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A monument like this would help to change a blind enthusiasm and a dilettante-talk into knowledge, reverence, and study; and surely this would be the true way to honour the memory of the man who appeals to posterity by no mighty deeds of worldly prowess, but has left behind him food for heart, brain, and conscience, on which the generations will feed till the end of time. It would be the one true and natural mode of perpetuating his fame in kind; helping him to do more of that for which he was born, and because of which we humbly desire to do him honour, as the years flow farther away from the time when, at the age of fifty-two, he left the world a richer legacy of the results of intellectual labour than any other labourer in literature has ever done. It would be to raise a monument to his mind more than to his person.

But to honour Shakspere in the best way we must not gaze upon some grand memorial of his fame, we must not talk largely of his wonderful doings, we must not even behold the representation of his works on the stage, invaluable aid as that is to the right understanding of what he has written; but we must, by close, silent, patient study, enter into an understanding with the spirit of the departed poet-sage, and thus let his own words be the necromantic spell that raises the dead, and brings us into communion with that man who knew what was in men more than any other mere man ever did. Well was it for Shakspere that he was humble; else on what a desolate pinnacle of companionless solitude must he have stood! Where was he to find his peers? To most thoughtful minds it is a terrible fancy to suppose that there were no greater human being than themselves. From the terror of such a truth Shakspere’s love for men preserved him. He did not think about himself so much as he thought about them. Had he been a self-student alone, or chiefly, could he ever have written those dramas? We close with the repetition of this truth: that the love of our kind is the one key to the knowledge of humanity and of ourselves. And have we not sacred authority for concluding that he who loves his brother is the more able and the more likely to love Him who made him and his brother also, and then told them that love is the fulfilling of the law?