and to reproduce, are those of man in society as it existed; and it no more occurred to him to question the right of that society to exist than to criticize the divine ordination of the seasons.  His business was with men as they were, not with man as he ought to be,—­with the human soul as it is shaped or twisted into character by the complex experience of life, not in its abstract essence, as something to be saved or lost.  During the first half of the seventeenth century, the centre of intellectual interest was rather in the other world than in this, rather in the region of thought and principle and conscience than in actual life.  It was a generation in which the poet was, and felt himself, out of place.  Sir Thomas Browne, our most imaginative mind since Shakspeare, found breathing-room, for a time, among the “O altitudines!” of religious speculation, but soon descended to occupy himself with the exactitudes of science.  Jeremy Taylor, who half a century earlier would have been Fletcher’s rival, compels his clipped fancy to the conventional discipline of prose, (Maid Marian turned nun,) and waters his poetic wine with doctrinal eloquence.  Milton is saved from making total shipwreck of his large-utteranced genius on the desolate Noman’s Land of a religious epic only by the lucky help of Satan and his colleagues, with whom, as foiled rebels and republicans, he cannot conceal his sympathy.  As purely poet, Shakspeare would have come too late, had his lot fallen in that generation.  In mind and temperament too exoteric for a mystic, his imagination could not have at once illustrated the influence of his epoch and escaped from it, like that of Browne; the equilibrium of his judgment, essential to him as an artist, but equally removed from propagandism, whether as enthusiast or logician, would have unfitted him for the pulpit; and his intellectual being was too sensitive to the wonder and beauty of outward life and Nature to have found satisfaction, as Milton’s could, (and perhaps only by reason of his blindness,) in a world peopled by purely imaginary figures.  We might fancy his becoming a great statesman, but he lacked the social position which could have opened that career to him.  What we mean, when we say Shakspeare, is something inconceivable either during the reign of Henry the Eighth or the Commonwealth, and which would have been impossible after the Restoration.

All favorable stars seem to have been in conjunction at his nativity.  The Reformation had passed the period of its vinous fermentation, and its clarified results remained as an element of intellectual impulse and exhilaration; there were signs yet of the acetous and putrefactive stages which were to follow in the victory and decline of Puritanism.  Old forms of belief and worship still lingered, all the more touching to Fancy, perhaps, that they were homeless and attainted:  the light of skeptic day was baffled by depths of forest where superstitious shapes still