business of the drama, and cared only to indulge his
whim. He was at the top of his profession, and was
no longer forced to adapt himself to the narrower
conventions of the stage. He might write what he
liked, and he made full use of his hard-earned liberty.

The sense of relief which comes with these last
plays, after the prolonged and heightened anguish of
the Tragedies, seems to suggest the state of con-
valescence, when the mind wanders among happy
memories, and is restored to a delight in the sim-
plest pleasures. The scene is shifted, for escape from
the old jealousies of the Court, to an enchanted island,
or to the mountains of Wales, or to the sheep-walks of
Bohemia, where the life of the inhabitants is a peaceful
round of daily duties and rural pieties. The very
structure of the plays has the inconsequence of reverie:
even The Tempest, while it observes the mechanical
unities, escapes from their tyranny by an appeal to
supernatural agencies, which in a single day can do
the work of years. All these characteristics of matter
and form point to the same conclusion, that the dark-
ness and burden of tragic suffering gave place, in the
latest works that Shakespeare wrote for the stage, to
daylight and ease.

The Tragedies must be reckoned his greatest
achievement, so that it may sound paradoxical to
speak of the sudden change from Tragedy to Romance
as if it betokened a recovery from disease. Yet no
man can explore the possibilities of suffering, as
Shakespeare did, to the dark end, without peril to his
own soul. The instinct of self-preservation keeps
most men from adventuring near to the edge of the
abyss. The inevitable pains of life they will nerve
themselves to endure, but they are careful not to
multiply them by imagination, lest their strength

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