mind had been preoccupied against the full impressions of
Shakspeare. And we know that there is such a thing as keeping the
sympathies of love and admiration in a dormant state, or state of
abeyance; an effort of self-conquest realized in more cases than
one by the ancient fathers, both Greek and Latin, with regard to
the profane classics. Intellectually they admired, and would not
belie their admiration; but they did not give their hearts
cordially, they did not abandon themselves to their natural
impulses. They averted their eyes and weaned their attention from
the dazzling object. Such, probably, was Milton's state of feeling
towards Shakspeare after 1642, when the theatres were suppressed,
and the fanatical fervor in its noontide heat. Yet even then he did
not belie his reverence intellectually for Shakspeare; and in his
younger days we know that he had spoken more enthusiastically of
Shakspeare, than he ever did again of any uninspired author. Not
only did he address a sonnet to his memory, in which he declares
that kings would wish to die, if by dying they could obtain such a
monument in the hearts of men; but he also speaks of him in his
_Il Penseroso_, as the tutelary genius of the English stage.
In this transmission of the torch (greek: lampadophoria) Dryden
succeeds to Milton; he was born nearly thirty years later; about
thirty years they were contemporaries; and by thirty years, or
nearly, Dryden survived his great leader. Dryden, in fact, lived
out the seventeenth century. And we have now arrived within nine
years of the era, when the critical editions started in hot
succession to one another. The names we have mentioned were the
great influential names of the century. But of inferior homage
there was no end. How came Betterton the actor, how came Davenant,
how came Rowe, or Pope, by their intense (if not always sound)
admiration for Shakspeare, unless they had found it fuming upwards