is fairly chargeable with some breaches of good taste:  these however are so few and of such a kind, that they still leave him just our highest authority in the School of Taste.  Here, as elsewhere, he is our “canon of Polycletus.”  So Raphael made a painting of Apollo play the fiddle on Parnassus,—­a grosser breach of good taste than any thing Shakespeare ever did.  And yet Raphael is the painter of the finest taste in the world!—­All which just approves the old proverb, that “no man is wise at all hours”:  so that we may still affirm without abatement the fine saying of Schlegel, that “genius is the almost unconscious choice of the highest excellence, and, consequently, it is taste in the greatest perfection."[17]

[17] All beauty depends upon symmetry and proportion.  An overgrowth that sucks out the strength of a flowering plant, and destroys its shape, may be in the oak a harmless sport of exuberance, and even an ornament to its form:  bushes which would be a wilderness in a garden may enhance the beauty of the grander scenes of Nature.  Irregularity, when isolated or taken out of its place, will always be ugly; while in its proper connection it may add to the charm by variety.  The good men of Polonius’s school, who cannot see beyond their beards, who never get further than such particulars as, “that is a foolish figure,”—­“that’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase,”—­“that’s good,”—­“this is too long,”—­these Hamlet sends “to the barber’s with their beards” and their art criticisms; they are out of place with such a poet as Shakespeare.  All the experience we have gained warns us against following their steps.  The whole history of Shakespearian criticism for the last century is but a discovery of the mistakes of those who, for a century before, were thought to have discovered faults in the Poet.  For numbers of the errors of taste in Shakespeare have turned out to be striking touches of character; the aesthetic deformities imputed to his poetry have proved the moral deformities of certain of his persons; and what had been denounced as a fault was found to be an excellence.—­GERVINUS.

It is to be observed, also, that Shakespeare never brings in any characters as the mere shadows or instruments or appendages of others.  All the persons, high and low, contain within themselves the reason why they are there and not elsewhere, why they are so and not otherwise.  None are forced in upon the scene merely to supply the place of others, and so to be trifled with till the others are ready to return; but each is treated in his turn as if he were the main character of the piece.  So true is this, that even if one character comes in as the satellite of another, he does so by a right and an impulse of his own:  he is all the while obeying, or rather executing the law of his individuality, and has just as much claim on the other for a primary as the other has on him for a satellite; which may be aptly instanced in Justice Shallow and Justice Silence, or in Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.  The consequence is, that all the characters are developed, not indeed at equal length, but with equal perfectness as far as they go; for, to make the dwarf fill the same space as the giant were to dilute, not develop, the dwarf.