t put into my hands.
It proves how childlike my mind still was, that my earliest sensation in
reading him was that of disappointment. It was not only that, despite my
familiarity with English (thanks chiefly to the care of him whom I
call my second father), there is much in the metaphorical diction of
Shakspeare which I failed to comprehend; but he seemed to me so far like
the modern French writers who affect to have found inspiration in his
muse, that he obtrudes images of pain and suffering without cause or
motive sufficiently clear to ordinary understandings, as I had taught
myself to think it ought to be in the drama.

He makes Fate so cruel that we lose sight of the mild deity behind her.
Compare, in this, Corneille's "Polyeucte," with the "Hamlet." In the
first an equal calamity befalls the good, but in their calamity they are
blessed. The death of the martyr is the triumph of his creed. But when
we have put down the English tragedy,--when Hamlet and Ophelia are
confounded in death with Polonius and the fratricidal king, we see not
what good end for humanity is achieved. The passages that fasten on
our memory do not make us happier and holier: they suggest but terrible
problems, to which they give us no solution.

In the "Horaces" of Corneille there are fierce contests, rude passions,
tears drawn from some of the bitterest sources of human pity; but then
through all stands out, large and visible to the eyes of all spectators,
the great ideal of devoted patriotism. How much of all that has been
grandest in the life of France, redeeming even its worst crimes of
revolution in the love of country, has had its origin in the "Horaces"
of Corneille. But I doubt if the fates of Coriolanus and Caesar and
Brutus and Antony, in the giant tragedies of Shakspeare, have made
Englishmen more willing to die for England. In fine, it was long
before--I will not say I understood or rightly appreciated Shakspeare,
for no Englishman would admit that I or even you could ever do so, but
before I could recognize the justice of the place his country claims
for him as the genius without an equal in the literature of Europe.
Meanwhile the ardour I had put into study, and the wear and tear of the
emotions which the study called forth, made themselves felt in a return
of my former illness, with symptoms still more alarming; and when the
year was out I was ordained to rest for perhaps another year before I
could sing in public, still less app