would not. It is not in twenty places, or
not in a hundred, that the obsoleteness of a word or phrase makes
Shakspeare hard, nor any thing in the world but his wit, his intellect in
excess, that occasionally runs away with him, and wraps up his meaning in
a phraseology of his own creating; enigmas that are embarrassing to
disinvolve again--which might, indeed, be an antiquated manner of his age,
but not an obsolete dictionary and grammar. Neither is it required of us
to convince the reader, by copious extracts, that _he_ really understands
Shakspeare, one or other of whose volumes he has always in his pocket, and
whose English he sits hearing by the hour, lisped, mouthed, and
legitimately spoken upon the stage, and still fancying that he understands
what he hears. But it seemed not altogether out of place, when the
criticism of style is moved, and Shakspeare's English challenged, to
recall into the liveliest consciousness of the reader, for a moment, the
principal feature of the case, which is, without doubt, that Shakspeare
is, in all our literature, the writer in whom this highest art of
writing--namely--start not, good, innocent reader! for it must one day be
said--THE ART OF SIMPLICITY--reaches its height; that magical art of
steeping the words and idioms that fall from every lip at every minute, in
music, and beauty, and pathos, and power, so that the familiar sound slips
along the well-known inlets into the soul, and we are--"took ere we are
'ware."

Otherwise, for the general fact, that he, the reader of 1845, does
understand, without much difficulty, the dramatic poet whom, in 1665, the
gulf of years and the mutations of speech from father to son had rendered
"unintelligible"--for the general verity of this unforeseen and
improbable, but indisputable fact, the reader's recollection of his own
personal history since he was eight or ten years old, may be left
satisfactorily to vouch.

Neither was it, perhaps, unreasonable to snatch the occasion of alleging
and manifesting the momentous and instructive truth--_that the intenser
working of the mind finds out, in every age, the perpetuities of a
language_.

Let us take our place for a moment in the Age of our poetry, which began
with Dryden inclusive, and ended, or began ending, with Cowper exclusive.
It was the UNCREATIVE age of our poetry; or, if you insist upon a
denomination positively grounded, the IMITATIVE; or it was the
_unimpassioned_, or it was the _rat