poet who works for it. He loses no time in idle
experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the case of
Shakspeare there is much more. At the time when he left Stratford and
went up to London, a great body of stage-plays of all dates and writers
existed in manuscript and were in turn produced on the boards. Here is
the Tale of Troy, which the audience will bear hearing some part of,
every week; the Death of Julius Caesar, and other stories out of
Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of English history,
from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur down to the royal Henries, which
men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian
tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the London 'prentices know. All
the mass has been treated, with more or less skill, by every playwright,
and the prompter has the soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no
longer possible to say who wrote them first. They have been the property
of the Theatre so long, and so many rising geniuses have enlarged or
altered them, inserting a speech or a whole scene, or adding a song,
that no man can any longer claim copyright in this work of numbers.
Happily, no man wishes to. They are not yet desired in that way. We have
few readers, many spectators and hearers. They had best lie where
they are.

Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old plays
waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had the
_prestige_ which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing could
have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England circulated in
the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he wanted to his
airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on
which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due
temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his
edifice, and in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at
leisure and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination. In
short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the temple.
Sculpture in Egypt and in Greece grew up in subordination to
architecture. It was the ornament of the temple wall: at first a rude
relief carved on pediments, then the relief became bolder and a head or
arm was projected from the wall; the groups being still arranged with
reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the
figures; and when at las