and he betters the instruction. He finds two counties groping
to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of production to the
place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad. Every master has found
his materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his
people and in his love of the materials he wrought in. What an economy
of power! and what a compensation for the shortness of life! All is
done to his hand. The world has brought him thus far on his way. The
human race has gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows,
and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have
worked for him, and he enters into their labors. Choose any other thing,
out of the line of tendency, out of the national feeling and history,
and he would have all to do for himself: his powers would be expended in
the first preparations. Great genial power, one would almost say,
consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive, in
letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass
unobstructed through the mind.

Shakspeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were
importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily
at political allusions and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, a
growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican
church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,
houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs
were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted this
new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now,--no, not
by the strongest party,--neither then could king, prelate, or puritan,
alone or united, suppress an organ which was ballad, epic, newspaper,
caucus, lecture, Punch and library, at the same time. Probably king,
prelate, and puritan all found their own account in it. It had become,
by all causes, a national interest,--by no means conspicuous, so that
some great scholar would have thought of treating it in an English
history,--but not a whit less considerable because it was cheap and of
no account, like a baker's-shop. The best proof of its vitality is the
crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field: Kyd, Marlow,
Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele,
Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher.

The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the first
importance to the