It would be impossible in the space to which we are necessarily confined, to do justice to Mr. Hudson's powers of analysis and representation, as exercised through the wide variety of the Shaksperian drama. The volumes swarm with strong and striking thoughts on so many suggested topics, that it is difficult to fix upon any particular excellence for especial praise. The first quality which will strike the reader will be the author's opulence of expression and profusion of wit. Analogies with him are as cheap as commonplaces are to other men. He has no hesitation in announcing his analysis in a witticism, and condensing a principle into an epigram. His page often blazes and burns with wit. South, Congreve, and Sheridan are hardly richer in the precious article. In Mr. Hudson, also, the quality has an individual character, and is the racier from its genuineness and from its root in his intellectual constitution. This wit is, perhaps, the leading characteristic of his style, though his diction varies sufficiently with the varying demands of his subjects, and often glides from the tingling concussion of antithesis into the softest music, or rises from sarcastic brevity and stinging emphasis into rich and sonorous amplification. The analysis of Iago, and the analysis of the Weird Sisters, indicate, perhaps, the extremes of his manner. Throughout the volumes, whether the subject be comic or tragic, humorous or sublime, there is never any lack of verbal felicities. These seem to grow spontaneously in the soil of his mind; and there is no American writer whose style is more wholly free from worn and wasted images, phrases, and forms of expression. He is neither mediocre in thought nor expression.
We cannot resist the temptation to give a few of Mr. Hudson's sentences, illustrative of his manner of stinging the minds of his readers and enforcing their attention. Speaking of Sir Thomas Lucy, on whose manor Shakspeare is said to have poached, Hudson remarks: "This Warwickshire esquire, once so rich and mighty, is now known only as the block over which the Warwickshire peasant stumbled into immortality." Referring to those purists who regard words more than things in their strictures on licentiousness, he calls them persons "whose morality seems to be all in their ears." Speaking of Hume, "an exquisite voluptuary among political and metaphysical abstractions," he puts him in a class of men who "study art as they study nature, only in the process of dissection--a process which, of course, scares away the very life which makes her nature; so that they get, after all, but a _sort of post-mortem knowledge of her_." Again, he observes--"Pope, for example, was the prince of versifiers, and Hume the prince of logicians: with the one versification strangled itself in a tub of honey; with the other logic broke its neck in trying to fly in a vacuum. It is by no means strange, therefore, that the thousand-eyed philosophy of Shakspeare should have seemed a perfect monster to the one-eyed logic of Hume." Perhaps the finest answer to the charge that Shakspeare was an unregulated genius, full of great absurdities and great beauties, is contained in Hudson's ironical statement of it: "He has sometimes been represented as a sort of inspired and infallible idiot, who practiced a species of poetical magic without knowing what he did or why he did it; who achieved the greatest wonders of art, not by rational insight and design, but by a series of lucky accidents and _lapsus naturæ_; who, in short, went through life stumbling upon divinities, and blundering into miracles."