d worth could afford that many a flurry of vanity,
petulance, and even error should flit across the surface and be
forgotten. Whatever else Dryden may have been, the last and abiding
impression of him is that he was thoroughly manly; and while it may be
disputed whether he was a great poet, it may be said of him, as
Wordsworth said of Burke, "that he was by far the greatest man of his
age, not only abounding in knowledge himself, but feeding, in various
directions, his most able contemporaries."

III

OF FAULTS FOUND IN SHAKESPEARE[37]

Mr. Matthew Arnold seems to think that Shakespeare has damaged English
poetry. I wish he had! It is true he lifted Dryden above himself in
"All for Love"; but it was Dryden who said of him, by instinctive
conviction rather than judgment, that within his magic circle none
dared tread but he. Is he to blame for the extravagances of modern
diction, which are but the reaction of the brazen age against the
degeneracy of art into artifice, that has characterized the silver
period in every literature? We see in them only the futile effort of
misguided persons to torture out of language the secret of that
inspiration which should be in themselves. We do not find the
extravagances in Shakespeare himself. We never saw a line in any
modern poet that reminded us of him, and will venture to assert that
it is only poets of the second class that find successful imitators.
And the reason seems to us a very plain one. The genius of the great
poet seeks repose in the expression of itself, and finds it at last in
style, which is the establishment of a perfect mutual understanding
between the worker and his material. The secondary intellect, on the
other hand, seeks for excitement in expression, and stimulates itself
into mannerism, which is the wilful obtrusion of self, as style is its
unconscious abnegation. No poet of the first class has ever left a
school, because his imagination is incommunicable; while, just as
surely as the thermometer tells of the neighborhood of an iceberg, you
may detect the presence of a genius of the second class in any
generation by the influence of his mannerism, for that, being an
artificial thing, is capable of reproduction. Dante, Shakespeare,
Goethe, left no heirs either to the form or mode of their expression;
while Milton, Sterne, and Wordsworth left behind them whole regiments
uniformed with all their external characteristics.

[Footnote 37: From the essay