It is indeed true that the Drama shot ahead with amazing rapidity as soon as it came to feel the virtue of Shakespeare’s hand.  We have nothing more dreary, dismal, and hopeless than the course of the English Drama down to his time.  The people would have dramatic entertainments, and hundreds of minds, apparently, were ever busy furnishing them wooden things in dramatic form.  And so, century after century, through change after change, the work of preparation went on, still scarce any progress, and no apparent result, nothing that could live, or was worth keeping alive.  It seemed as if no rain would ever fall, no sun ever shine, to take away the sterility of the land.  Yet all of a sudden the Drama blazed up with a splendor that was to illuminate and sweeten the ages, and be at once the delight and the despair of other nations and future times.  All this, too, came to pass in Shakespeare! and, which is more, the process ended with him!  It is indeed a singular phenomenon, and altogether the most astonishing that the human mind has produced.

Yet even here we should be careful of attributing too much to the genius of the individual man.  It was rather the genius of the age and nation springing into flowerage through him,—­a flowerage all the larger and more eloquent for the long delay, and the vast accumulation of force.  For it is remarkable that when the Warwickshire peasant entered upon his work, with the single exception of Chaucer, not one good English book had been written.  Yet he was far from being alone in thus beginning and perfecting the great workmanship which he took in hand.  Before Hamlet, Othello, and The Tempest were written, Romantic Poetry had done its best in Spenser, Philosophical Divinity in Hooker, Civil and Moral Discourse in Bacon.  All these alike are unapproached and unapproachable in their several kinds.  We have nothing more tuneable and melodious than Spenser’s verse; no higher and nobler eloquence than Hooker’s prose; no practical wisdom of deeper reach or more attractive garb than Bacon’s Essays.  Yet they did not learn their cunning from Shakespeare, nor did Shakespeare learn his cunning from them.  The language was then just ripe for the uses of such minds; it had the wealth of much learning incorporated with it, yet had not been cast into rigidity nor dressed into primness by a technical and bookish legislation; it had gone on for centuries gathering in and assimilating stores from Nature and from Religion; it was rich with the life of a nation of brave, free, honest, full-souled, and frank-hearted men; it was at once copious, limber, and sinewy, capable alike of expressing the largest and the subtlest thought, the deepest and strongest passion, the most tender and delicate feeling; wit could sport itself for ever, humour could trim its raciest issues, imagination could body forth its sweetest and awfullest visions, in the furnishings of the English tongue.  And so these four great