91 



in reference to plays and players, the poet was held in 

 no literary honour by his contemporaries, or in any sense 

 esteemed as a great poet. Lord Bacon does not refer to 

 him in all his works ; nor Sir Henry Wotton in his volu- 

 minous correspondence with almost every literary man of 

 the period ; nor Webbe, in 1586 ; nor Pemberton, in 

 1589 ; nor Sir J. Harrington, in 1591, although publishing 

 works in reference to poets and poetry. 



6. — The internal evidence of haste or carelessness, or 

 presumed neglect in the diction, in the arrangement 

 of scenes, or in the construction, and in the choice 

 of plots already familiar, as well as in the repeated 

 obscenity and undue importance conceded to the comic 

 passages, &c. 



7. — That the tenotir of his life, from the contemporary 

 evidence transmitted, was marked by no outward profes- 

 sions of sincerity or religious zeal — nor such conscious 

 elevation of his own personal dignity or of the importance 

 of his mission as attaches to the functions and offices of 

 professedly moral writers or moralists, such as we associate 

 even with the memory of Milton, Dante, or Wordsworth. 

 That he came, as Mr. Emerson has remarked, eating and 

 drinldng, and that it could not be said of him that " his 

 soul was like a star and dwelt apart." He was a jolly 

 companion, a free liver, not inattentive to his religious 

 offices ; on the contrary, shewing a reverential nature in 

 every aspect ; but that he wore his religion easily is the 

 uniform tenour of such anecdotes as refer to him. That 

 he represented in this, what Macaulay has described as 

 the national feeling of the time, when he expresses his 

 opinion, " That the people whose minds were made up on 

 either side, or who were inclined to make any saciifice or 

 run any risk for either religion, were few." This tra- 

 ditional character, handed down like the story of the 

 deer stealing — of his holding horses at the theatre door 



