The peoples who earliest reached the state of culture which is needed to bring forth books, each standing by itself, each necessarily sang and wrote merely of itself.  Thus did the Hebrews and the Greeks.  But already the Romans went out of themselves, and Virgil takes a Trojan for his hero.  This appropriation of foreign material shows that the aim of high books is, to ascend to the sphere of ideas and feelings that are independent of time and place.  Thence, when, by multiplication of Christian nations our mental world had become vastly enlarged, embracing in one bond of culture, not only all modern civilized peoples, but also the three great ancient ones, the poets—­especially the dramatic, for reasons that will be presently stated—­looked abroad and afar for the frame-work and corporeal stuff of their writings.

The most universal of all writers, ancient or modern, he who is most generic in his thought, Shakespeare, embodied his transcendent conceptions for the most part in foreign personages.  Of Shakespeare’s fourteen comedies, the scene of only one is laid in England; and that one, “The Merry Wives of Windsor”—­the only one not written chiefly or largely in verse—­is a Shakespearean farce.  Of the tragedies (except the series of the ten historical ones) only two, “Lear” and “Macbeth,” stand on British ground.  Is “Hamlet” on that score less English than “Lear,” or “Othello” than “Macbeth”?  Does Italy count Juliet among her trophies, or Desdemona?

Of Milton’s two dramas—–­to confine myself here to the dramatic domain—­the tragedy ("Samson Agonistes,”) like his epics, is Biblical; the comedy ("Comus”) has its home in a sphere

  “Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
  Which men call earth.”

Of the numerous athletic corps of dramatists, contemporary with Shakespeare and Milton, few have left works pithy enough and so poetically complete as to withstand the wear of time and keep fresh to each successive generation.  But if you inspect the long list from which Charles Lamb took his “Specimens,” you will find few British names.

Casting our eyes on the dramatic efforts of the recent English poetic celebrities, we perceive that Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley, all abandoned, in every instance, native ground.  The only dramatic work of a great modern, the scene of which is laid within the British limits, is “The Borderers,” of Wordsworth, which, though having the poetic advantage of remoteness in time—­being thrown back to the reign of Henry III.—­is, in strictness, neither a drama nor a poem, Wordsworth’s deficiency in dramatic gifts being so signal as to cause, by the impotent struggle in an uncongenial element, a partial paralysis even of his high poetic genius.

Glance now across the Channel.  French poetic tragedy is in its subjects almost exclusively ancient—­Greek, Roman, and Biblical.  In the works of the great comic genius of France, Moliere, we have a salient exception to the practice of all other eminent dramatists.  The scene of his plays is Paris; the time is the year in which each was written.