judged to have been, in the Poet’s time, decidedly a great institution.  In fact, it was a sort of fourth estate of the realm; nearly as much so, indeed, as the Newspaper Press is in our time.  Practically, the Government was vested in King, Lords, Commons, and Dramatists, including in the latter both writers and actors; the Poet thus having far more reason than now exists for making Hamlet say to the old statesman, “After your death you were better have a bad epitaph, than their ill report while you live.”

* * * * *

The foregoing review, brief and inadequate as it is, may answer the purpose of imparting some just notion of the growth and progress of the English Drama till it reached the eve of its maturity.  The allegorical drama had great influence, no doubt, in determining the scope and quality of the proper drama of comedy and tragedy; since, by its long discipline of the popular mind in abstract ideas, or in the generalized forms of ethical thought, it did much towards forming that public taste which required and prompted the drama to rise above a mere geography of facts into the empyrean of truth; and under the instructions of which Shakespeare learned to make his persons embodiments of general nature as well as of individual character.  For the excellences of the Shakespearian Drama were probably owing as much to the mental preparation of the time as to the powers of the individual man.  He was in demand before he came; and it was that pre-existing demand that taught and enabled him to do what he did.  If it was the strength of his genius that lifted him to the top of the heap, it was also the greatness of the heap that enabled him to reach and maintain that elevation.  For it is a great mistake to regard Shakespeare as standing alone, and working only in the powers of his individual mind.  In fact, there never was any growth of literature or art that stood upon a wider basis of collective experience, or that drew its form and substance from a larger or more varied stock of historical preparation.[5]

[5] Since the passage in the text was written, I have met with some well-drawn remarks of a like drift in Froude’s History of England, Chapter I.:  “The chroniclers have given us many accounts of the masques and plays which were acted in the Court, or in the castles of the noblemen.  Such pageants were but the most splendid expression of a taste which was national and universal.  As in ancient Greece, generations before the rise of the great dramas of Athens, itinerant companies wandered from village to village, carrying their stage furniture in their little carts, and acted in their booths and tents the grand stories of the mythology; so in England the mystery-players haunted the wakes and fairs, and in barns or taverns, tap-rooms, or in the farm-house kitchen, played at saints and angels, and transacted on their petty stage the entire drama of the Christian Faith.  We allow ourselves to think of Shakespeare