those of which the annals of antiquity have given us knowledge, as we behold to our amazement in the dramas where he paints the Roman realm, long passed away, with truest colours. As he saw to the inner life the knights of the Middle Ages, so did he that of the heroes of the antique world, and bade them speak out the deepest word of their souls. And he always knew how to raise Truth to Poetry; and how to set forth in poetic light that hard and sober race of prose, those combinations of rude rapine and refined legal shrewdness, that casuistic soldatesca, the unsentimental Romans.
But yet as regards his Roman dramas, Shakespeare must needs incur the reproach of being without form, and a highly-gifted author, Dietrich Grabbe, even called them[1] "poetically adorned chronicles," wherein all central motive was wanting, where no one knew who was the leading or side character, and where, even if we dispensed with unity of time and place, we can find no unity of interest. A strange error of the shrewdest critics! For neither is this last-named unity, nor those of place and time, at all wanting to our great poet. Only that the ideas[2] are
