It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no man’s work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse.  Our English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language.  But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and churches brought it to perfection.  There never was a time when there was not some translation existing.  The Liturgy, admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the Catholic church,—­these collected, too, in long periods, from the prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer all over the world.  Grotius makes the like remark in respect to the Lord’s Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is composed were already in use in the time of Christ, in the Rabbinical forms.  He picked out the grains of gold.  The nervous language of the Common Law, the impressive forms of our courts and the precision and substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where these laws govern.  The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being translation on translation.  There never was a time when there was none.  All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and all others successively picked out and thrown away.  Something like the same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books.  The world takes liberties with world-books.  Vedas, Aesop’s Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men.  In the composition of such works the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us.  Every book supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day; and the generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his own.

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakspeare Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the Mysteries celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton’s Needle, down to the possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare altered, remodelled, and finally made his own.  Elated with success and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no bookstall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy Shakspeare poached or not, whether he held horses at the theatre door, whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second-best bed to Anne Hathaway, his wife.