The Birkenhead News and Wirral General Advertiser. — 1879-04-26 (Birkenhead, Merseyside, England)

VIII." Wolsey can find no fit type of the great fall of his estate except by analogies in external nature. When the reality of his adversity is first forced upon him he exclaims— " Nay, then, farewell! l're touched the highest point of all my greatness, And from that fall meridian of my g:ory I haste now to my settiog. I shall fall Like a bright exaltation in the even ng, And no man see me more." In the same scene, when he has been baited and worried by the courtiers who bring his sentence of degradation, and is at last left alone, he finds in the course of natural insensate things the best illustration of the growth and decay of his own fortunes. In the sonnets—those mysterious sonnets, of which the key I think has never been nor never will be found—it is difficult to find a page in which instances of the subject I am speaking of do not abound These sonnets are b 0 rich in instances of this special facility of Shakespeare's that it is hard to select from them, but in the 102nd sonnet we have dealt with a phase of feeling with which I suppose most people are familiar, the undemonstrativeness—if there be such a word—of settled growing love; and again we find nature drawn upon to enforce and help the meaning. In King John we have instances of the imaginative use of natural things in Shakespeare's grandest manner.—When Constance, in the grief and shame of her disappointed hopes, refuses to go with Salisbury to the Kings, she throws herself on the gtound and says—  To me, and to the state of my great grief, Let Kings assemble; for my grief's so great That no supporter but the liege firm earth Can hold it op. Here I and BORA, sit; Here is my throne, bid Kings come bow to it. And at last when John himself, consumed by the fire of his fatal fever, is at his own entreaty carried into the open air, in the orchard of Swinstead Abbey, he can only describe his state—his craving for relief—by natural imagery. Othello, too, is replete with natural imagery. Meeting Desdemona in Cyprus, after what must have been an uncomfortable sea passage, his great joy and peace are contrasted with the storm from which he has escaped; and when his mind has succombed to the vile suggestions of lago, and lago persuades him to be patient, he compares his set unchangeable purpose to the sea which had no ebb tide. And in those awful words spoken when Togo's poison had done its work, and Othello had been driven by the wild passion of jealousy which possessed him to murder that being whom he eo rassionatcly loved, we find him recurring at every turn to external nature to help out his thought. Of Shakespeare's sense of music there are instances to be found at every turn. It seems to have been to him a source of the deepest and most subtle feeling, suggesting ideas for wnich even he with his mastery way of compelling thought into wot ds could not always find adequate language. Of the infinite wealth of flower image, yto be found throughout Shakespeare's works, I cannot now speak—it is a subject in itself —nor of the illustrations drawn from common things which occur so frequently with such charming effect. You will remember how Prospero says to Miranda, "the fringed curtain of thine eye advanos," when she is to look for the first time on Ferdinand. Bow that daring young lady, Rosalind in "As you like it," when asked by Orlando, " whPre dwell you, pretty youth ?" answers, with this shepherdess, my sister. Here In the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat." Now, the king in Hamlet is 'like a mildew'd ear, blasting his wholesome brother." But my time has run out, as I fear your patience may have done. That which is not and cannot be exhausted is the mine of wealth from which I have extracted a few specimens. That is infinite. It seems to me that as our experience of life, and human nature, and feeling in all their marvellous complexity are extended, as we become more capable of appreciating the significance of the great insoluble problems which surround us, as knowledge slowly widens—so does the immensity, the universality, of Shakespeare's genius become more and more apparent to us. His own words, spoken of Cleopatra, are most true of himself, "age cannot wither him, nor custom stale his infinite variety." He is in very truth one of the "Immortals." (Appla the.) The proceedings terminated shortly after eleven o'clock.