ent things bewildering, the number of existing works
capable of attracting a young writer's attention and of becoming his
models, immense: what he wants is a hand to guide him through the
confusion, a voice to prescribe to him the aim which he should keep in
view, and to explain to him that the value of the literary works which
offer themselves to his attention is relative to their power of
helping him forward on his road towards this aim. Such a guide the
English writer at the present day will nowhere find. Failing this, all
that can be looked for, all indeed that can be desired, is, that his
attention should be fixed on excellent models; that he may reproduce,
at any rate, something of their excellence, by penetrating himself
with their works and by catching their spirit, if he cannot be taught
to produce what is excellent independently.

Foremost among these models for the English writer stands Shakespeare:
a name the greatest perhaps of all poetical names; a name never to be
mentioned without reverence. I will venture, however, to express a
doubt, whether the influence of his works, excellent and fruitful for
the readers of poetry, for the great majority, has been of unmixed
advantage to the writers of it. Shakespeare indeed chose excellent
subjects; the world could afford no better than Macbeth, or Romeo and
Juliet, or Othello: he had no theory respecting the necessity of
choosing subjects of present import, or the paramount interest
attaching to allegories of the state of one's own mind; like all great
poets, he knew well what constituted a poetical action; like them,
wherever he found such an action, he took it; like them, too, he found
his best in past times. But to these general characteristics of all
great poets, he added a special one of his own; a gift, namely, of
happy, abundant, and ingenious expression, eminent and unrivalled: so
eminent as irresistibly to strike the attention first in him, and even
to throw into comparative shade his other excellences as a poet. Here
has been the mischief. These other excellences were his fundamental
excellences _as a poet_; what distinguishes the artist from the mere
amateur, says Goethe, is _Architectonice_ in the highest sense; that
power of execution, which creates, forms, and constitutes: not the
profoundness of single thoughts, not the richness of imagery, not the
abundance of illustration. But these attractive accessories of a
poetical work being more easily seize