ation on a
Shaksperian theme. In the delirium of his last sickness, he told Warton
that he had found in an Italian novel the long-sought original of the
plot of "The Tempest." It is noteworthy, by the way, that the
romanticists were attracted to the poetic, as distinguished from the
dramatic, aspect of Shakspere's genius; to those of his plays in which
fairy lore and supernatural machinery occur, such as "The Tempest" and "A
Midsummer Night's Dream."

Again, the stage has a history of its own, and, in so far as it was now
making progress of any kind, it was not in the direction of a more poetic
or romantic drama, but rather toward prose tragedy and the sentimental
comedy of domestic life, what the French call _la tragedie bourgeoise_
and _la comedie larmoyante_. In truth the theater was now dying; and
though, in the comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan, it sent up one bright,
expiring gleam, the really dramatic talent of the century had already
sought other channels in the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett.

After all, a good enough reason why the romantic movement did not begin
with imitation of Shakspere is the fact that Shakspere is inimitable. He
has no one manner that can be caught, but a hundred manners; is not the
poet of romance, but of humanity; nor medieval, but perpetually modern
and contemporaneous in his universality. The very familiarity of his
plays, and their continuous performance, although in mangled forms, was a
reason why they could take little part in a literary revival; for what
has never been forgotten cannot be revived. To Germany and France, at a
later date, Shakspere came with the shock of a discovery and begot
Schiller and Victor Hugo. In the England of the eighteenth century he
begot only Ireland's forgeries.

The name inscribed in large letters on the standard of the new school was
not Shakspere but Spenser. If there is any poet who is _par excellence_
the poet of romance, whose art is the antithesis of Pope's, it is the
poet of the "Faerie Queene." To ears that had heard from childhood the
tinkle of the couplet, with its monotonously recurring rhyme, its
inevitable caesura, its narrow imprisonment of the sense, it must have
been a relief to turn to the amplitude of Spencer's stanza, "the full
strong sail of his great verse." To a generation surfeited with Pope's
rhetorical devices--antithesis, climax, anticlimax--and fatigued with the
unrelaxing brilliancy and compressi