mere instinct, that he grew immortal in his own despite, and sank below
men of second or third-rate power, when he attempted aught beside the
drama--even as bees construct their cells and manufacture their honey
to admirable perfection; but would in vain attempt to build a nest. Now
this mode of reconciling a compelled sense of inferiority with a feeling
of pride, began in a few pedants, who having read that Sophocles was the
great model of tragedy, and Aristotle the infallible dictator of its
rules, and finding that the Lear, Hamlet, Othello and other
master-pieces were neither in imitation of Sophocles, nor in obedience
to Aristotle,--and not having (with one or two exceptions) the courage
to affirm, that the delight which their country received from generation
to generation, in defiance of the alterations of circumstances and
habits, was wholly groundless,--took upon them, as a happy medium and
refuge, to talk of Shakspeare as a sort of beautiful 'lusus naturae', a
delightful monster,--wild, indeed, and without taste or judgment, but
like the inspired idiots so much venerated in the East, uttering, amid
the strangest follies, the sublimest truths. In nine places out of ten
in which I find his awful name mentioned, it is with some epithet of
'wild', 'irregular,' 'pure child of nature,' &c. If all this be true, we
must submit to it; though to a thinking mind it cannot but be painful to
find any excellence, merely human, thrown out of all human analogy, and
thereby leaving us neither rules for imitation, nor motives to
imitate;--but if false, it is a dangerous falsehood;--for it affords a
refuge to secret self-conceit,--enables a vain man at once to escape his
reader's indignation by general swoln panegyrics, and merely by his
'ipse dixit' to treat, as contemptible, what he has not intellect enough
to comprehend, or soul to feel, without assigning any reason, or
referring his opinion to any demonstrative principle;--thus leaving
Shakspeare as a sort of grand Lama, adored indeed, arid his very
excrements prized as relics, but with no authority or real influence. I