ow they have been,--a
delightful, yet most effectual remedy for this dead palsy of the public
mind. What would appear mad or ludicrous in a book, when presented to the
senses under the form of reality, and with the truth of nature, supplies a
species of actual experience. This is indeed the special privilege of a
great actor over a great poet. No part was ever played in perfection, but
nature justified herself in the hearts of all her children, in what state
soever they were, short of absolute moral exhaustion, or downright
stupidity. There is no time given to ask questions, or to pass judgments;
we are taken by storm, and, though in the histrionic art many a clumsy
counterfeit, by caricature of one or two features, may gain applause as a
fine likeness, yet never was the very thing rejected as a counterfeit. O!
when I think of the inexhaustible mine of virgin treasure in our
Shakespeare, that I have been almost daily reading him since I was ten
years old,--that the thirty intervening years have been unintermittingly
and not fruitlessly employed in the study of the Greek, Latin, English,
Italian, Spanish, and German _belle lettrists_, and the last fifteen years
in addition, far more intensely in the analysis of the laws of life and
reason as they exist in man,--and that upon every step I have made forward
in taste, in acquisition of facts from history or my own observation, and
in knowledge of the different laws of being and their apparent exceptions,
from accidental collision of disturbing forces,--that at every new
accession of information, after every successful exercise of meditation,
and every fresh presentation of experience, I have unfailingly discovered
a proportionate increase of wisdom and intuition in Shakespeare;--when I
know this, and know too, that by a conceivable and possible, though hardly
to be expected, arrangement of the British theatres, not all, indeed, but
a large, a very large, proportion of this indefinite all--(round which no
comprehension has yet drawn the line of circumscription, so as to say to
itself, "I have seen the whole")--might be sent into the heads and
hearts--into the very souls of the mass of mankind, to whom, except by this
living comment and interpretation, it must remain for ever a sealed
volume, a deep well without a wheel or a windlass;--it seems to me a
pardonable enthusiasm to steal away from sober likelihood, and share in so
rich a feast in the faery world of possibility! Yet e