e flowers the _least_ better himself, he would
assuredly have been offended at this, and given a botanical turn of mind
to Caesar, or Othello.

Sec. 30. And it is even among the most curious proofs of the necessity to
all high imagination that it should paint straight from the life, that
he has _not_ given such a turn of mind to some of his great men;--Henry
the Fifth, for instance. Doubtless some of my readers, having been
accustomed to hear it repeated thoughtlessly from mouth to mouth that
Shakespere conceived the spirit of all ages, were as much offended as
surprised at my saying that he only painted human nature as he saw it in
his own time. They will find, if they look into his work closely, as
much antiquarianism as they do geography, and no more. The commonly
received notions about the things that had been, Shakespere took as he
found them, animating them with pure human nature, of any time and all
time; but inquiries into the minor detail of temporary feeling, he
despised as utterly as he did maps; and wheresoever the temporary
feeling was in anywise contrary to that of his own day, he errs frankly,
and paints from his own time. For instance in this matter of love of
flowers; we have traced already, far enough for our general purposes,
the mediaeval interest in them, whether to be enjoyed in the fields, or
to be used for types of ornamentation in dress. If Shakespere had cared
to enter into the spirit even of the early fifteenth century, he would
assuredly have marked this affection in some of his knights, and
indicated, even then, in heroic tempers, the peculiar respect for
loveliness of _dress_ which we find constantly in Dante. But he could
not do this; he had not seen it in real life. In his time dress had
become an affectation and absurdity. Only fools, or wise men in their
weak moments, showed much concern about it; and the facts of human
nature which appeared to him general in the matter were the soldier's
disdain, and the coxcomb's care of it. Hence Shakespere's good soldier
is almost always in plain or battered armor; even the speech of Vernon
in Henry the Fourth, which, as far as I remember, is the only one that
bears fully upon the beauty of armor, leans more upon the spirit and
hearts of men--"bated, like eagles having lately bathed;" and has an
under-current of slight contempt running through the following line,
"Glittering in golden coats, _like images_;" while the beauty of the
young Harry is ess