began to be abolished; in the English comic authors who succeeded him the clown is no longer to be found.  The dismissal of the fool has been extolled as a proof of refinement; and our honest forefathers have been pitied for taking delight in such a coarse and farcical amusement.  For my part, I am rather disposed to believe that the practice was dropped from the difficulty in finding fools able to do full justice to their parts:[27] on the other hand, reason, with all its conceit of itself, has become too timid to tolerate such bold irony; it is always careful lest the mantle of its gravity should be disturbed in any of its folds; and rather than allow a privileged place to folly beside itself, it has unconsciously assumed the part of the ridiculous; but, alas! a heavy and cheerless ridicule.[28] It would be easy to make a collection of the excellent sallies and biting sarcasms which have been preserved of celebrated court fools.  It is well known that they frequently told such truths to princes as are never now told to them.[29] Shakespeare’s fools, along with somewhat of an overstraining for wit, which cannot altogether be avoided when wit becomes a separate profession, have for the most part an incomparable humor and an infinite abundance of intellect, enough indeed to supply a whole host of ordinary wise men.

I have still a few observations to make on the diction and versification of our poet.  The language is here and there somewhat obsolete, but on the whole much less so than in most of the contemporary writers—­a sufficient proof of the goodness of his choice.  Prose had as yet been but little cultivated, as the learned generally wrote in Latin—­a favorable circumstance for the dramatic poet; for what has he to do with the scientific language of books?  He had not only read, but studied, the earlier English poets; but he drew his language immediately from life itself, and he possessed a masterly skill in blending the dialogical element with the highest poetical elevation.  I know not what certain critics mean, when they say that Shakespeare is frequently ungrammatical.  To make good their assertion, they must prove that similar constructions never occur in his contemporaries, the direct contrary of which can, however, be easily shown.  In no language is everything determined on principle; much is always left to the caprice of custom, and if this has since changed, is the poet to be made answerable for it?  The English language had not then attained to that correct insipidity which has been introduced into the more recent literature of the country, to the prejudice, perhaps, of its originality.  As a field when first brought under the plough produces, along with the fruitful shoots, many luxuriant weeds, so the poetical diction of the day ran occasionally into extravagance, but an extravagance originating in the exuberance of its vigor.  We may still perceive traces of awkwardness, but nowhere of a labored and spiritless display of art.  In