between the use and the abuse; and the line of demarcation generally
turns out to be singularly fluctuating and uncertain. You can hardly
demolish Beaumont and Fletcher without bringing down some of the
outlying pinnacles, if not shaking the very foundations, of the temple
sacred to Shakespeare.

It would be regrettable, could one stop to regret the one-sided and
illogical construction of the human mind, that a fair judgment in such
matters seems to require incompatible qualities. Your impartial critic
or historian is generally a man who leaves out of account nothing but
the essential. His impartiality means sympathy with the commonplace, and
incapacity for understanding heroic faith and overpowering enthusiasm.
He fancies that a man or a book can be judged by balancing a list of
virtues and vices as if they were separate entities lying side by side
in a box, instead of different aspects of a vital force. On the other
hand, the vivid imagination which restores dead bones to life makes its
possessor a partisan in extinct quarrels, and as short-sighted and
unfair a partisan as the original actors. Roundheads and Cavaliers have
been dead these two centuries.

Dumb are those names erewhile in battle loud;
Dreamfooted as the shadow of a cloud,
They flit across the ear.

Yet few even amongst modern writers are capable of doing justice to both
sides without first making both sides colourless. Hallam judges men in
the throes of a revolution as though they were parties in a lawsuit to
be decided by precedents and parchments, and Carlyle cannot appreciate
Cromwell's magnificent force of character without making him all but
infallible and impeccable. Critics of the early drama are equally
one-sided. The exquisite literary faculty of Charles Lamb revelled in
detecting beauties which had been covered with the dust of oblivion
during the reign of Pope. His appreciation was intensified by that charm
of discovery which finds its typical utterance in Keats's famous sonnet.
He was scarcely a more impartial judge of Fletcher or Ford than 'Stout
Cortes' of the new world revealed by his enterprise. We may willingly
defer to his judgment of the relative value of the writers whom he
discusses, but we must qualify his judgment of their intrinsic
excellence by the recollection that he speaks as a lover. To him and
other thoroughgoing admirers of the old drama the Puritanical onslaught
upon the stage presented itself as the adve