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the work will proceed according to the laws, even while departing from the matter, of history; so that pure creations will be formed upon the principles, and in the order and manner of histories. And if - O, if — there arise a workman having the creative powers of a Shakespeare, what he creates will be, in effect, historical, and what he borrows will come from him with all the life and freshness of original creation; because he will assimilate and reproduce the dead matter of fact in the forms of living art.

Hence the early and continued use of historical materials on the stage had, unquestionably, great influence in moulding and determining the form and structure of the English national Drama in all its parts and branches. Now, a dramatic representation, in any proper sense of the term, of the events and persons of history is clearly incompatible with the rules of the classic stage: the work requires a larger scope, a broader platform, a more varied and expansive scene. It cannot possibly live and move under the "cold obstruction" of what may be termed the minor unities; and if it undertake to do so, narrative and description will needs, in great part, take the place of representation. In a word, the spirit of Gothic Christian Art could no more be embodied in the forms of the Classic Drama than the soul of an eagle could organize itself into the body of a fish, or than an acorn could be developed into a violet.

Here, then, was required a principle of compensation. As the mind was taken away from the laws of time and place, it must be delivered over to the higher laws of reason. So that the work lay under the necessity of proceeding in such a way as to make the spectator live in his imagination, not in his senses; and even his senses must, for the time being, be rationalized, and, as it were, made imaginative. That is, instead of the formal or numerical unities of time and place, we must have the unities of intellectual time and intellectual space: the further the artist departed from the local and chronological succession of things, the more strict and manifest must be his observance of their logical and productive succession. Incidents and characters were to be represented, not in the order of sensible juxtaposition or procession, but in that of cause and effect, of principle and consequence. Whether, therefore, they stood ten minutes or ten years, ten feet or ten miles asunder, mattered not, provided they were really and evidently related in this way; that is, provided the unities of action and interest were made strong enough and clear enough to overcome the diversities of time and place. For, here, it is not where and when a given thing happened, but how it was produced and why, whence it came and whither it tended, what caused it to be that it was and to do that it did, that we are mainly concerned with.

Hence the well-known nakedness of the Elizabethan stage in respect of scenic furniture and accompaniment. The weakness, if such it were, was the source of vast strength. It is to this poverty of the old stage that we owe, in great part, the immense riches of the Shakespearian drama, forasmuch as it was thereby laid under a necessity of making up the defect of sensuous impression by working on the rational, moral, and imaginative forces of the audience. And, undoubtedly, the modern way of glutting the senses with a profusion of showy and varied dress and scenery has struck, and always must strike, a dead palsy on the legitimate processes of Gothic art. The decline of the Drama began with its beginning, and has kept pace with its progress. So that here we have a forcible illustration of what is often found true, that men cannot get along because there is nothing to hinder them. For, in respect of the moral and imaginative powers, it may justly be affirmed that we are often assisted most when not assisted, and that the right way of helping us to walk is by leaving us to walk unhelped. That the soul may find and use her wings, it is better that she be left where there is little for her feet to get hold of and rest upon. How emphatically these positions infer the profound Christian but anti-Romish spirit of Shakespearian drama, is indeed a great subject, but cannot here be followed out.

The foregoing chapters have also shown, it is