other bias. A popular player,--nobody suspected
he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as
faithfully from poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and
frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human
understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson,
though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no
suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was
attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him
generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet
of the two.

If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakespeare's
time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born
four years after Shakespeare, and died twenty-three years after him;
and I find, among his correspondents and acquaintances, the following
persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, Earl of
Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane,
Izaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton,
John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi,
Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of his having
communicated, without enumerating many others, whom doubtless he
saw,--Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Herberts,
Marlowe, Chapman, and the rest. Since the constellation of great men
who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any
such society; yet their genius failed them to find out the best head
in the universe. Our poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the
mountain near. It took a century to make it suspected; and not until
two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we
think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to write the
history of Shakespeare till now; for he is the father of German
literature: it was on the introduction of Shakespeare into German, by
Lessing, and the translation of his works by Wieland and Schlegel,
that the rapid burst of German literature was most intimately
connected. It was not until the nineteenth century, whose speculative
genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could
find such wondering readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought
are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present,
we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge
and Goethe are the only critics who have expr