divert me....

Cowper's "versification" of the incident is vapid compared to this. The
incident of the viper and the kittens again, which he "versified" in _The
Colubriad_, is chronicled far more charmingly in the letters. His quiet
prose gave him a vehicle for that intimacy of the heart and fancy which
was the deepest need of his nature. He made a full confession of himself
only to his friends. In one of his letters he compares himself, as he
rises in the morning to "an infernal frog out of Acheron, covered with the
ooze and mud of melancholy." In his most ambitious verse he is a frog
trying to blow himself out into a bull. It is the frog in him, not the
intended bull, that makes friends with us to-day.

VII.--A NOTE ON ELIZABETHAN PLAYS

Voltaire's criticism of Shakespeare as rude and barbarous has only one
fault. It does not fit Shakespeare. Shakespeare, however, is the single
dramatist of his age to whom it is not in a measure applicable. "He was a
savage," said Voltaire, "who had imagination. He has written many happy
lines; but his pieces can please only in London and in Canada." Had this
been said of Marlowe, or Chapman, or Jonson (despite his learning), or
Cyril Tourneur, one might differ, but one would admit that perhaps there
was something in it. Again, Voltaire's boast that he had been the first to
show the French "some pearls which I had found" in the "enormous dunghill"
of Shakespeare's plays was the sort of thing that might reasonably have
been said by an anthologist who had made selections from Dekker or
Beaumont and Fletcher or any dramatist writing under Elizabeth and James
except William Shakespeare. One reads the average Elizabethan play in the
certainty that the pearls will be few and the rubbish-heap practically
five acts high. There are, perhaps, a dozen Elizabethan plays apart from
Shakespeare's that are as great as his third-best work. But there are no
_Hamlets_ or _Lears_ among them. There are no _Midsummer Night's Dreams_.
There is not even a _Winter's Tale_.

If Lamb, then, had boasted about what he had done for the Elizabethans in
general in the terms used by Voltaire concerning himself and Shakespeare
his claim would have been just. Lamb, however, was free from Voltaire's
vanity. He did not feel that he was shedding lustre on the Elizabethans as
a patron: he regarded himself as a follower. Voltaire was infuriated by
the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than himself; La