t, the strongest, the most graceful, and beautiful of
them; but it was a common and a noble brood. He was not something sacred
and aloof from the vulgar herd of men, but shook hands with nature and the
circumstances of the time, and is distinguished from his immediate
contemporaries, not in kind, but in degree and greater variety of
excellence. He did not form a class or species by himself, but belonged to
a class or species. His age was necessary to him; nor could he have been
wrenched from his place in the edifice of which he was so conspicuous a
part, without equal injury to himself and it. Mr. Wordsworth says of
Milton, that "his soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." This cannot be
said with any propriety of Shakspeare, who certainly moved in a
constellation of bright luminaries, and "drew after him a third part of
the heavens." If we allow, for argument's sake (or for truth's, which is
better), that he was in himself equal to all his competitors put together;
yet there was more dramatic excellence in that age than in the whole of
the period that has elapsed since. If his contemporaries, with their
united strength, would hardly make one Shakspeare, certain it is that all
his successors would not make half a one. With the exception of a single
writer, Otway, and of a single play of his (Venice Preserved), there is
nobody in tragedy and dramatic poetry (I do not here speak of comedy) to
be compared to the great men of the age of Shakspeare, and immediately
after. They are a mighty phalanx of kindred spirits closing him round,
moving in the same orbit, and impelled by the same causes in their
whirling and eccentric career. They had the same faults and the same
excellences; the same strength and depth and richness, the same truth of
character, passion, imagination, thought and language, thrown, heaped,
massed together without careful polishing or exact method, but poured out
in unconcerned profusion from the lap of nature and genius in boundless
and unrivalled magnificence. The sweetness of Deckar, the thought of
Marston, the gravity of Chapman, the grace of Fletcher and his young-eyed
wit, Jonson's learned sock, the flowing vein of Middleton, Heywood's ease,
the pathos of Webster, and Marlow's deep designs, add a double lustre to
the sweetness, thought, gravity, grace, wit, artless nature, copiousness,
ease, pathos, and sublime conceptions of Shakspeare's Muse. They are
indeed the scale by which we can best ascend to th