enough and to spare in Shakspere's plays; for his chivalrous and Christian men and women of the Elizabethan age, the clergy, the clowns, and even the London artisans, are permanent enough to find a place in the Rome of Coriolanus and of Julius Cesar impartially; and if the dramatist had undertaken to depict the contemporary life of Russia, Hindustan, or China, we cannot doubt that the conditions of his art would have demanded a similar display of "universal ideas," and that the scenery of Warwick or some other English county would, if required, have done excellent duty in the country of Romanoff or of Shah Jehan as the physical background for English men and women in something like (or perhaps not at all like) Russian or Indian dress.
We do not honour Shakspere by ignoring such truths; we merely display our ignorance of the necessary limitations of dramatic art which result from its social nature; we merely impose upon ourselves the penalty of ignorance—self-contradiction. If we wish to see the contradictions into which the subjective school of criticism is perpetually betrayed by its anxiety to raise a human idol above the sphere of human associations, we need only compare different passages of Coleridge or Carlyle inter se. Unwilling to find in the Elizabethan age the models of Shakspere's characters, looking upon them as "creatures of his meditation," "fragments of the divine mind that drew them," Coleridge, in spite of his ultra-idealism, cannot avoid self-contradiction; and his twofold defence of Shakspere's "conceits" is a reductio ad absurdum of itself. "If people would in idea throw themselves back a couple of centuries," he says, "they would find that conceits and puns were very allowable because very natural. We are not to forget that at the time Shakspere lived there was an attempt at, and an affectation of, quaintness and
