is much more. At the time when he left
Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all
dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced
on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, which the audience will bear
hearing some part of every week; the Death of Julius Caesar, and other
stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of
English history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the
royal Henries, which men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful
tragedies, merry Italian tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the
London prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or
less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and
tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote
them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so long, and so
many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a
speech, or a whole Scene, or adding a song, that no man can any longer
claim copyright in this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to.
They are not yet desired in that way. We have few readers, many
spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.

Shakespeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old
plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had
the _prestige_ which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing
could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England
circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he
wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in
popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain
his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people,
supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much
work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for
the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to his
legend what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and in
Greece, grew up in subordination to architecture. It was the ornament
of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, then
the relief became bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the
wall, the groups being still arranged with reference to the building,
which serves also as a frame to hold the figures; and when, at last,
the greatest freedom of style and treatment was reached, the
prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain c