1 62 Shakspeare 



It is important always to take due account of 

 the profitable use advisedly made of experience 

 for the ideal effects of art, and largely to discount 

 the fulsome extravagancies of the dedications 

 then in vogue. Shakspeare was not the only 

 poet who, after the abject fashion of the time, 

 addressed adulatory verses to noble patrons and 

 was rewarded with liberal gifts of money ; indeed, 

 he makes it his merit that he did not, in order to 

 compete with those who spent all their might in 

 richly compiled sonnets and polished form of 

 *' well-refined pen," alter his style and adopt new- 

 found methods, but kept to true plain words of 

 his own pen ; so that every word almost told 

 whence they proceeded, and other pens had even 

 taken to imitate his style. Still, he was not only 

 profoundly discontented with his situation but 

 keenly self-reproachful for his past conduct in 

 life. " The frailties of his sportive blood " had, he 

 confesses, betrayed him into irregularities which 

 had injured his reputation ; he had " gored his 

 own thoughts," " wasted his affections," looked 



his dark moods he may, like Hamlet, half wishing the end but 

 shrinking from the means, have sometimes craved that this 

 too solid flesh would melt, or that the Almighty had not fixed 

 nis canon against self- slaughter. A person so superiorly en- 

 dowed mentally and surely conscious of his superiority, yet at 

 the same time capable of nourishing seriously the common 

 ambitions which he cherished as an honest citizen, could not be 

 so detached as to be uniformly serene ; in encounter with the 

 realities of life he might well fall at times into fits of dejec- 

 tion and disgust. 



