shall, accordingly, illustrate its nature and bearing on the scientific treatment of literature. But let us first understand the full meaning of historical propriety by contrasting it with the universal assumptions of unhistoric criticism.
§ 9. Macaulay, commenting on some of Dryden's plays (Aurungzebe, the Indian Emperor, and the Conquest of Granada), observes that the sentiments put into the mouths of certain dramatis personæ violate all historical propriety; that, in fact, "nothing similar was ever even affected except by the cavaliers of Europe. The truth of character is the first object, the truth of place and time is to be considered only in the second place. We blame Dryden, not because his characters are not Moors or Americans, but because they are not men and women—not because love as he represents it could not exist in a harem or a wigwam, but because it could not exist anywhere." This is a moderate estimate of historical propriety, allowing, as it does, certain universal characteristics of all men and women while assigning a subordinate position to those differences of time, place, and social life which it is the part of the historical artist to indicate. But our Shaksperian critics of the subjective school will have nothing to do with such limitations of art. Shakspere's characters are to their minds true for all space and all time; nay, they rise above time and space, being apparently conceived, if not worked out, in an altogether Platonic world. Shakspere, says Coleridge, will not, like Plautus or Molière, draw for us the character of a miser because such a character is not "permanent;" and Shakspere's characters "must be permanent, permanent while men continue men, because they stand on what is absolutely necessary to our existence." Certainly of permanence, in one sense, we have
