"The best in this kind are but shadows." No German commentator has ever made an adequate note on that.

Nevertheless, Shakespeare was an Englishman; he was nowhere more English than in his blunders; but he was nowhere more successful than in the description of very English types of character.

And if anything is to be said about Hamlet, beyond what Shakespeare has said about him, I should say that Hamlet was an Englishman too.

He was as much an Englishman as he was a gentleman, and he had the very grave weaknesses of both characters.

The chief English fault, especially in the nineteenth century, has been lack of decision, not only lack of decision in action, but lack of the equally essential decision in thought--which some call dogma.