h in its
highest form and fullest measure. His own modesty may be permitted to
envy this man's art or that man's scope, but never was envy more
misplaced.

This is no rhapsody. Longinus tells us that an unassailable verdict upon
the sublime must be the consensus of different ages, pursuits, tastes
and walks in life. Concerning Shakespeare's gifts there is no discord
among the competent--the Hazlitts, Coleridges, Emersons, Carlyles. Some
of those gifts can be cultivated in considerable measure, some in a
less; some lie beyond all training and all art. But no art or
cultivation whatever can bring any one of them to the Shakespearean
height and fulness, if Nature herself has been less kind than she was
to the child of John Shakespeare, that unsuspecting burgess of Stratford
town.

If, before we attempt to realise the supremacy of Shakespeare in any
particular attribute, we have recognised how miserably we ourselves have
managed, at some time or other, to fail in every one of them; if, before
we approach an appreciation of Shakespeare, we have applied to other
great creators the same analysis which we are about to apply to him; if
we have learned from the most instructive examples what is meant by
creation, by imagination, by insight, by wisdom, by wit, by humour, by
eloquence, and by verbal music; then we cannot fail to acknowledge that
here is the all-round, the all-comprehensive genius, superlatively
dowered with each and all of them; that here is the entire mind, where
others are partial; that here, as I believe some one has put it, is the
man who, when others have said, or depicted, or argued, or pleaded,
seems to come along and say, "let me show you how this should be done,"
and so does it once and for ever.

It is but few, one may believe, who are fully conscious of the reasons
why Shakespeare could fill the Elizabethan pit with the rough London
apprentices and the Elizabethan boxes with superfine gallants and
courtiers; why he has been a delight equally to the worldling, to whom
always "the play's the thing," and to the sedate scholar, who has
perchance never set foot in a theatre, and to whom a play is a dramatic
poem printed in a book. Yet the reason is simple. It is because
Shakespeare's gifts are numerous and varied enough to appeal to populace
and gallant, to worldling and student; they meet to the full each and
every demand that can be made upon a work of dramatic art.

To begin with, he possesses the tru