progressive steps to a consummation beyond which there was nothing possible but retrogression.—­GERVINUS.

Thus the time and the man were just suited to each other; and it was in his direct, fearless, whole-hearted sympathy with the soul of the time that the man both lost himself and found his power:  which is doubtless one reason why we see so little of him in what he wrote.  So that the work could not possibly have been done anywhere but in England,—­the England of Spenser and Raleigh and Bacon; nor could it have been done there and then by any man but Shakespeare.  In his hand what had long been a national passion became emphatically a National Institution:  how full of life, is shown in that it has ever since refused to die.  And it seems well worth the while to bring this clearly into view, inasmuch as it serves to remove the subject upon deeper and broader principles of criticism than have commonly stood uppermost in the minds of the Poet’s critics.

Properly speaking, then, it was the mind and soul of old England that made the English Drama as we have it in Shakespeare:  her life, genius, culture, spirit, character, built up the work, and built themselves into the work, at once infusing the soul and determining the form.  Of course, therefore, they ordered and shaped the thing to suit their own purpose, or so as to express freely and fitly their proper force and virtue; and they did this in wise ignorance, or in noble disregard, of antecedent examples, and of all formal and conventional rules.  In other words, they were the life of the thing; and that life organized its body, as it needs must do, according to its innate and essential laws.[12]

    [12]

      A Poet!—­He hath put his heart to school,
      Nor dares to move unpropp’d upon the staff
      Which Art hath lodg’d within his hand,—­must laugh
      By precept only, and shed tears by rule. 
      Thy Art be Nature! the live current quaff,
      And let the groveller sip his stagnant pool,
      In fear that else, when Critics grave and cool
      Have kill’d him, Scorn should write his epitaph. 
      How doth the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold? 
      Because the lovely little flower is free
      Down to its root, and in that freedom bold;
      And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree
      Comes not by casting in a formal mould,
      But from its own divine vitality.

    WORDSWORTH.

Which naturally starts the question, how or why the Shakespearian Drama came to take on a form so very different from that of the Classic Drama.  This question has been partly disposed of already, in speaking of the freedom and variety which the historical branch imported into the sphere of dramatic production.  Still it may be asked how, if the Classic form is right, as all admit it to be, can we avoid concluding the Shakespearian form to be wrong?  The answer