e laws
govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being
translation on translation. There never was a time when there was
none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and all
others successively picked out, and thrown away. Something like the
same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these
books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, AEsop's
Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish
Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of such
works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter,
the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book
supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every
trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic genius who is
not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of
all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his
own.

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakespeare
Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the
Mysteries celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final
detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from
_Ferrex and Porrex_, and _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, down to the
possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakespeare altered,
remodelled, and finally made his own. Elated with success, and piqued
by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no bookstall
unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow
accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to
discover whether the boy Shakespeare poached or not, whether he held
horses at the theatre door, whether he kept school, and why he left in
his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.

There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age
mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are
turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen
Elizabeth, and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and
Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable note the founder
of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be
remembered,--the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the
inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people
of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to
receive this and not an