ified and fortified, in _Pericles Prince of
Tyre_. Hitherto, ever since the appearance of his first poem, and its
instant acceptance by all classes from courtiers to courtesans under a
somewhat dubious and two-headed form of popular success,--'vrai succes de
scandale s'il en fut'--even the potent influence and unequivocal example
of Rabelais had never once even in passing or in seeming affected or
infected the progressive and triumphal genius of Shakespeare with a taint
or touch of anything offensive to healthier and cleanlier organs of
perception than such as may belong to a genuine or a pretending Puritan.
But on taking in his hand that one of these two new dramatic pamphlets
which might first attract him either by its double novelty as a never
acted play or by a title of yet more poetic and romantic associations
than its fellow's, such a purchaser as I have supposed, with his mind
full of the sweet rich fresh humour which he would feel a right to expect
from Shakespeare, could hardly have undergone less than a qualm or a pang
of strong disrelish and distaste on finding one of the two leading comic
figures of the play break in upon it at his entrance not even with "a
fool-born jest," but with full-mouthed and foul-mouthed effusion of such
rank and rancorous personalities as might properly pollute the lips even
of some emulous descendant or antiquarian reincarnation of Thersites, on
application or even apprehension of a whip cracked in passing over the
assembled heads of a pseudocritical and mock-historic society. In either
case we moderns at least might haply desire the intervention of a
beadle's hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as knotty as ever the son of
Laertes applied to the shoulders of the first of the type or the tribe of
Thersites. For this brutal and brutish buffoon--I am speaking of
Shakespeare's Thersites--has no touch of humour in all his currish
composition: Shakespeare had none as nature has none to spare for such
dirty dogs as those of his kind or generation. There is not even what
Coleridge with such exquisite happiness defined as being the
quintessential property of Swift--"_anima Rabelaesii habitans in
sicco_--the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place." It is the fallen
soul of Swift himself at its lowest, dwelling in a place yet drier: the
familiar spirit or less than Socratic daemon of the Dean informing the
genius of Shakespeare. And thus for awhile infected and possessed, the
divine ge