those of any other author; in their delicate or grand proportions he has only been excelled by Homer.

The Age.-Much of Shakspeare's charm has been lost with the passage of time: a thousand political and personal allusions, much pointed satire, many graceful compliments. The flattery of kings is no longer pleasing; the republican ardor of the Attic stage is more agreeable to modern thought. His language has sometimes grown obscure; his lines are often corrupt. The age has risen to a refinement that will no longer tolerate passages, scenes, and characters on which Elizabeth and James looked without a blush. In his own time, surrounded by the applause of nobles and citizens, the fashionable poet of the day, the wit of the Mermaid Tavern, where Ben Jonson and Raleigh, perhaps, exchanged their sharp sallies, the friend of Essex and Southampton, amiable, gentle, beloved, the refinement of Shakspeare's nature won unbounded popularity, and a splendid group of friendly critics applauded each animated scene.

All

these adventitious aids are now taken away, and Shakspeare's plays live rather as inimitable poems, fit to be read in the closet, but often scarcely suited for the stage.

Macbeth, Titania, never lose their power, but they are no longer the living themes of the Elizabethan days. The scene is changed; it is Shakspeare alone that compels delight.

Shakspeare's Learning.* It is often said that Shakspeare wanted learning; but Shakspeare's learning was that of a quick and sensitive intellect that seemed never to forget any of its impressions, on which all the exterior world was written in changeless colors. He had never been a retired student, passing his midnight hours, like Milton or Bacon, with the sages of Greece and Rome; he was not a master of languages, a critic, a commentator. He was far less accomplished than Lady Bacon, Lady Coke, or even the queen herself; yet it is not impossible to find in Shakspeare's works an extraordinary amount of reading and observation to which Lady Coke, Queen Elizabeth, and even Bacon himself were strangers. Nature, of which he could have seen so little in his busy life, he describes with the accuracy of a naturalist. The impres

* Guizot, in his Shakspeare and his Times, adopts all the traditions. But few of them are ever probable.

SHAKSPEARE'S POWER.

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sions of his youth had never passed away; the scenes of his annual journey to Stratford he could never forget. He knew the most delicate of the flowers, their hue and order; he delights in the cool oaken glade, the cry of the hounds, and the rush of the antlered stag; he knows all the birds that haunt the wildwood or the ancient tower; even the insects and the worms. Nothing in nature has escaped his eye, and nothing he has seen, heard, or felt is ever forgotten. Of men and women he was equally conscious and observant. His gallery of characters was borrowed from the gay courtiers who sported around him, from the hearty citizens of Chepe, from the sailors, the soldiers, and the narrow world of Elizabethan London. His eyes missed nothing; his retentive faculties drank in all the living scene; his intellect, delicate as a photographer's film, kept, like a camera, a vivid picture of the most minute lines and drawings. In books he seems to have been equally observant. Every dull chronicle or fanciful legend fixed itself upon his memory. All that was fine and graceful in every story he rescues from its tedious narrative. His fancy, easily inflamed, blazes with pictorial ardor. The scene, the life, the men, are ever

before him; in a moment he transforms the rude legend into a poem. King Lear becomes as majestic as a weeping Priam; Juliet is the embodiment of love-a new Aphrodite; Hamlet the Prometheus who wails over his race forever. Never was there so delicate an instrument as Shakspeare's intellect to combine, to conceive, to remember.

Ben Jonson. In his earliest play* Jonson describes his own youthful passion for letters:

Myself was once a student, and, indeed,

Fed with the self-same humor he is now;
Dreaming on naught but idle poetry,
That fruitless and unprofitable art.

But poverty had nearly checked the genial flow of his intellect. His mother, the widow of a Scotch clergyman, married a bricklayer, and the bard was forced to maintain himself by his daily labor. He soon grew weary of his trade, enlisted as a soldier, fought in the Lowlands, came back to London to win learning in some obscure way. It is said that he was tutor to Raleigh's sons. He became a player, killed a person in a duel, and was thrown into prison. Here a

Every Man in his Humor, act i., sc. 1.

Roman Catholic priest visited and converted him. His strong, fervid intellect, his rude and well-knit frame, and his varied attainments soon raised him above his early difficulties. He escaped from poverty and a prison to become the most famous of poets next to Shakspeare, to win the esteem and friendship of Raleigh, Bacon, Essex, and produce poems and plays of the highest excellence. Something of the rude severity of his early training lingered around him; he was a bitter critic. He was not afraid to aim his shafts at Shakspeare. He was more fond of his club at a tavern near Temple Bar than the masks and festivities of the court in which he so often shared. His stern, reserved, and saturnine temper repelled Drummond of Hawthornden, whom he visited; his sharp taunts were felt and retorted by many of the rising poets of the time. But Jonson broke through opposition and grew great by rivalry. With royalty he was always familiar; Elizabeth and James I. admired and employed him. He was Bacon's sincere friend; and Charles I., late in his reign, bestowed valuable gifts upon the poet. Jonson died in 1637, long after the brilliant circle that had witnessed the first performance of Every Man in his