316 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



shown anything like an approach to it, (for Moliere's qual 

 ity was comic power rather than humor,) except Sterne, 

 Fielding, and perhaps Richter. Only Shakespeare was 

 endowed with that healthy equilibrium of nature whose 

 point of rest was midway between the imagination and 

 the understanding, that perfectly unruffled brain 

 which reflected all objects with almost inhuman impar 

 tiality, that outlook whose range was ecliptical, dom 

 inating 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 vivi 

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

 abnormal aud monstrous characters to evade the risks 

 and responsibilities of absolute truthfulness, nor to stim 

 ulate a jaded imagination by Caligulan horrors of plot. 

 He is never, like many of his fellow-dramatists, con 

 fronted 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 Shakespeare did not dif 

 fer from them in kind as well as in degree. Fine poets 

 some of them were ; but though imagination and the 

 power of poetic expression are, singly, not uncommon 

 gifts, and even in combination not without secular ex 

 amples, yet it is the rarest of earthly phenomena to find 

 them joined with those faculties of perception, arrange 

 ment, and plastic instinct in the loving union which 

 alone makes a great dramatic poet possible. We suspect 

 that Shakespeare will long continue the only specimen 

 of the genus. His contemporaries, in their comedies, 

 either force what they call " a humor " till it becomes 



