meaning of these signs, as determined by experience and reflection,
constitute "the observer of men;" but tacitly to draw from these still
further conclusions and to arrange the separate observations according
to grounds of probability into a just and valid combination--this, it
may be said, is to know men. The distinguishing property of the
dramatic poet who is great in characterization, is something
altogether different here, and which, take it which way we will,
either includes in it this readiness and this acuteness, or dispenses
with both. It is the capability of transporting himself so completely
into every situation, even the most unusual, that he is enabled, as
plenipotentiary of the whole human race, without particular
instructions for each separate case, to act and speak in the name of
every individual. It is the power of endowing the creatures of his
imagination with such self-existent energy that they afterward act in
each conjuncture according to general laws of nature: the poet, in his
dreams, institutes, as it were, experiments which are received with as
much authority as if they had been made on waking objects. The
inconceivable element herein, and what moreover can never be learned,
is, that the characters appear neither to do nor to say anything on
the spectator's account merely; and yet that the poet, simply by means
of the exhibition, and without any subsidiary explanation,
communicates to his audience the gift of looking into the inmost
recesses of their minds. Hence Goethe has ingeniously compared
Shakespeare's characters to watches with crystalline plates and cases,
which, while they point out the hours as correctly as other watches,
enable us at the same time to perceive the inward springs whereby all
this is accomplished.

Nothing, however, is more foreign to Shakespeare than a certain
anatomical style of exhibition, which laboriously enumerates all the