with the like wing, is
witnessed by all biographies of Shakespeare, and by many thousands of the
volumes of criticism and commentary that have been written on his works.
One writer is content to botanise with him--to study plant-lore, that is,
with a theatrical manager, in his hard-earned leisure, for teacher.
Another must needs read the Bible with him, although, when all is said,
Shakespeare's study was but little on the Bible. Others elect to keep him
to music, astronomy, law, hunting, hawking, fishing. He is a good
companion out of doors, and some would fain keep him there, to make a
country gentleman of him. His incorrigible preoccupation with humanity,
the ruling passion and employment of his life, is beyond the range of
their complete sympathy; they like to catch him out of hours, to draw him
aside and bespeak his interest, for a few careless minutes, in the trades
and pastimes that bulk so largely and so seriously in their own
perspective of life. They hardly know what to make of his "unvalued
book"; but they know that he was a great man, and to have bought a
wool-fell or a quarter of mutton from him, that would have been
something! Only the poet-critics attempt to see life, however brokenly,
through Shakespeare's eyes, to let their enjoyment keep attendance upon
his. And from their grasp, too, he escapes by sheer excess.

In the case of Milton the imperfection of our sympathy is due to other
causes. In the first place, we know him as we do not know Shakespeare.
The history of his life can be, and has been, minutely written. The
affairs of his time, political and religious, have been recorded with
enormous wealth of detail; and this wealth, falling into fit hands, has
given us those learned modern historians to whom the seventeenth century
means a period of five thousand two hundred and eighteen weeks. Milton's
own attitude towards these affairs is in no way obscure; he has explained
it with great fulness and candour in numerous publications, so that it
would be easy to draw up a declaration of his chief tenets in politics
and religion. The slanders of his adversaries he met again and again with
lofty passages of self-revelation. "With me it fares now," he remarks in
one of these, "as with him whose outward garment hath been injured and
ill-bedighted; for having no other shift, what help but to turn the
inside outwards, especially if the lining be of the same, or, as it is
sometimes, much better." In his poetry,