of his time. In some of his
tragedies his classic learning was thought to be ostentatiously
displayed, but this was not true of his comedy, and on the whole he was
too strong to be swamped in pseudo-classicism. For his experience of men
and of life was deep and varied. Before he became a public actor and
dramatist, and served the court and fashionable society with his
entertaining, if pedantic, masques, he had been student, tradesman, and
soldier; he had traveled in Flanders and seen Paris, and wandered on foot
through the length of England. London he knew as well as a man knows his
own house and club, the comforts of its taverns, the revels of lords and
ladies, the sports of Bartholomew Fair, and the humors of suburban
villages; all the phases, language, crafts, professions of high and low
city life were familiar to him. And in his comedies, as Mr. A. W. Ward
pertinently says, his marvelously vivid reproduction of manners is
unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries. "The age lives in his men and
women, his country gulls and town gulls, his imposters and skeldering
captains, his court ladies and would-be court ladies, his puling
poetasters and whining Puritans, and, above all, in the whole ragamuffin
rout of his Bartholomew Fair. Its pastimes, fashionable and
unfashionable, its games and vapors and jeering, its high-polite
courtships and its pulpit-shows, its degrading superstitions and
confounding hallucinations, its clubs of naughty ladies and its offices
of lying news, its taverns and its tobacco shops, its giddy heights and
its meanest depths--all are brought before us by our author."

No, he was not swamped by classicism, but he was affected by it, and just
here, and in that self-consciousness which Shakespeare was free from, and
which may have been more or less the result of his classic erudition, he
fails of being one of the universal poets of mankind. The genius of
Shakespeare lay in his power to so use the real and individual facts of
life as to raise in the minds of his readers a broader and nobler
conception of human life than they had conceived before. This is creative
genius; this is the idealist dealing faithfully with realistic material;
this is, as we should say in our day, the work of the artist as
distinguished from the work of the photographer. It may be an admirable
but it is not the highest work of the sculptor, the painter, or the
writer, that does not reveal to the mind--that comes into relation w