motives by which a man is determined to act in this or that particular
manner. This rage of supplying motives, the mania of so many modern
historians, might be carried at length to an extent which would
abolish everything like individuality, and resolve all character into
nothing but the effect of foreign or external influences, whereas we
know that it often announces itself most decidedly in earliest
infancy. After all, a man acts so because he is so. And what each man
is, that Shakespeare reveals to us most immediately: he demands and
obtains our belief even for what is singular, and deviates from the
ordinary course of nature. Never perhaps was there so comprehensive a
talent for characterization as Shakespeare. It not only grasps every
diversity of rank, age, and sex, down to the lispings of infancy; not
only do the king and the beggar, the hero and the pickpocket, the sage
and the idiot, speak and act with equal truthfulness; not only does he
transport himself to distant ages and foreign nations, and portray
with the greatest accuracy (a few apparent violations of costume
excepted) the spirit of the ancient Romans, of the French in the wars
with the English, of the English themselves during a great part of
their history, of the Southern Europeans (in the serious part of many
comedies), the cultivated society of the day, and the rude barbarism
of a Norman fore-time; his human characters have not only such depth
and individuality that they do not admit of being classed under common
names, and are inexhaustible even in conception: no, this Prometheus
not merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical world of
spirits, calls up the midnight ghost, exhibits before us the witches
with their unhallowed rites, peoples the air with sportive fairies and
sylphs; and these beings, though existing only in the imagination,
nevertheless possess such truth and consistency that even with such
misshapen abortions as Caliban, he extorts the assenting conviction
that, were there such beings, they would so conduct themselves. In a