ence. Jeremy Taylor, who half a century earlier would have been
Fletcher's rival, compels his clipped fancy to the conventional
discipline of prose, (Maid Marian turned nun,) and waters his poetic
wine with doctrinal eloquence. Milton is saved from making total
shipwreck of his large-utteranced genius on the desolate Noman's Land
of a religious epic only by the lucky help of Satan and his colleagues,
with whom, as foiled rebels and republicans, he cannot conceal his
sympathy. As purely poet, Shakspeare would have come too late, had his
lot fallen in that generation. In mind and temperament too exoteric for
a mystic, his imagination could not have at once illustrated the
influence of his epoch and escaped from it, like that of Browne; the
equilibrium of his judgment, essential to him as an artist, but equally
removed from propagandism, whether as enthusiast or logician, would
have unfitted him for the pulpit; and his intellectual being was too
sensitive to the wonder and beauty of outward life and Nature to have
found satisfaction, as Milton's could, (and perhaps only by reason of
his blindness,) in a world peopled by purely imaginary figures. We
might fancy his becoming a great statesman, but he lacked the social
position which could have opened that career to him. What we mean, when
we say Shakspeare, is something inconceivable either during the reign
of Henry the Eighth or the Commonwealth, and which would have been
impossible after the Restoration.

All favorable stars seem to have been in conjunction at his nativity.
The Reformation had passed the period of its vinous fermentation, and
its clarified results remained as an element of intellectual impulse
and exhilaration; there were signs yet of the acetous and putrefactive
stages which were to follow in the victory and decline of Puritanism.
Old forms of belief and worship still lingered, all the more touching
to Fancy, perhaps, that they were homeless and attainted: the light of
skeptic day was baffled by depths of forest where superstitious shapes
still cowered, creatures of immemorial wonder, the raw material of
Imagination. The invention of printing, without yet vulgarizing
letters, had made the thought and history of the entire past
contemporaneous; while a crowd of translators put every man who could
read in inspiring contact with the select souls of all the centuries. A
new world was thus opened to intellectual adventure at the very time
when the keel of Colu