In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,

The sole drift of my purpose doth extend

Not a frown further.

And so, when the wondering wrecked company are led in by Ariel, after a while Prospero says:

For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive

Thy rankest fault, all of them.

And it is a most heavenly touch of the fulness of this pardon when presently, stricken with overwhelming compunction as he looks into the cell and sees Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess, the brother laments :

But, O, how oddly will it sound that I

Must ask my child forgiveness!

and Prospero quickly interrupts :

There, sir, stop:

Let us not burden our remembrance with

A heaviness that's gone.

Which is almost like a paraphrase of St. Paul's Forgetting what is behind, let us press forward, and so forth. And so Prospero's art and Prospero's forgiveness rise above the most galling oppositions of life, and we see that Shakspere has found out moral exaltation to be the secret of managing all the moral antagonisms of existence. How changed is the attitude of man towards the supernatural, here, from what it was in the dream play of the Midsummer Night, and in the real play of Hamlet! In the first, man is the sport of chance; in the second, man knows not what is above; in the third, repentance, forgiveness, and Providence rise like stars out of the dark of Hamlet.

In the next two lectures we will trace those cunning and often amusing revelations of the attitude of man towards his fellow-man and towards nature proper which will complete our examination of these plays. Meantime let me close this lecture with remarking that it is instructive to observe from a different point of view the three phases of the supernatural presented by these plays. The supernatural, you see, is in all these plays. In Midsummer Night's Dream it is a flippant Oberon; in Hamlet it is a ghost; here in Tempest it is in the first place God, and in the second place man made in God's image controlling the pucks and ghosts who formerly controlled him. Puck, the bright trickster, changes to Ariel, the bright minister, through the intermediate ghost, the dark messenger. Thus the Ideal Period has come round by a wonderful cyclus to be simply the Dream Period reinformed with a new youth, and Shakspere's age, with its fairy-tale, The Tempest, is but a new and immortally fine reconstruction of his youth, with its fairy-tale, the Dream. I cannot think of the manner in which this glimmering Puck melts into this sombre ghost, and this ghost into the radiant Ariel, without recalling a series of ideas which I found some years ago in a long-forgotten essay of Bulwer's. He was drawing a comparison between the different appearances things would present to us if slight changes were made in the powers of our sense of sight; and these changes strikingly represent the actual changes in views of things which we have here been tracing as between Shakspere's youth and his ripeness. Said Bulwer, in substance: Our present eyesight takes only the view which comes from the surface of things, whence the ray of light glances and strikes our retina. What we see, therefore, under present conditions, is a sort of film, or dreamy covering of things. That is, what we call a beautiful face really applies only to the colours and

outlines of the skin which covers the actual framework of the face. Now, before going on, let us analogise this to the state of the young man's eyes, the state of Shakspere's eyes in the Midsummer Night's Dream, seeing only the surface of things, seeing things as in a dream, not seeing the real at all, not realising anything.

But suppose, continued Bulwer, that by a slight change the rays of light did not bound back from the surface,— say from the skin of the face,- but penetrated beneath that, and only bounded back from the muscles, nerves, veins, and bones. What an inconceivably repulsive place would the world become! In looking then, for instance, at our beautiful face, we would see only that reticulation of nerves and veins and muscles which makes a medical plate so horrible; we would see the two holes of the skull for nostrils; we would see a ghastly grin instead of a captivating smile.

And here, again, before going further, let us analogise this to the young man's first sight of the real in life, that is, to our Shakspere's Hamlet period, when the forbidding network of death and murder and revenge and sin and suffering starts out from underneath the smooth exterior of life, as the network of veins and muscles and so on starts out from the maiden's cheek to the more powerful vision. This Hamlet period is, indeed, just that in which the rays of light begin to come to us, not from the surface of things, but from the reality of things; and we see how our Shakspere is paralysed with horror at the sight.

But Bulwer does not leave us in this condition. Suppose again, he says, that our eyes should acquire an infinitely greater power, so that they should see not only the underlying realities of things but should actually see the purpose and reason of being and function of each thing along

with the thing itself. Suppose, to carry on the example, that, along with the revolting network of muscles and veins and bones in the human face, we should actually see the functions of each one-how each part was beautifully coadapted with the other, how the muscle played and swelled and contracted, how the generous blood ever leaped along the artery with nutriment and built up the exquisite structure of the face, depositing this little atom here and this there, and keeping up the form and contour of the flesh, how the nerves thrilled with a sudden impulse that ran into the sensorium and told of colour and of music, and so on. Then, then, if we saw along with these things their working and their final end and purpose, the world which a moment before was hideous as the real would now become infinitely beautiful as the ideal.

And so it became to Shakspere: bright but unreal in Midsummer Night's Dream, when he saw only the external; hideous in Hamlet, when he saw only the real; perfectly beautiful in Tempest, when he saw all things together, all things related to a common purpose, nothing common or unclean, because everything was dignified by its functional relation to that purpose-in short, when he saw the world in its ideal. And, finally, I cannot better sum up the relations of these three plays than by calling your attention to their epilogues from the point of view of our present

status.

At the end of the Midsummer Night's Dream exeunt Oberon, Titania, and their train, and Puck concludes all with this epilogue:

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here,
While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I'm an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck,
Now to scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;

Else the Puck a liar call:

So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands,

(that is, the applause of your hands)

if we be friends,

And Robin shall restore amends.

Here we have

nothing fit end of a dream.

When we come to Hamlet, there is no set epilogue, but they are to bury Hamlet, and to shoot over his grave as a tribute to his soldierhood; and the stage-direction is, Exeunt, bearing off the bodies: after which a peal of ordnance is shot off. So the epilogue is really a peal of guns, and truly to this lamentable play there could be no fitter epilogue than these sullen shots from behind the curtain, like inarticulate cries from beyond the grave.

But, lastly, to The Tempest we have a set epilogue; and such a farewell as it is!

Bearing in mind the flippant departure of Puck from the stage, and remembering how likely it is that either The Tempest was Shakspere's last play, or that he thought it would be, we cannot listen unmoved to the passionate human appeal of Shakspere in this epilogue as a personal supplication from the master to his fellow-men whom he had so long entertained with his art. The stage-direction is: