d sank below men of
second or third rate power, when he attempted aught beside the drama--even
as bees construct their cells and manufacture their honey to admirable
perfection; but would in vain attempt to build a nest. Now this mode of
reconciling a compelled sense of inferiority with a feeling of pride,
began in a few pedants, who having read that Sophocles was the great model
of tragedy, and Aristotle the infallible dictator of its rules, and
finding that the _Lear_, _Hamlet_, _Othello_ and other master-pieces were
neither in imitation of Sophocles, nor in obedience to Aristotle,--and not
having (with one or two exceptions) the courage to affirm, that the
delight which their country received from generation to generation, in
defiance of the alterations of circumstances and habits, was wholly
groundless,--took upon them, as a happy medium and refuge, to talk of
Shakespeare as a sort of beautiful _lusus naturae_, a delightful
monster,--wild, indeed, and without taste or judgment, but like the
inspired idiots so much venerated in the East, uttering, amid the
strangest follies, the sublimest truths. In nine places out of ten in
which I find his awful name mentioned, it is with some epithet of "wild,"
"irregular," "pure child of nature," &c. If all this be true, we must
submit to it; though to a thinking mind it cannot but be painful to find
any excellence, merely human, thrown out of all human analogy, and thereby
leaving us neither rules for imitation, nor motives to imitate;--but if
false, it is a dangerous falsehood;--for it affords a refuge to secret
self-conceit,--enables a vain man at once to escape his reader's
indignation by general swoln panegyrics, and merely by his _ipse dixit_ to
treat, as contemptible, what he has not intellect enough to comprehend, or
soul to feel, without assigning any reason, or referring his opinion to
any demonstrative principle;--thus leaving Shakespeare as a sort of grand
Lama, adored indeed, and his very excrements prized as relics, but with no
authority or real influence. I grieve that every late voluminous edition
of his works would enable me to substantiate the present charge with a
variety of facts, one-tenth of which would of themselves exhaust the time
allotted to me. Every critic, who has or has not made a collection of
black letter books--in itself a useful and respectable amusement,--puts on
the seven-league boots of self-opinion, and strides at once from an
illustrator into