“Our friend’s style has flowery components,” Mr. Greenwood adds to this deliciously eloquent passage from his American author, “and yet Shakespeare who did all this,” et caetera.  But Shakespeare did not do “all this”!  We know the sources of the plays well enough:  novels in one of which “Delphos” is the insular seat of an oracle of Apollo; Holinshed, with his contaminated legends; North’s Plutarch, done out of the French; older plays, and the rest of it.  Shakespeare does not go to Tighernach and the Hennskringla for Macbeth; or for Hamlet to the saga which is the source of Saxo; or for his English chronicle-plays to the State Papers.  Shakespeare did not, like William of Deloraine, dig up “clasped books, buried and forgotten.”  There is no original research; the author uses the romances, novels, ballads, and popular books of uncritical history which were current in his day.  Mr. Greenwood knows that; Mr. Morgan, perhaps, knew it, but forgot what he knew; hurried away by the Muse of Eloquence.  And the common Baconian may believe Mr. Morgan.

But Mr. Greenwood asks “what was the poetic output?” in Burns’s case. {100a} It was what we know, and that was what suited his age and his circumstances.  It was lyric, idyll, song, and satire; it was not drama, for to the Stage he had no access, he who passed but one winter in Edinburgh, where the theatre was not the centre of literature.

Shakespeare came, with genius and with such materials as I have suggested, to an entirely different market, the Elizabethan theatre.  I have tried to show how easily his mind might be steeped in the all-pervading classicism and foreign romance of the period, with the wide, sketchy, general information, the commonly known fragments from the great banquet of the classics,—­with such history, wholly uncritical, as Holinshed and Stow, and other such English chroniclers, could copiously provide; with the courtly manners mirrored in scores of romances and Court plays; and in the current popular Morte d’Arthur and Destruction of Troy.

I can agree with Mr. Greenwood, when he says that “Genius is a potentiality, and whether it will ever become an actuality, and what it will produce, depends upon the moral qualities with which it is associated, and the opportunities that are open to it—­in a word, on the circumstances of its environment.” {101a}

Of course by “moral qualities,” a character without spot or stain is not intended:  we may take that for granted.  Otherwise, I agree; and think that Shakespeare of Stratford had genius, and that what it produced was in accordance with the opportunities open to it, and with “the circumstances of its environment.”  Without the “environment,” no Jeanne d’Arc,—­without the environment, no Shakespeare.