ounger than Your Majesty's happy reign!"--has the world's meanness and
cunning engrafted into his intellect, and remains smooth, serene,
unenthusiastic, and in some degree base, even with all his sincere
devotion and universal wisdom; bearing, to the end of life, the likeness
of a marble palace in the street of a great city, fairly furnished
within, and bright in wall and battlement, yet noisome in places about
the foundations. The other, born at Clermont, in Auvergne, under the
shadow of the Puy de Dome, though taken to Paris at eight years old,
retains for ever the impress of his birthplace; pursuing natural
philosophy with the same zeal as Bacon, he returns to his own mountains
to put himself under their tutelage, and by their help first discovers
the great relations of the earth and the air: struck at last with mortal
disease; gloomy, enthusiastic, and superstitious, with a conscience
burning like lava, and inflexible like iron, the clouds gather about the
majesty of him, fold after fold; and, with his spirit buried in ashes,
and rent by earthquake, yet fruitful of true thought and faithful
affection, he stands like that mound of desolate scoria that crowns the
hill ranges of his native land, with its sable summit far in heaven, and
its foundations green with the ordered garden and the trellised vine.

Sec. 28. When, however, our inquiry thus branches into the successive
analysis of individual characters, it is time for us to leave it; noting
only one or two points respecting Shakespere, whom, I doubt not, the
reader was surprised to find left out of all our comparisons in the
preceding volume. He seems to have been sent essentially to take
universal and equal grasp of the _human_ nature; and to have been
removed, therefore, from all influences which could in the least warp or
bias his thoughts. It was necessary that he should lean _no_ way; that
he should contemplate, with absolute equality of judgment, the life of
the court, cloister, and tavern, and be able to sympathize so completely
with all creatures as to deprive himself, together with his personal
identity, even of his conscience, as he casts himself into their hearts.
He must be able to enter into the soul of Falstaff or Shylock with no
more sense of contempt or horror than Falstaff or Shylock themselves
feel for or in themselves; otherwise his own conscience and indignation
would make him unjust to them; he would turn aside from something, miss
some good, o