world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to receive
this and not another bias. A popular player;--nobody suspected he was
the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from
poets and intellectual men as from courtiers and frivolous people.
Bacon, who took the inventory of the human understanding for his times,
never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his few
words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame
whose first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise
he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all
question, the better poet of the two.

If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakspeare's time
should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four
years after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after him; and I
find, among his correspondents and acquaintances, the following persons:
Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex,
Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac
Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John
Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi,
Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of his having communicated,
without enumerating many others whom doubtless he saw,--Shakspeare,
Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, the two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman
and the rest. Since the constellation of great men who appeared in
Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any such society;--yet
their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe. Our
poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took
a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed,
after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to
appear. It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare till now;
for he is the father of German literature: it was with the introduction
of Shakspeare into German, by Lessing, and the translation of his works
by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German literature was
most intimately connected. It was not until the nineteenth century,
whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of
Hamlet could find such wondering readers. Now, literature, philosophy,
and thought, are Shakspearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at
present, we do not see. Our ears are educate