mall, notwithstanding the noise they make. What Act of Parliament,
debate at St. Stephen's, on the hustings or elsewhere, was it that
brought this Shakspeare into being? No dining at Freemason's Tavern,
opening subscription-lists, selling of shares, and infinite other
jangling and true or false endeavoring! This Elizabethan Era, and all
its nobleness and blessedness, came without proclamation, preparation of
ours. Priceless Shakspeare was the free gift of Nature; given altogether
silently;--received altogether silently, as if it had been a thing of
little account. And yet, very literally, it is a priceless thing. One
should look at that side of matters too.

Of this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a
little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the
best judgment not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is
slowly pointing to the conclusion, that Shakspeare is the chief of all
Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has
left record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, I know
not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all
the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth; placid
joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so true and
clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea! It has been said, that in
the constructing of Shakspeare's Dramas there is, apart from all other
"faculties" as they are called, an understanding manifested, equal to
that in Bacon's _Novum Organum_ That is true; and it is not a truth that
strikes every one. It would become more apparent if we tried, any of
us for himself, how, out of Shakspeare's dramatic materials, _we_ could
fashion such a result! The built house seems all so fit,--every way
as it should be, as if it came there by its own law and the nature of
things,--we forget the rude disorderly quarry it was shaped from. The
very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself had made it, hides
the builder's merit. Perfect, more perfect than any other man, we
may call Shakspeare in this: he discerns, knows as by instinct, what
condition he works under, what his materials are, what his own force and
its relation to them is. It is not a transitory glance of insight that
will suffice; it is deliberate illumination of the whole matter; it is
a calmly _seeing_ eye; a great intellect, in short. How a man, of some
wide thing that he has witnessed, will c