ur own;
or, if you are not convinced of that, be at least assured that an
illiterate man never did, and never will, write even tolerable poetry.

It may seem as if I were acting the traitor to my own profession when I
rejoice that Shakespeare was never turned into what is technically
called a learned man. He was something better, he was an educated man.
You do not need erudition to be a creator of great works of imagination,
whether it be erudition concerning Latin syntax or concerning the Origin
of the Concept or concerning the life-history of the worm. What you
chiefly require to know is the human heart; and the best books for that
knowledge are human beings. Learning is after all but the milch-cow of
education. If Shakespeare had been as learned as Ben Jonson, or the
so-called University Wits, he might perchance have come to view mankind
too much through the medium of books, as Jonson himself did, instead of
through his own keen natural orbs of vision.

His soul proud science never taught to stray
Far as the Solar walk or Milky Way.

No! but he had soared otherwise to the Solar walk and the Galaxy, he had
gladdened at the sight of the sun flattering all Nature with his
sovereign eye, and he had felt the full sense of the nocturnal heavens,
thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. A learned man, says Bagehot,
may study butterflies till he forgets that they are beautiful. On the
other hand, it is only fair to say that he need forget nothing of the
kind. So a man may study Aristotle till he forgets that Aristotle
derived his psychology from men and not men from Aristotle.

The real scandalum to Greene and the scholar playwrights was not that
Shakespeare was illiterate, but that, not having studied by Cam or Isis,
he had no business to be literate. He was an "upstart crow," and what
right had he to be "as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the
best of you?" The attitude was perhaps natural to jealous rivals, but it
should never have been used to show that Shakespeare was destitute of a
decent school education. Perhaps the most regrettable outcome of this
notion is that Milton should have written the amazing line which tells
how Shakespeare

Warbled his native woodnotes wild.

Like the famous description of the crab as the little red fish which
walks backwards, it contains only three demonstrable errors. Shakespeare
does not warble, his notes are not woodnotes, and they are not wild.

He was, moreove