232 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



Milton in versification, and was, perhaps, as purely a poet as 

 any that England has produced ; but his mind had no balance- 

 wheel. Chapman abounds in splendid enthusiasms of diction, 

 and now and then dilates our imaginations with suggestions of 

 profound poetic depth. Ben Johnson was a conscientious and 

 intelligent workman, whose plays glow, here and there, with the 

 golden pollen of that poetic feeling with which his age impreg 

 nated all thought and expression ; but his leading characteristic, 

 like that of his great namesake, Samuel, was a hearty common 

 sense, which fitted him rather to be a great critic than a great 

 poet. He had a keen and ready eye for the comic in situation, 

 but no humour. Fletcher was as much a poet as fancy and sen 

 timent can make any man. Only Shakspeare wrote comedy 

 and tragedy with truly ideal elevation and breadth. Only 

 Shakspeare had that true sense of humour which, like the uni 

 versal solvent sought by the alchemists, so fuses together all the 

 elements of a character (as in Falstaff), that any question of 

 good or evil, of dignified or ridiculous, is silenced by the appre 

 hension of its thorough humanity. Rabelais shows gleams 

 of it in Panurge ; but, in our opinion, no man ever possessed 

 it in an equal degree with Shakspeare, except Cervantes ; 

 no man has since shown anything like an approach to it (for 

 Molieie s quality was comic power rather than humour), except 

 Sterne, Fielding, and perhaps Richter. Only Shakspeare was 

 endowed with that healthy equilibrium of nature whose point of 

 rest was midway between the imagination and the understand 

 ing that perfectly unruffled brain which reflected all objects 

 with almost inhuman impartiality that outlook whose range 

 was ecliptical, dominating all zones of human thought and 

 action that power of veri-similar conception which could take 

 away Richard III. from History, and Ulysses from Homer 

 and that creative faculty whose equal touch is alike vivifying in 

 Shallow and in Lear. He alone never seeks in abnormal and 

 monstrous characters to evade the risks and responsibilities of 

 absolute truthfulness, nor to stimulate a jaded imagination by 

 Caligulan horrors o^plot. He is nevsr, like many of his fellow- 

 dramatists, confronted with unnatural Frankensteins of his own 

 making, whom he must get off his hands as best he may. Given 

 a human foible, he can incarnate it in the nothingness of Slender, 

 or make it loom gigantic through the tragic twilight of Hamlet. 

 We are tired of the vagueness which classes all the Elizabethan 

 playwrights together as great dramatists/ as if Shakspeare 

 did not differ from them in kind as well as in degree. Fine 



