with “a fool-born jest,” but with full-mouthed and foul-mouthed effusion of such rank and rancorous personalities as might properly pollute the lips even of some emulous descendant or antiquarian reincarnation of Thersites, on application or even apprehension of a whip cracked in passing over the assembled heads of a pseudocritical and mock-historic society.  In either case we moderns at least might haply desire the intervention of a beadle’s hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as knotty as ever the son of Laertes applied to the shoulders of the first of the type or the tribe of Thersites.  For this brutal and brutish buffoon—­I am speaking of Shakespeare’s Thersites—­has no touch of humour in all his currish composition:  Shakespeare had none as nature has none to spare for such dirty dogs as those of his kind or generation.  There is not even what Coleridge with such exquisite happiness defined as being the quintessential property of Swift—­“anima Rabelaesii habitans in sicco—­the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place.”  It is the fallen soul of Swift himself at its lowest, dwelling in a place yet drier:  the familiar spirit or less than Socratic daemon of the Dean informing the genius of Shakespeare.  And thus for awhile infected and possessed, the divine genius had not power to re-inform and re-create the daemonic spirit by virtue of its own clear essence.  This wonderful play, one of the most admirable among all the works of Shakespeare’s immeasurable and unfathomable intelligence, as it must always hold its natural high place among the most admired, will always in all probability be also, and as naturally, the least beloved of all.  It would be as easy and as profitable a problem to solve the Rabelaisian riddle of the bombinating chimaera with its potential or hypothetical faculty of deriving sustenance from a course of diet on second intentions, as to read the riddle of Shakespeare’s design in the procreation of this yet more mysterious and magnificent monster of a play.  That on its production in print it was formally announced as “a new play never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar,” we know; must we infer or may we suppose that therefore it was not originally written for the stage?  Not all plays were which even at that date appeared in print:  yet it would seem something more than strange that one such play, written simply for the study, should have been the extra-professional work of Shakespeare:  and yet again it would seem stranger that he should have designed this prodigious nondescript or portent of supreme genius for the public stage:  and strangest of all, if so, that he should have so designed it in vain.  Perhaps after all a better than any German or Germanising commentary on the subject would be the simple and summary ejaculation of Celia—­“O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping!” The perplexities of the whole matter seem literally to crowd and thicken upon us at every step.  What ailed the man or any man to write such a manner of dramatic poem at all? and having written, to keep it beside him or let it out of his hands into stranger and more slippery keeping, unacted and unprinted?  A German will rush in with an answer where an Englishman (non angelus sed Anglus) will naturally fear to tread.