that they are beguiled of their tears or thrown into such ecstasies of
mirth.

It exalts, and not degrades, the memory of Shakspeare to think of him in
this manner, as a man: for he _was_ a man; he had eyes, hands, organs,
dimensions, and so forth, the same that a Jew hath; a good many people
saw him alive. Had we lived in London between 1580 and 1610, we might
have seen him,--a man who came from his Maker's hand endowed with the
noblest powers and the most godlike reason,--who had the greatest
natural ability to become a great dramatic poet,--the native genius and
the aptness to acquire the art, and who did acquire the highest art
of his age, and went on far beyond it, exhibiting new ingenuities and
resources, and a breadth that has never been equalled, and which admits
at once and harmonizes the deepest tragedy and the broadest farce, and,
in language, the loftiest flights of measured rhetoric along with
the closest imitation of common talk;--and all this he _so used_, so
elaborated through it the poetic creations of his mind, in such glorious
union and perfection of high purpose and art and reach of soul, that he
was the greatest and most universal poet the world has known.

Rowe observes, in regard to Shakspeare,--"Art had so little and
Nature so large a share in what he did, that, for aught I know, the
performances of his youth, as they were the most vigorous, and had the
most fire and strength of imagination in them, were the best. I
would not be thought by this to mean that his fancy was so loose and
extravagant as to be independent on the rule and government of judgment;
but that what he thought was commonly so great, so justly and rightly
conceived in itself, that it wanted little or no correction, and was
immediately approved by an impartial judgment at the first sight."