There is something touching in the madness with which the passing age mischooses the object on which all candles shine and all eyes are turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen Elizabeth and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable note the founder of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be remembered,—­the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias.  A popular player;—­nobody suspected he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men as from courtiers and frivolous people.  Bacon, who took the inventory of the human understanding for his times, never mentioned his name.  Ben Jonson, though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was attempting.  He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet of the two.

If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakspeare’s time should be capable of recognizing it.  Sir Henry Wotton was born four years after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after him; and I find, among his correspondents and acquaintances, the following persons:  Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of his having communicated, without enumerating many others whom doubtless he saw,—­Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, the two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman and the rest.  Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any such society;—­yet their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe.  Our poet’s mask was impenetrable.  You cannot see the mountain near.  It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear.  It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare till now; for he is the father of German literature:  it was with the introduction of Shakspeare into German, by Lessing, and the translation of his works by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German literature was most intimately connected.  It was not until the nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering readers.  Now, literature, philosophy, and thought, are Shakspearized.  His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see.  Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm.  Coleridge and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed our convictions with any adequate fidelity:  but there is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like Christianity, qualifies the period.