fashion or whim as upon a change in taste or in literary form. Not only
is contemporary judgment often at fault, but posterity is perpetually
revising its opinion. We are accustomed to say that the final rank of an
author is settled by the slow consensus of mankind in disregard of the
critics; but the rank is after all determined by the few best minds of
any given age, and the popular judgment has very little to do with it.
Immediate popularity, or currency, is a nearly valueless criterion of
merit. The settling of high rank even in the popular mind does not
necessarily give currency; the so-called best authors are not those most
widely read at any given time. Some who attain the position of classics
are subject to variations in popular and even in scholarly favor or
neglect. It happens to the princes of literature to encounter periods of
varying duration when their names are revered and their books are not
read. The growth, not to say the fluctuation, of Shakespeare's
popularity is one of the curiosities of literary history. Worshiped by
his contemporaries, apostrophized by Milton only fourteen pears after his
death as the "dear son of memory, great heir to fame,"

"So sepulchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die,"

he was neglected by the succeeding age, the subject of violent extremes
of opinion in the eighteenth century, and so lightly esteemed by some
that Hume could doubt if he were a poet "capable of furnishing a proper
entertainment to a refined and intelligent audience," and attribute to
the rudeness of his "disproportioned and misshapen" genius the "reproach
of barbarism" which the English nation had suffered from all its
neighbors. Only recently has the study of him by English scholars--I do
not refer to the verbal squabbles over the text--been proportioned to his
preeminence, and his fame is still slowly asserting itself among foreign