ution of all
the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries
where these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence
by being translation on translation. There never was a time when there
was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and all
others successively picked out and thrown away. Something like the same
process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books. The
world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, Aesop's Fables, Pilpay,
Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the
work of single men. In the composition of such works the time thinks,
the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer,
the fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good
word; every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day; and the
generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his
originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the
recorder and embodiment of his own.

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakspeare
Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the
Mysteries celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final
detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from
Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the possession of
the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare altered, remodelled, and
finally made his own. Elated with success and piqued by the growing
interest of the problem, they have left no bookstall unsearched, no
chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to decompose
in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy
Shakspeare poached or not, whether he held horses at the theatre door,
whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second-best
bed to Anne Hathaway, his wife.

There is something touching in the madness with which the passing age
mischooses the object on which all candles shine and all eyes are
turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen
Elizabeth and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and
Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable note the founder of
another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be
remembered,--the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the
inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people
of the