dramatic poet of England. His excellencies compelled even his
contemporaries to seat him on that throne, although there were giants in
those days contending for the same honor. Hereafter I would fain
endeavour to make out the title of the English drama as created by, and
existing in, Shakspeare, and its right to the supremacy of dramatic
excellence in general. But he had shown himself a poet, previously to
his appearance as a dramatic poet; and had no Lear, no Othello, no Henry
IV., no Twelfth Night ever appeared, we must have admitted that
Shakspeare possessed the chief, if not every, requisite of a poet,--deep
feeling and exquisite sense of beauty, both as exhibited to the eye in
the combinations of form, and to the ear in sweet and appropriate
melody; that these feelings were under the command of his own will; that
in his very first productions he projected his mind out of his own
particular being, and felt, and made others feel, on subjects no way
connected with himself, except by force of contemplation and that
sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that, on which it
meditates. To this must be added that affectionate love of nature and
natural objects, without which no man could have observed so steadily,
or painted so truly and passionately, the very minutest beauties of the
external world:--


When them hast on foot the purblind hare,
Mark the poor wretch; to overshoot his troubles,
How he outruns the wind, and with what care,
He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles;
The many musits through the which he goes
Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes.

Sometimes he runs among the flock of sheep,