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memory episodes of Shakespeare's London career. The true aim of a national London memorial must be symbolical of a larger fact. It must typify Shakespeare's place not in the past, but in the present life of the nation and of the world. It ought to constitute a perpetual reminder of the position that he fills in the present economy, and is likely to fill in the future economy of human thought, for those whose growing absorption in the narrowing business of life tends to make them forget it.

The day is long since past when vague eulogy of Shakespeare is permissible. Shakespeare's literary supremacy is as fully recognised by those who justly appreciate literature as any law of nature. To the man and woman of culture in all civilised countries he symbolises the potency of the human intellect. But those who are content to read and admire him in the cloister at times overlook the full significance of his achievement in the outer world. Critics of all nationalities are in substantial agreement with the romance-writer Dumas, who pointed out that Shakespeare is more than the greatest of dramatists; he is the greatest of thinking men.

The exalted foreign estimate illustrates the fact that Shakespeare contributes to the prestige of his nation a good deal beyond repute for literary power. He is not merely a literary ornament of our British household. It is largely on his account that foreign nations honour his country as an intellectual and spiritual force. Shakespeare and Newton together give England an intellectual sovereignty which adds more to her "reputation through the world" than any exploit in battle or statesmanship. If, again, Shakespeare's pre-eminence has added dignity to the

name of Englishman abroad, it has also quickened the sense of unity among the intelligent sections of the English-speaking peoples. Admiration, affection for his work has come to be one of the strongest links in the chain which binds the English-speaking peoples together. He quickens the fraternal sense among all who speak his language.

London is no nominal capital of the kingdom and the Empire. It is the headquarters of British influence. Within its boundaries are assembled the official insignia of British prestige. It is the mothercity of the English-speaking world. To ask of the citizens of London some outward sign that Shakespeare is a living source of British prestige, an unifying factor in the consolidation of the British Empire, and a powerful element in the maintenance of fraternal relations with the United States, seems therefore no unreasonable demand. Neither cloistered study of his plays, nor the occasional representation of them in the theatres, brings home to either the English-speaking or the English-reading world the full extent of the debt that England owes to Shakespeare. A monumental memorial, which should symbolise Shakespeare's influence in the universe, could only find an appropriate and effective home in the capital city of the British Empire. It is this conviction, and no narrower point of view, which gives endeavour to commemorate Shakespeare in London its title to consideration.

VII

The admitted fact that Shakespeare's fame is established beyond risk of decay does not place him

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outside the range of conventional methods of commemoration. The greater a man's recognised service to his fellows, the more active grows in normally constituted minds that natural commemorative instinct, which seeks outward and tangible expression. A strange fallacy underlies the objection that has been taken to any commemoration of Shakespeare on the alleged ground that Milton warned the English people of all time against erecting a monument to Shakespeare.

In 1630 Milton asked the question that is familiar to thousands of tongues:

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones?

By way of answer he deprecated any such "weak witness of his name" as "piléd stones" or "star-ypointing pyramid." The poet-laureate of England echoed Milton's sentiment in 1905. He roundly asserted that "perishable stuff" is the fit crown of monumental pedestals. "Gods for themselves," he concluded, "have monument enough."

There are ample signs that the sentiment to which Milton and the laureate give voice has a good deal of public support. None the less the poetlaureate's conclusion is clearly refuted by experience and cannot terminate the argument. At any rate, in the classical and Renaissance eras monumental sculpture was in habitual request among those who would honour both immortal gods and mortal heroes -especially mortal heroes who had distinguished themselves in literature or art.

A little reflection will show, likewise, that Milton's fervid couplets have small bearing on the question at issue in its present conditions. Milton's poem

is an elegy on Shakespeare. It was penned when the dramatist had lain in his grave less than fourteen years, and when the writer was in his twenty-second year. The exuberant enthusiasm of youth was couched in poetic imagery which has from time immemorial been employed in panegyrics of great poets. The beautiful figure which presents a great man's work as his only lasting monument is as old as poetry itself. The conceit courses through the classical poetry of Greece from the time of Pindar, and through that of Italy from the time of Ennius. No great Renaissance writer of modern Italy, of sixteenth-century France, or of Elizabethan England, tired of arguing that the poet's deathless memorial is that carved by his own pen. Shakespeare himself clothed the conceit in glowing harmonies in his sonnets. Ben Jonson, in his elegy on the dramatist, adapted the time-honoured figure when he hailed his dead friend's achievement as "a monument without a tomb."

"The truest poetry is the most feigning," and, when one recalls the true significance and influence of great sculptured monuments through the history of the civilised world, Milton's poetic argument can only be accepted in what Sir Thomas Browne called "a soft and flexible sense"; it cannot "be called unto the rigid test of reason." To treat Milton's eulogy as the final word in the discussion of the subject whether or no Shakespeare should have a national monument, is to come into conflict with Sir Walter Scott, Tennyson, Ruskin, Dickens, and all the greatest men of letters of the nineteenth century, who answered the question in the affirmative. It is to discredit crowds of admirers of great

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writers in classical and modern ages, who have commemorated the labours of poets and dramatists in outward and visible monuments.

The genius of the great Greek dramatists was not underrated by their countrymen. Their literary efforts were adjudged to be true memorials of their fame, and no doubt of their immortality was entertained. None the less, the city of Athens, on the proposition of the Attic orator, Lycurgus, erected in honour of Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides statues which ranked with the most beautiful adornments of the Greek capital. Calderon and Goethe, Camoens and Schiller, Sir Walter Scott and Burns enjoy reputations which are smaller, it is true, than Shakespeare's, but are, at the same time, like his, of both national and universal significance. In memory of them all, monuments have been erected as tokens of their fellow-countrymen's veneration and gratitude for the influence which their poetry wields.

The fame of these men's writings never stood in any "need" of monumental corroboration. The sculptured memorial testified to the sense of gratitude which their writings generated in the hearts and minds of their readers.

Again, the great musicians and the great painters live in their work in a singularly vivid sense. Music and painting are more direct in popular appeal than great poetry. Yet none can ridicule the sentiment which is embodied in the statue of Beethoven at Bonn, or in that of Paolo Veronese at Verona. To accept literally the youthful judgment of Milton and his imitators is to condemn sentiments and practices which are in universal vogue among civilised peoples.