d the immense advantage of being at one with
his age, and not at odds with it. When he sought materials for
his poetry, he did not need, like our painters, to dive into
past worlds, restore lost creeds, worship fallen gods, and
imitate foreign works of art: from his national soil he drew the
power which makes his poetry unrivalled. The age favoured him
from another side also. He appeared at that auspicious period
when the Drama had in England already obtained acceptance and,
love; when the sympathy of the people was most alive; and when,
on the other hand, the public were not yet corrupted with
oversensibility. He took that in hand which most actively
engaged the spirit of the people; and he carried it through
progressive steps to a consummation beyond which there was
nothing possible but retrogression.--GERVINUS.

Thus the time and the man were just suited to each other; and it was
in his direct, fearless, whole-hearted sympathy with the soul of the
time that the man both lost himself and found his power: which is
doubtless one reason why we see so little of him in what he wrote. So
that the work could not possibly have been done anywhere but in
England,--the England of Spenser and Raleigh and Bacon; nor could it
have been done there and then by any man but Shakespeare. In his hand
what had long been a national passion became emphatically a National
Institution: how full of life, is shown in that it has ever since
refused to die. And it seems well worth the while to bring this
clearly into view, inasmuch as it serves to remove the subject upon
deeper and broader principles of criticism than have commonly stood
uppermost in the minds of the Poet's critics.

Properly speaking, then, it was the mind and soul of old England that
made the English Drama as we have it in Shakespeare: her life, genius,
culture, spirit, character, built up the work, and built themselves
into the work, at once infusing the soul and determining the form. Of
course, therefore, they ordered and shaped the thing to suit their own
purpose, or so as to express freely and fitly their proper force and
virtue; and they did this in wise ignorance, or in noble disregard, of
antecedent examples, and of all formal and conventional rules. In
other words, they were the _life_ of the thing; and that life
organized its body, as it needs must do, according to its innate and
essential laws.[12]

[12]