Shakespeare flourished and wrote in the last half of the reign of Queen Elizabeth and first half of that of James I.; and, consequently, under monarchs who were learned themselves and held literature in honor.  The policy of modern Europe, by which the relations of its different states have been so variously interwoven with one another, commenced a century before.  The cause of the Protestants was decided by the accession of Elizabeth to the throne; and the attachment to the ancient belief cannot therefore be urged as a proof of the prevailing darkness.  Such was the zeal for the study of the ancients that even court ladies, and the queen herself, were acquainted with Latin and Greek, and taught even to speak the former—­a degree of knowledge which we should in vain seek for in the courts of Europe at the present day.  The trade and navigation which the English carried on with all the four quarters of the world made them acquainted with the customs and mental productions of other nations; and it would appear that they were then more indulgent to foreign manners than they are in the present day.  Italy had already produced nearly all that still distinguishes her literature, and, in England, translations in verse were diligently, and even successfully, executed from the Italian.  Spanish literature also was not unknown, for it is certain that Don Quixote was read in England soon after its first appearance.  Bacon, the founder of modern experimental philosophy, and of whom it may be said that he carried in his pocket all that even in this eighteenth century merits the name of philosophy, was a contemporary of Shakespeare.  His fame as a writer did not, indeed, break forth into its glory till after his death; but what a number of ideas must have been in circulation before such an author could arise!  Many branches of human knowledge have, since that time, been more extensively cultivated, but such branches as are totally unproductive to poetry—­chemistry, mechanics, manufactures, and rural and political economy—­will never enable a man to become a poet.  I have elsewhere[17] examined into the pretensions of modern enlightenment, as it is called, which looks with such contempt on all preceding ages; I have shown that at bottom it is all small, superficial, and unsubstantial.  The pride of what has been called “the existing maturity of human intensity” has come to a miserable end; and the structures erected by those pedagogues of the human race have fallen to pieces like the baby-houses of children.

With regard to the tone of society in Shakespeare’s day, it is necessary to remark that there is a wide difference between true mental cultivation and what is called polish.  That artificial polish which puts an end to everything like free original communication and subjects all intercourse to the insipid uniformity of certain rules, was undoubtedly wholly unknown to the age of Shakespeare, as in a great measure it still is at the present day in England.  It possessed,