gradually the seeming-artless talk brings the man before us, a
sun-warmed fruit of humanity, with uncouth rind of stiff manners and
sweet kindly juices, not perfect in any way, shrivelled on this side by
early frost-bite, and on that softened to corruption through too much
heat, marred here by the bitter-black cicatrice of an ancient injury and
there fortune-spotted, but on the whole healthy, grateful, of a most
pleasant ripeness. Another, like Shakespeare, with passionate
conflicting sympathies and curious impartial intellect cannot discover
himself so simply; needs, like the diamond, many facets to show all the
light in him, and so proceeds to cut them one after the other as
Falstaff or Hamlet, to the dazzling of the purblind.

Yet Shakespeare's purpose is surely the same as Montaigne's, to reveal
himself to us, and it would be hasty to decide that his skill is
inferior. For while Montaigne had nothing but prose at his command, and
not too rich a prose, as he himself complains, Shakespeare in magic of
expression has had no equal in recorded time, and he used the lyric as
well as the dramatic form, poetry as well as prose, to give his soul
utterance.

We are doing Shakespeare wrong by trying to believe that he hides
himself behind his work; the suspicion is as unworthy as the old
suspicion dissipated by Carlyle that Cromwell was an ambitious
hypocrite. Sincerity is the birthmark of genius, and we can be sure that
Shakespeare has depicted himself for us with singular fidelity; we can
see him in his works, if we will take the trouble, "in his habit as he
lived."

We are doing ourselves wrong, too, by pretending that Shakespeare
"out-tops knowledge." He did not fill the world even in his own time: