i/8 Shakspeare 



petitioners, who have no other means to maintain 

 their wives and families but by the exercise of 

 their quality as they have heretofore done." 



That a sane and fruitful imagination implies 

 the food and training of real experience, wanting 

 which an unruled imagination runs into wild and 

 barren stalk, is proved by innumerable examples 

 of poets and novelists — signally by the eminent 

 example of Sir Walter Scott, in whose romances 

 the most real scenes and living characters can be 

 traced to diligently obtained information and 

 carefully noted observations of actual places 

 and persons, translated and more or less ideally 

 transformed by a richly stored and well ruled 

 imagination. To suppose that Shakspeare had no 

 personal part either as observer or actor in the 

 dissipations which he describes, is to suppose it 

 only because unreasoning devotees, craving to 

 have be that which they wish should be and 

 counting it virtuous in such case to practise wilful 

 self-deception, hug the opinion that a transcen- 

 dent genius must have been a person of transcen- 

 dent morality, although the experience of all the 

 world proves the contrary in the general and his 

 history exemplifies in the particular. As well 

 believe that Burns, because he wrote the Cotter's 

 Saturday Night and Holy Willie's Prayer, was not 

 a lustful drunkard, debauched no village maiden, 

 wrote no verses unfit for publication ; that Goethe 

 because he wrote Faust had no selfish love ad- 

 ventures, and did not in the end marry his 



