316 LIBEAEY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



Bhown anything like an approach to it, (for Moli^re'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 

 Eichard III. fi'om History, and Ulysses fi-om Homer, — 

 and that creative faculty whose equal touch is alike vivi- 

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

 abnormal and monstroiis 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 I'arest of earthly phenomena to find 

 them joined with those faculties of perception, an-ange- 

 ment, and plastic instinct in the loving union which 

 alone makes a great dramatic poet possible. We siispect 

 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 



