of judgment which his later plays supply.  Here all is straightforward, genuine, natural, with no rhetorical trickeries or fineries whatever; and among all modern writers his style stands quite alone in the solid purity, directness, and inward virtue of that perfect art which not only conceals itself from others, but is even a secret unto itself; or at least is too intent on something else to be listening to the music of its own voice.  For so his highest style was when, in the maturity of his power, he left the style to take care of itself, and therefore had it perfectly subordinated to his matter and thought:  in other words, he always writes best when most unconscious of it, being so possessed with his theme as to take no thought of himself.

We have somewhat the same order and course of things in Burke, who may be not unfitly described as the Shakespeare of political philosophy.  His treatise On the Sublime and Beautiful was, though in a good sense, mainly the fruit of literary ambition.  There he rather sought for something to say because he wanted to speak, than spoke because he had something he wanted to say.  And so he is not properly himself in that work, but only a studious, correct, and tasteful writer.  When thoroughly roused and kindled in the work of defending, intrenching, and illustrating the Constitution of his country as the sacred guardian of liberty and order, he became quite another man; then it was that all the powers of his great mind were taught and inspired to act in concert and unity.  As Wordsworth says of him,—­

    “This is no trifler, no short-flighted wit,
    No stammerer of a minute, painfully
    Deliver’d.  No! the Orator hath yok’d
    The Hours, like young Aurora, to his car: 
    Thrice-welcome Presence! how can patience e’er
    Grow weary of attending on a track
    That kindles with such glory!”

The mere ambitions of authorship are not enough to make good authors; and what Burke needed was something to lift him far above them.  And when he came to grapple with the high practical questions and living interests of mankind, here he was too full of his matter, and too earnest in his cause, to observe how finely he was working; and because he was captivated by his theme, not by the figure he made in handling it, therefore he earned a prerogative place among the sons of light.

The distinction I have been remarking between Shakespeare’s rhetorical and dramatic use of language, or, as I before termed it, his imitative and idiomatic style, may be better understood on comparing some brief specimens of his earlier and later workmanship.  As an instance of the former, take a part of York’s speech to the King, in King Richard the Second, ii. 1: