by nature, could impart only what he had learned; and as he must
increase his ideas, like other mortals, by gradual acquisition, he,
like them, grew wiser as he grew older, could display life better,
as he knew it more, and instruct with more efficacy, as he was
himself more amply instructed.

There is a vigilance of observation and accuracy of distinction which
books and precepts cannot confer; from this almost all original and
native excellence proceeds. Shakespeare must have looked upon mankind
with perspicacity, in the highest degree curious and attentive.
Other writers borrow their characters from preceding writers, and
diversify them only by the accidental appendages of present manners;
the dress is a little varied, but the body is the same. Our authour
had both matter and form to provide; for except the characters of
Chaucer, to whom I think he is not much indebted, there were no
writers in English, and perhaps not many in other modern languages,
which shewed life in its native colours.

The contest about the original benevolence or malignity of man had
not yet commenced. Speculation had not yet attempted to analyse
the mind, to trace the passions to their sources, to unfold the
seminal principles of vice and virtue, or sound the depths of the
heart for the motives of action. All those enquiries, which from
that time that human nature became the fashionable study, have been
made sometimes with nice discernment, but often with idle subtilty,
were yet unattempted. The tales, with which the infancy of learning
was satisfied, exhibited only the superficial appearances of action,
related the events but omitted the causes, and were formed for such
as delighted in wonders rather than in truth. Mankind was not then
to be studied in the closet; he that would know the world, was