dern time. And second, and this seems at
first a paradox, they are truer to the classic spirit than the characters
in the contemporary French drama. This results from the fact that they
are truer to the substance of things, to universal human nature, while
the French seem to be in great part an imitation, having root neither in
the soil of France nor Attica. M. Guizot confesses that France, in order
to adopt the ancient models, was compelled to limit its field in some
sort to one corner of human existence. He goes on to say that the present
"demands of the drama pleasures and emotions that can no longer be
supplied by the inanimate representation of a world that has ceased to
exist. The classic system had its origin in the life of the time; that
time has passed away; its image subsists in brilliant colors in its
works, but can no more be reproduced." Our own literary monuments must
rest on other ground. "This ground is not the ground of Corneille or
Racine, nor is it that of Shakespeare; it is our own; but Shakespeare's
system, as it appears to me, may furnish the plans according to which
genius ought now to work. This system alone includes all those social
conditions and those general and diverse feelings, the simultaneous
conjuncture and activity of which constitute for us at the present day
the spectacle of human things."

That is certainly all that any one can claim for Shakespeare and his
fellow-dramatists. They cannot be models in form any more than Sophocles
and Euripides; but they are to be followed in making the drama, or any
literature, expressive of its own time, while it is faithful to the
emotions and feeling of universal human nature. And herein, it seems to
me, lies the broad distinction between most of the English and French
literature of the latter part of the sixteenth and the beginning of the
seventeenth centuries. Perhaps I may be indulged in another observation
on this topic, touching a later time. Notwithstanding the prevalent
notion that the French poets are the sympathetic heirs of classic
culture, it appears to me that they are not so imbued with the true
classic spirit, art, and mythology as some of our English poets, notably
Keats and Shelley.

Ben Jonson was a man of extensive and exact classical erudition; he was a
solid scholar in the Greek and Roman literatures, in the works of the
philosophers, poets, and historians. He was also a man of uncommon
attainments in all the literary knowledge