may have some weight that way.  An old knight, Sir John of Boundis, being about to die, calls in his wise friends to advise him touching the distribution of his property among his three sons.  They advise him to settle all his lands on the eldest, and leave the youngest without any thing.  Gamelyn, the youngest, being his favourite son, he rejects their advice, and bestows the largest portion upon him.  The Poet goes much more according to their advice; Orlando, who answers to Gamelyn, having no share in the bulk of his father’s estate.  A few other resemblances, also, may be traced, wherein the play differs from Lodge’s novel; though none of them are so strong as to force the inference that Shakespeare must have consulted the Tale.  Nor, in truth, is the matter of much consequence, save as bearing upon the question whether the Poet was of a mind to be unsatisfied with such printed books as lay in his way.  I would not exactly affirm him to have been “a hunter of manuscripts”; but indications are not wanting, that he sometimes had access to them:  nor is it at all unlikely that one so greedy of intellectual food, so eager and so apt to make the most of all the means within his reach, should have gone beyond the printed resources of his time.  Besides, there can be no question that Lodge was very familiar with the Tale of Gamelyn:  he follows it so closely in a large part of his novel as to leave scarce any doubt that he wrote with the manuscript before him; and if he, who was also sometime a player, availed himself of such sources, why may not Shakespeare have done the same?

The practical use of such inquiries is, that they exhibit the Poet in the character where I like especially to view him, namely, as an earnest and diligent seeker after knowledge, and as building himself up in intelligence and power by much the same means as are found to serve in the case of other men.  He himself tells us that “ignorance is the curse of God, knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to Heaven.”  Assuredly he was a great student as well as a great genius; as full of aptness to learn as of force to create.  If he had great faculties to work with, he was also a greater worker in the use of them.  Nor is it best for us to think of him as being raised by natural gifts above the common methods and processes of high intellectual achievement.

Lodge’s Rosalynd was first printed in 1590; and its popularity appears in that it was reprinted in 1592, and again in 1598.  Steevens pronounced it a “worthless original”; but this sweeping sentence is so unjust as to breed some doubt whether he had read it.  Compared with the general run of popular literature then in vogue, the novel has no little merit; and is very well entitled to the honour of having contributed to one of the most delightful poems ever written.  A rather ambitious attempt indeed at fine writing; pedantic in style, not a little blemished with the elaborate euphemism of the time, and occasionally running into absurdity and indecorum; nevertheless, upon the whole, it is a varied and pleasing narrative, with passages of great force and beauty, and many touches of noble sentiment, and sometimes informed with a pastoral sweetness and simplicity quite charming.