, and he hits on a railroad.
Every master has found his material collected, and his power lay in
his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he
wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him
thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the
hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations,
poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into
their labours. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency,
out of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do
for himself; his powers would be expended in the first preparations.
Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being
original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world
do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed
through the mind.

Shakespeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were
importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily
at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans,
a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican
church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,
houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs,
were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted
this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers
now,--no, not by the strongest party,--neither then could king,
prelate, or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ, which was
ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, punch, and library, at the
same time. Probably king, prelate, and puritan, all found their own
account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national interest,--by
no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of
treating it in an English history,--but not a whit less considerable,
because it was cheap, and of no account, like a baker's shop. The best
proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke
into this field: Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker,
Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and
Fletcher.

The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the
first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in
idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the
case of Shakespeare, there