can give a name.

Shakespeare must early have felt his superiority in true education (the
nimble play of all the faculties) to the merely learned men with whom he
came in contact, and must soon have discovered that _he_ drank from
fountains of which they knew nothing. His own vitality of soul was
responsive to the essential life of men and things; and it was through
this responsiveness that he attained to a wisdom inaccessible to mere
learning and intellectual enlightenment. It was his mother, I like to
think, who initiated him into the mysteries of the spirit.

NOTE 1, PAGE 21.

See Vol. I, pp. 229 _et seq._ of 'Memoirs of Richard Whateley,
Archbishop of Dublin. With a glance at his contemporaries and times. By
William John Fitzpatrick, J.P. In two volumes. London: Richard Bentley,
1864.'

NOTE 2, PAGE 47.

This notation of feet I have used in my 'Primer of English Verse,' _a_
representing an accented, and _x_, an unaccented, syllable.

NOTE 3, PAGE 50.

We cannot help observing, because certain critics observe otherwise,
that Chaucer utters as true music as ever came from poet or musician;
that some of the sweetest cadences in all our English are extant in his
"swete upon his tongue," in completest modulation. Let "Denham's
strength and Waller's sweetness join" the Io paean of a later age, the
"eurekamen" of Pope and his generation. Not one of the "Queen Anne's
men," measuring out tuneful breath upon their fingers, like ribbons for
topknots, did know the art of versification as the old rude Chaucer knew
it. Call him rude for the picturesqueness of the epithet; but his verse
has, at least, as much regularity in the sense of true art, and more
manifestly in proportion to our increasing acquaintance with his dialect
and pronunciation, as can be discovered or dreamed in the French school.
Critics, indeed, have set up a system based upon the crushed atoms of
first principles, maintaining that poor Chaucer wrote by accent only!
Grant to them that he counted no verses on his fingers; grant that he
never disciplined his highest thoughts to walk up and down in a
paddock--ten paces and a turn; grant that his singing is not after the
likeness of their singsong; but there end your admissions. It is our
ineffaceable impression, in fact, that the whole theory of accent and
quantity held in relation to ancient and modern poetry stands upon a
fallacy, totters, rather than stands; and that, when considered in
conne