessities of his craft. In addition to

this, not only must he have the visioned eye, which sees the open secret, never revealed in its grander significance but to the true seer, but he must also be artist, architect, and musician, uniting in himself the whole vast category of endowment, which is usually divided among the priesthood of the beautiful. This Shakspeare did, and that too in a supereminent degree. Look at that fairly arched eyebrow, so perfectly in accordance with the symmetrically developed features of that more than classic, that spiritual face, of which it forms a befitting and harmoniously component part. What a faculty for colour, form, outline, and perspective is there indicated to the duly qualified observer. An eyebrow worthy of Titian. No doubt this man painted with the pen, and that too in a style which leaves us nothing to regret that he never used the pencil; but when we contemplate these fine executive powers in combination with his splendid ideality and constructiveness, it becomes at once obvious that in gaining its greatest dramatist the world lost its second Raphael. Perhaps, indeed, we ought rather to say its first, for here was a power for composition whence a thousand Transfigurations might have been derived. No wonder his stage scenes are an unfailing source of inspiration to artists. How, indeed, could they be otherwise, for are they not cartoons of ever varied life, drawn by a master-hand, whose equal the world has never yet beheld?

It must not be supposed that all architects build with stone. What, indeed, is a great epic but a magnificent temple of ideas. Your Iliad is grander than the Parthenon., The Divina Commedia transcends all Minsters, and looks down with sublime pity even on St. Peter's; while no man we suppose would compare St. Paul's to that palace of thought, which the infernals reared beneath the spiritual eye of the blind old bard of Britain's stormy isle. It is the same with the plot of a perfect drama. It is a temple of exquisite design and elaborate workmanship, demanding architectural genius of the highest order. What Doric pile ever equalled the simplicity and grandeur, the power and sublimity of the Prometheus Unbound. And what Gothic cathedral or Norman castle could be compared to Hamlet or Richard the Third?

There was a period when the sage and poet were one, when all high utterances were essentially rhythmic in form and idealistic in spirit, when the great man was also the good, and genius ever tended to culminate in prophesy. All these things have doubtless been much changed in these latter centuries, but whether for the better may admit of rather grave doubt. The clerisy of the land are now sepa

rated into many orders. First the men of science and the men of letters, each again arranged into many subdivisions, now, alas, so isolated and estranged, in accordance with the analytical and disintegrative spirit of our age, that their several members are apt occasionally to forget that they once were formally, and still are essentially, brethren of the same exalted craft. We want a reconstitution not only of the priesthood of letters, but also of the hierarchy of intellect, now fallen like so much else into a state of chaotic ruin. And thus then it has come to pass that William of Stratford was regarded, and perhaps even regarded himself, as simply a playwright and poet, and not at all as a prophet, it being his worshipful vocation, among other things, to afford adequate amusement at the Globe Theatre to the court and the apprentices of London. And in the assiduous and praiseworthy prosecution of this his "lawful calling," it was that he produced those wondrous dramas which we are sometimes pleased to call immortal, but which to him were probably simple matters of business, conducing in their appointed way to a healthy condition of the exchequer. And yet this same playwright had in him, beyond question, a true prophetic voice of the deepest significance, had the world only been pleased to listen to its inspired utterances. Look, as we have said, at that lofty veneration, crowning the most God-like brow of these latter generations, and say whether the religious element could have been absent from such a soul. Here in very truth, if anywhere, was a man full of all devoutness, profoundly worshipful in his innermost spirit, to whom real irreverence of any kind was impossible. An inherently and constitutionally religious man, who indeed saw into the very heart of things, mainly because he loved, and in the better sense idolised them. Then, in strictest accordance with this exalted moral nature, so magnificently developed along the central line, behold the powerful comparison, powerful, yet blending so harmoniously with causality. What an inexhaustible capacity for apt and beautiful illustration lies there. What apologues and parables, bright and glorious in all the radiant imagery of genius, went down to the grave silently with this successful stage-manager. Alas, with all respect be it spoken, was there not here also a divine "Tecton," who yet never emerged out of the "shop," never taught upon his higher plane, was never baptised with fire from heaven, was never called to his most heavenly mission, the world as we have said in his day wanting not a prophet but a playwright, in which capacity, accordingly, the Godsent in the guise of a servant, as is their wont, ministered unto its requirements.

Society does not want prophets, it never did, and probably never will; the powers that be both in church and state, regarding all such, whatever their credentials and pretensions, as unwelcome and intrusive. But it does want sages and philosophers, at all events can endure them with more equanimity than their kinsmen the seers, perhaps because they do not knock quite so hard at the accepted respectabilities, what we call orthodoxies, as their sterner and more earnest brethren. And yet here also the world had an unspeakable loss in this William of Stratford. Never since the days of Plato has a more spiritually gifted and metaphysically endowed intellect been manifested for the enlightenment of men. Of this, what bright scintillations do we now and then obtain in the ordinary course of his plays, in very truth "sparks from the anvil" at which this Titanic Tecton is labouring, with such demiurgic force, to frame, so far as in him lies, a grim chaos into a beautiful creation.

"Our little life is rounded with a sleep."

What depths of Pythagorean lore, what farstretching glimpses of antenatal existence, what a grasp of the great and glorious thought, that we are not only immortal but eternal, in that pregnant line,

"We are such stuff as dreams are made of,"

is another. What a Brahminical perception of the unreality of appearance, what a profound intuition that all this seemingly solid and substantial world is after all but a cheating semblance, the maia or divine delusion by which the senses are mocked, but through which the soul is nevertheless educated. What more than Platonic spiritualities were in this man, folded up for the most part silently, not being often wanted perchance in that particular craft, to which as court playwright, he was specially devoted. Truly we have had Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, David Hume and Bishop Berkeley, who in their formal and laborious way have endeavoured to cast some few rays of light on the abstruse problems of our inner life, but if we mistake not, here was a master of psychology, who with a few strokes of his magician's wand would have revealed more than they could have put into many volumes. But the world of Queen Bess did not want moral philosophy but amusement, and William of Stratford knew how to supply its necessities.

141

THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF PARIS.*

THE third number of the French Society's Bulletin, first presents to our notice a continuation of M. Simonot's article (alluded to in the Anthropological Review, vol. i, p. 378), on the peoples of French Senegal. After briefly referring to the difficulty of tracing to a common origin the various languages of Senegambia, the author of the paper sums up in the following brief conclusions :

"That the influence of media may induce deviations from a single form, but that these deviations are always in the direction of the original form, and do not constitute an actual transmutation like that produced by crossing."

"That without tradition man would long ago have had his genera, species and varieties, like all the other series of the animal scale."

"That the primitive unity of language is still a question to be solved; and that its solution will only be definitely arrived at when it is shown that all peoples possess an invariable faculty of articulation."

In order to disprove a statement of M. Bertillon, relative to the diminution of stature of the French people, M. Boudin submitted to the society the following table of the proportion of tall men in 10,000, in the undermentioned years :

In reply, M. Bertillon said that the difference proceeded from his having calculated from the restoration, whilst M. Boudin's calculations only commenced with 1836. M. Lagneau quoted M. d'Omalius d'Halloy, to show that France was divisible into two great ethnic groups; one including the departments of the North-east, which furnished a great number of tall men; the other, those of the Southwest, containing only a few men of large stature. He then gave an

* Bulletins de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, vol. iv, 3eme Fascicule. May to August 1863.