have proposed to excise or to obelise whole passages which the delight
and wonder of youth and age alike, of the rawest as of the ripest among
students, have agreed to consecrate as examples of his genius at its
highest. In the last trumpet-notes of Macbeth's defiance and despair, in
the last rallying cry of the hero reawakened in the tyrant at his utmost
hour of need, there have been men and scholars, Englishmen and editors,
who have detected the alien voice of a pretender, the false ring of a
foreign blast that was not blown by Shakespeare; words that for centuries
past have touched with fire the hearts of thousands in each age since
they were first inspired--words with the whole sound in them of battle or
a breaking sea, with the whole soul of pity and terror mingled and melted
into each other in the fierce last speech of a spirit grown "aweary of
the sun," have been calmly transferred from the account of Shakespeare to
the score of Middleton. And this, forsooth, the student of the future is
to accept on the authority of men who bring to the support of their
decision the unanswerable plea of years spent in the collation and
examination of texts never hitherto explored and compared with such
energy of learned labour. If this be the issue of learning and of
industry, the most indolent and ignorant of readers who retains his
natural capacity to be moved and mastered by the natural delight of
contact with heavenly things is better off by far than the most studious
and strenuous of all scholiasts who ever claimed acquiescence or
challenged dissent on the strength of his lifelong labours and
hard-earned knowledge of the letter of the text. Such an one is indeed
"in a parlous state"; and any boy whose heart first begins to burn within
him, who feels his blood kindle and his spirit dilate, his pulse leap and
his eyes lighten, over a first study of Shakespeare, may say to such a
teacher with better reason than Touchstone said to Corin, "Truly, thou
art damned; like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side." Nor could charity
itself hope much profit for him from the moving appeal and the pious