al Plays, _Henry Fifth_ and the
others, which is worth remembering. He calls them a kind of National
Epic. Marlborough, you recollect, said, he knew no English History but
what he had learned from Shakspeare. There are really, if we look to
it, few as memorable Histories. The great salient points are admirably
seized; all rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence; it
is, as Schlegel says, _epic_;--as indeed all delineation by a great
thinker will be. There are right beautiful things in those Pieces,
which indeed together form one beautiful thing. That battle of
Agincourt strikes me as one of the most perfect things, in its sort,
we anywhere have of Shakspeare's. The description of the two hosts:
the worn-out, jaded English; the dread hour, big with destiny, when
the battle shall begin; and then that deathless valour: "Ye good
yeomen, whose limbs were made in England!" There is a noble Patriotism
in it,--far other than the 'indifference' you sometimes hear ascribed
to Shakspeare. A true English heart breathes, calm and strong, through
the whole business; not boisterous, protrusive; all the better for
that. There is a sound in it like the ring of steel. This man too had
a right stroke in him, had it come to that!

But I will say, of Shakspeare's works generally, that we have no full
impress of him there; even as full as we have of many men. His works
are so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that
was in him. All his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory,
imperfect, written under cramping circumstances; giving only here and
there a note of the full utterance of the man. Passages there are that
come upon you like splendour out of Heaven; bursts of radiance,
illuminating the very heart of the thing: you say, "That is _true_,
spoken once and forever; wheresoever and whensoever there is an open
human soul, that will be recognised as true!" Such bursts, however,
make us feel that the surrounding matter is not radiant; that it is,
in part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakspeare had to write for
the Globe Play-house: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could,
into that and no other mould. It was with him, then, as it is with us
all. No man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his
own free Thought before us; but his Thought as he could translate it
into the stone that was given, with the tools that were given.
_Disjecta membra_ are all that we find of any Poet, or of