The confusion of the present times is great, the multitude of voices counselling different things bewildering, the number of existing works capable of attracting a young writer’s attention and of becoming his models, immense:  what he wants is a hand to guide him through the confusion, a voice to prescribe to him the aim which he should keep in view, and to explain to him that the value of the literary works which offer themselves to his attention is relative to their power of helping him forward on his road towards this aim.  Such a guide the English writer at the present day will nowhere find.  Failing this, all that can be looked for, all indeed that can be desired, is, that his attention should be fixed on excellent models; that he may reproduce, at any rate, something of their excellence, by penetrating himself with their works and by catching their spirit, if he cannot be taught to produce what is excellent independently.

Foremost among these models for the English writer stands Shakespeare:  a name the greatest perhaps of all poetical names; a name never to be mentioned without reverence.  I will venture, however, to express a doubt whether the influence of his works, excellent and fruitful for the readers of poetry, for the great majority, has been an unmixed advantage to the writers of it.  Shakespeare indeed chose excellent subjects—­the world could afford no better than Macbeth, or Romeo and Juliet, or Othello:  he had no theory respecting the necessity of choosing subjects of present import, or the paramount interest attaching to allegories of the state of one’s own mind; like all great poets, he knew well what constituted a poetical action; like them, wherever he found such an action, he took it; like them, too, he found his best in past times.  But to these general characteristics of all great poets he added a special one of his own; a gift, namely, of happy, abundant, and ingenious expression, eminent and unrivalled:  so eminent as irresistibly to strike the attention first in him and even to throw into comparative shade his other excellences as a poet.  Here has been the mischief.  These other excellences were his fundamental excellences, as a poet; what distinguishes the artist from the mere amateur, says Goethe, is Architectonice in the highest sense; that power of execution which creates, forms, and constitutes:  not the profoundness of single thoughts, not the richness of imagery, not the abundance of illustration.  But these attractive accessories of a poetical work being more easily seized than the spirit of the whole, and these accessories being possessed by Shakespeare in an unequalled degree, a young writer having recourse to Shakespeare as his model runs great risk of being vanquished and absorbed by them, and, in consequence, of reproducing, according to the measure of his power, these, and these alone.  Of this prepondering quality of Shakespeare’s genius, accordingly, almost the whole of modern English