These are “questions not to be asked,” or, at least, argued, any more than the question, Whether the blessed sun of heaven shall eat blackberries.  The quality of Shakspeare’s writing renders it impossible to suppose that it was produced in any other state than one where all the perceptions that make good sense, and not only good, but most excellent sense, were present and alert.  Howsoever “apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes” his brain may be, it never gambols from the superintendence of his reason and understanding.  In truth, it is the perfectness of the control, the conscious assurance of soundness in himself, which leaves him so free that the control is to so many eyes invisible; they perceive nothing but luxuriant ease in the midst of intricate complexities of passion and character, and they think he could have followed the path he took only by a sort of necessity which they call Nature,—­that he wrote himself quite into his works, bodily, just as he was, every thought that came and went, and every expression that flew to his pen,—­leaving out only a few for shortness.  They are so thoroughly beguiled by the very quality they do not see, that they are like spectators who mistake the scene on the stage for reality; they cannot fancy that a man put it all there, and that it is by the artistic and poetic power of him, this man, who is now standing behind or at the wing, and counting the money in the house, that they are beguiled of their tears or thrown into such ecstasies of mirth.

It exalts, and not degrades, the memory of Shakspeare to think of him in this manner, as a man:  for he was a man; he had eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, and so forth, the same that a Jew hath; a good many people saw him alive.  Had we lived in London between 1580 and 1610, we might have seen him,—­a man who came from his Maker’s hand endowed with the noblest powers and the most godlike reason,—­who had the greatest natural ability to become a great dramatic poet,—­the native genius and the aptness to acquire the art, and who did acquire the highest art of his age, and went on far beyond it, exhibiting new ingenuities and resources, and a breadth that has never been equalled, and which admits at once and harmonizes the deepest tragedy and the broadest farce, and, in language, the loftiest flights of measured rhetoric along with the closest imitation of common talk;—­and all this he so used, so elaborated through it the poetic creations of his mind, in such glorious union and perfection of high purpose and art and reach of soul, that he was the greatest and most universal poet the world has known.

Rowe observes, in regard to Shakspeare,—­“Art had so little and Nature so large a share in what he did, that, for aught I know, the performances of his youth, as they were the most vigorous, and had the most fire and strength of imagination in them, were the best.  I would not be thought by this to mean that his fancy was so loose and extravagant as to be independent on the rule and government of judgment; but that what he thought was commonly so great, so justly and rightly conceived in itself, that it wanted little or no correction, and was immediately approved by an impartial judgment at the first sight.”