ink to have
done with them, and lift up your bonnet with a courteous gesture of
leave-taking, your host draws your arm within his, and leads you out
into his garden, and threading some labyrinthine involution of paths,
conducts you to some hidden parterre of his choicest flowers, or to the
aerial watch-tower of his most magnificent prospect.

The omnipotent setter of limits, Death, freezes the tuneful tongue,
unnerves the critical hand, from which the terrible pen drops into dust.
Shakspeare has written his last play--Dryden his last tale. You may
dream--if you like--of what projected and unwritten--what unprojected
but possible comedies, histories, tragedies, went into the tomb in the
church of Stratford upon Avon! In the meanwhile, you will find that what
is written is not so soon read. Read for the first time it soon is--not
for the last. For what is "to read?" "_Legere_" is "to gather."
Shakspeare is not soon gathered--nor is Dryden.

Walk through a splendid region. Do you think that you have seen it? You
have begun seeing it. Live in it fifty years, and by degrees you may
have come to know something worth telling of Windermere! Our vocation
now, gentles all, is not simply the knowing--it is the showing too; and
here, too, the same remark holds good. For we think ten times and more,
that now surely we have shown poet or critic. But not so. Some other
attitude, some other phasis presents itself; and all at once you feel
that, without it, your exposition of the power, or your picture of the
man, is incomplete.

You have seen how the critics lead us a dance. Dryden and Pope criticise
Shakspeare. We have been obliged to criticise Shakspeare, and this
criticism of him. Dryden measures himself with Juvenal, Lucretius, and
Virgil. We, somewhat violently perhaps--with a gentle violence--construe
a translation into a criticism, and prate too of those immortals.
Glorious John modernizes Father Geoffrey; and to try what capacity of
palate you have for the enjoyment of English poetry some four or five
centuries old, we spread our board with a feast of veritable Chaucer.
Yet not a word, all the while, of the Wife of Bath's Tale of Chivalry
and Faery, which is given with fine spirit by Dryden--nor of the Cock
and the Fox, told by the Nun's priest, which is renewed with infinite
life and gaiety, and sometimes we are half-inclined to say, with
fidelity in the departure, by the same matchless pen. Good old father
Chaucer! Can it