his conscious observation and objective experience.

Shakespeare may be regarded as the first and the last
great artistic physiologist or natural historian of the passions;
and he was this by virtue of the life of the spirit, which enabled him
to reproduce sympathetically the whole range of human passion
within himself. He was the first of the world's dramatists
that exhibited the passions in their evolutions, and in
their subtlest complications. And the moral proportion he preserved
in exhibiting the complex and often wild play of the passions
must have been largely due to the harmony of his soul
with the constitution of things. What the Restoration dramatists
regarded or understood as moral proportion, was not moral proportion
at all, but a proportion fashioned according to merely conventional
ideas of justice. Shakespeare's moral proportion appeared to them,
in their low spiritual condition, a moral chaos, which they
set about converting, in some of his great plays, into a cosmos;
and a sad muss, if not a ridiculous muss, they made of it.
Signal examples of this are the `rifacimenti' of the Tempest by Dryden
and Davenant, the King Lear by Tate, and the Antony and Cleopatra
(entitled `All for Love, or the World well Lost') by Dryden.

In Milton, though there is a noticeable, an even distinctly marked,
reduction of the life of the spirit (in the sense in which I have been
using these words) exhibited by Shakespeare, it is still very strong
and efficient, and continues uninfluenced by the malign atmosphere
around him the last fifteen years of his life, which were lived
in the reign of Charles II. Within that period he wrote
the `Paradise Lost', `Paradise Regained', and `Samson Agonistes'.
"Milton," says Emerson, "was the stair or high table-land to let down