were all the wits born that could honor a language or help study. Now
things daily fall: wits grow downwards, eloquence grows backwards." Ben
had good reason for what he said of the wits. Not to speak of science,
of Galileo and Kepler, the sixteenth century was a spendthrift of
literary genius. An attack of immortality in a family might have been
looked for then as scarlet-fever would be now. Montaigne, Tasso, and
Cervantes were born within the same fourteen years; and in England,
while Spenser was still delving over the _propria que maribus_, and
Raleigh launching paper navies, Shakspeare was stretching his baby
hands for the moon, and the little Bacon, chewing on his coral, had
discovered that impenetrability was one quality of matter. It almost
takes one's breath away to think that "Hamlet" and the "Novum Organon"
were at the risk of teething and measles at the same time. But Ben was
right also in thinking that eloquence had grown backwards. He lived
long enough to see the language of verse become in a measure
traditionary and conventional. It was becoming so, partly from the
necessary order of events, partly because the most natural and intense
expression of feeling had been in so many ways satisfied and
exhausted,--but chiefly because there was no man left to whom, as to
Shakspeare, perfect conception gave perfection of phrase. Dante, among
modern poets, his only rival in condensed force, says, "Optimis
conceptionibus optima loquela conveniet; sed optimae conceptiones non
possunt esse nisi ubi scientia et ingenium est;... et sic non omnibus
versificantibus optima loquela convenit, cum plerique sine scientia et
ingenio versificantur."[9]

Shakspeare must have been quite as well aware of the provincialism of
English as Bacon was; but he knew that great poetry, being universal in
its appeal to human nature, can make any language classic, and that the
men whose appreciation is immortality will mine through any dialect to