d than the spirit of the whole,
and these accessories being possessed by Shakespeare in an unequalled
degree, a young writer having recourse to Shakespeare as his model
runs great risk of being vanquished and absorbed by them, and, in
consequence, of reproducing, according to the measure of his power,
these, and these alone. Of this preponderating quality of
Shakespeare's genius, accordingly, almost the whole of modern English
poetry has, it appears to me, felt the influence. To the exclusive
attention on the part of his imitators to this it is in a great degree
owing, that of the majority of modern poetical works the details
alone are valuable, the composition worthless. In reading them one is
perpetually reminded of that terrible sentence on a modern French
poet--_il dit tout ce qu'il veut, mais malheureusement il n'a rien a
dire_.

Let me give an instance of what I mean. I will take it from the works
of the very chief among those who seem to have been formed in the
school of Shakespeare: of one whose exquisite genius and pathetic
death render him for ever interesting. I will take the poem of
_Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, by Keats. I choose this rather than
the _Endymion_, because the latter work (which a modern critic has
classed with the _Faerie Queene_!), although undoubtedly there blows
through it the breath of genius, is yet as a whole so utterly
incoherent, as not strictly to merit the name of a poem at all. The
poem of _Isabella_, then, is a perfect treasure-house of graceful and
felicitous words and images: almost in every stanza there occurs one
of those vivid and picturesque turns of expression, by which the
object is made to flash upon the eye of the mind, and which thrill the
reader with a sudden delight. This one short poem contains, perhaps, a
greater number of happy single expressions which one could quote than
all the extant tragedies of Sophocles. But the action, the story? The
action in itself is an excellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by
the Poet, so loosely constructed, that the effect produced by it, in
and for itself, is absolutely null. Let the reader, after he has
finished the poem of Keats, turn to the same story in the _Decameron_:
he will then feel how pregnant and interesting the same action has
become in the hands of a great artist, who above all things
delineates his object; who subordinates expression to that which it is
designed to express.

I have said that the imitators