nius had not power to re-inform and re-create the daemonic
spirit by virtue of its own clear essence. This wonderful play, one of
the most admirable among all the works of Shakespeare's immeasurable and
unfathomable intelligence, as it must always hold its natural high place
among the most admired, will always in all probability be also, and as
naturally, the least beloved of all. It would be as easy and as
profitable a problem to solve the Rabelaisian riddle of the bombinating
chimaera with its potential or hypothetical faculty of deriving
sustenance from a course of diet on second intentions, as to read the
riddle of Shakespeare's design in the procreation of this yet more
mysterious and magnificent monster of a play. That on its production in
print it was formally announced as "a new play never staled with the
stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar," we know; must
we infer or may we suppose that therefore it was not originally written
for the stage? Not all plays were which even at that date appeared in
print: yet it would seem something more than strange that one such play,
written simply for the study, should have been the extra-professional
work of Shakespeare: and yet again it would seem stranger that he should
have designed this prodigious nondescript or portent of supreme genius
for the public stage: and strangest of all, if so, that he should have so
designed it in vain. Perhaps after all a better than any German or
Germanising commentary on the subject would be the simple and summary
ejaculation of Celia--"O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful
wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping!"
The perplexities of the whole matter seem literally to crowd and thicken
upon us at every step. What ailed the man or any man to write such a
manner of dramatic poem at all? and having written, to keep it beside him
or let it out of his hands into stranger and more slippery keeping,
unacted and unprinted? A German will rush in with an answer where an
Englishman (_non angelus sed Anglus_) will naturally fear to tread.

Alike in its most palpable perplexities and in its most patent
splendours, this political and philosophic and poetic problem, this
hybrid and hundred-faced and hydra-headed prodigy, at once defies and
derides all definitive comment. This however we may surely and
confidently say of it, that of all Shakespeare's offspring it is the one
whose best things lo