The practical consequences of all this were both manifold and strongly marked.  The Drama thus cut itself loose and swung clean away from the narrow circle of myths and legends, where the ancients had fixed it, and ranged at large in all the freedom and variety of historical representation.  It took on all the compass, amplitude, and expansiveness of the Homeric Epos.  The stereotyped sameness and confinement of the Greek stage were necessarily discarded, and the utmost breadth of matter and scope, compatible with clearness of survey, became the recognized freehold of Dramatic Art.[10]

[10] At this time the Drama was recognized throughout Europe as the poetic form most suitable to modern times and races.  As it occupied the place of the epic poem, and did not merely, like the ancient drama, stand side by side with it, so, along with the office of replacing it, it inherited also the task of showing itself capable of managing, like the epopee, any matter however extended.  The materials presented to it were not common property, like the many well-known myths of antiquity, handed down in a ready-made poetical form; but they were those rudiments formed in the religious dramas, those Mysteries founded on vast actions, and those historical subjects, which required a whole cycle of pieces for the mastering of the huge matter.  The things of the world had become complicated and manifold:  the variety of men, their nature, their passions, their situations, their mutually-contending powers, would not submit, in dramatic representation, to be limited to a simple catastrophe:  a wider horizon must be drawn; the actions must be represented throughout their course; the springs of action must be more deeply searched.  Thus Art was put to the work of setting forth the utmost fulness of matter in a corresponding form, which, however, according to Aristotle’s law, must not be extended so far as to preclude an easy survey.—­GERVINUS.

So that, as I have before observed, the English Drama was, in the largest sense, a national growth, and not the work of any individual.  Neither was it a sudden growth, as indeed nothing truly national ever can be:  like the English State, it was the slow, gradual, silent production of centuries,—­the result of the thoughts of many minds in many ages.  The whole platform, and all that relates to the formal construction of the work, were fixed before Shakespeare put his hand to it:  what remained for him to do, and what he was supremely gifted for doing, was to rear a grand and beautiful fabric on the basis and out of the materials already prepared.  And where I like best to contemplate the Poet is, not in the isolation of those powers which lift him so far above all others, but as having the mind of the nation, with its great past and greater present, to back him up.  And it seems to me, his greatness consisted very much in that, as he had the gift, so he surrendered himself to the high task, of reproducing in artistic