* * * * *

Everybody conversant with the subject knows that an author’s style, if genuine, (and it is not properly a style, but a mannerism, if ungenuine,) is a just measure of his mind, and an authentic registration of all his faculties and forces.  It has indeed passed into a proverb, that “the style is the man.”  And there is no other English writing, probably no uninspired writing in the world, of which this is so unreservedly true as of Shakespeare’s; and this, because his is the most profoundly genuine:  here the style—­I mean in his characteristic pieces—­is all his own,—­rooted perfectly in and growing entirely from the man himself,—­and has no borrowed sap or flavour whatever.  And as he surpasses all others alike in breadth and delicacy of perception, in sweep and subtilty of thought, in vastness of grasp and minuteness of touch, in fineness of fibre and length and strength of line; so all these are faithfully reflected in his use of language.  There is none other so overwhelming in its power, none so irresistible in its sweetness.  If his intellect could crush the biggest and toughest problems into food, his tongue was no less able to voice in all fitting accents the results of that tremendous digestion.  Coleridge, the profoundest of critics, calls him “an oceanic mind,” and this language, as expressing the idea of multitudinous unity, is none too big for him; Hallam, the severest of critics, describes him as “thousand-souled,” and this has grown into common use as no more than just; another writer makes his peculiarity to consist in “an infinite delicacy of mind”; and whatsoever of truth and fitness there may be in any or all of these expression’s has a just exponent in his style.

All which may suffice to explain why it is that Shakespeare’s style has no imitators.  He were indeed a very hardy or else a very imbecile man, who should undertake to imitate it.  All the other great English poets, however, have been imitated in this respect, and some of them with no little success.  Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, for example, is an avowed imitation of Spenser; and that, I think, is Thomson’s best poem.  Beattie’s Minstrel, too, is another happy imitation of the same great original.  I cannot say so much for any of Milton’s or Wordsworth’s imitators, though both have had many of them.  But no one, apparently, ever thinks of trying to tilt in Shakespeare’s Titanic armour.

MORAL SPIRIT.

Much of what may need to be said on this topic will come in more fitly in speaking of particular plays and characters.  A few observations of a very inclusive scope will be sufficient here.