ted from his day to our own? He tells
us very little. He must have heard discussions and arguments on metre,
on classical precedent, on the ancient and modern drama; but he makes no
mention of these questions. He does not seem to have attached any
prophetic importance to poetry. The poets who exalt their craft are of a
more slender build. Is it conceivable that he would have given his
support to a literary academy,--a project which began to find advocates
during his lifetime? I think not. It is true that he is full of good
sense, and that an academy exists to promulgate good sense. Moreover his
own free experiments brought him nearer and nearer into conformity with
classical models. _Othello_ and _Macbeth_ are better constructed plays
than _Hamlet_. The only one of his plays which, whether by chance or by
design, observes the so-called unities, of action and time and place, is
one of his latest plays--_The Tempest_. But he was an Englishman, and
would have been jealous of his freedom and independence. When the
grave-digger remarks that it is no great matter if Hamlet do not recover
his wits in England, because there the men are as mad as he, the satire
has a sympathetic ring in it. Shakespeare did not wish to see the mad
English altered. Nor are they likely to alter; our fears and our hopes
are vain. We entered on the greatest of our wars with an army no bigger,
so we are told, than the Bulgarian army. Since that time we have
regimented and organized our people, not without success; and our
soothsayers are now directing our attention to the danger that after the
war we shall be kept in uniform and shall become tame creatures, losing
our independence and our spirit of enterprise. There is nothing that
soothsayers will not predict when they are gravelled for lack of matter,
but this is the stupidest of all their efforts. The national character
is not so flimsy a thing; it has gone through good and evil fortune for
hundreds of years without turning a hair. You can make a soldier, and a
good soldier, of a humorist; but you cannot militarize him. He remains a
free thinker.

New institutions do not flourish in England. The town is a comparatively
modern innovation; it has never, so to say, caught on. Most schemes of
town-planning are schemes for pretending that you live in the country.
This is one of the most persistent of our many hypocrisies. Wherever
working people inhabit a street of continuous red-brick cottages, the
nam