im by distance
is indeed for the first time clearly demonstrated. We can still see him,
though other bodies of his system have vanished into the infinite depths
of oblivion. But he has also ceased to give appreciable warmth or light
to ordinary human beings. He is a splendid name, but not a living
influence. There are, of course, exceptions and qualifications to any
such statements, but I have a suspicion that even Shakespeare's chief
work may have been done in the Globe Theatre, to living audiences, who
felt what they never thought of criticising, and were quite unable to
measure; and that, spite of all aesthetic philosophers and minute
antiquarians and judicious revivals, his real influence upon men's minds
has been for the most part declining as his fame has been spreading. To
defend or fully expound this heretical dogma would take too much space.
The 'late-dinner' theory, however, as held by Wordsworth and Landor, is
subject to one less questionable qualification. It is an utterly
untenable proposition that great men have been generally overlooked in
their own day.

If we run over the chief names of our literature, it would be hard to
point to one which was not honoured, and sometimes honoured to excess,
during its proprietor's lifetime. It is, indeed, true that much
ephemeral underwood has often hidden in part the majestic forms which
now stand out as sole relics of the forest. It is true also that the
petty spite and jealousy of contemporaries, especially of their ablest
contemporaries, has often prevented the full recognition of great men.
And there have been some whose fame, like that of Bunyan and De Foe, has
extended amongst the lower sphere of readers before receiving the
ratification of constituted judges. But such irregularities in the
distribution of fame do not quite meet the point. I doubt whether one
could mention a single case in which an author, overlooked at the time
both by the critics and the mass, has afterwards become famous; and the
cases are very rare in which a reputation once decayed has again taken
root and shown real vitality. The experiment of resuscitation has been
tried of late years with great pertinacity. The forgotten images of our
seventeenth-century ancestors have been brought out of the lumber-room
amidst immense flourishes of trumpets, but they are terribly worm-eaten;
and all efforts to make their statues once more stand firmly on their
pedestals have generally failed. Landor him