, let me tell
you, is a very different thing from merely making "the sound an echo
to the sense,"--as much better too as it is different.

* * * * *

Everybody conversant with the subject knows that an author's style, if
genuine, (and it is not properly a style, but a mannerism, if
ungenuine,) is a just measure of his mind, and an authentic
registration of all his faculties and forces. It has indeed passed
into a proverb, that "the style is the man." And there is no other
English writing, probably no uninspired writing in the world, of which
this is so unreservedly true as of Shakespeare's; and this, because
his is the most profoundly genuine: here the style--I mean in his
characteristic pieces--is all his own,--rooted perfectly in and
growing entirely from the man himself,--and has no borrowed sap or
flavour whatever. And as he surpasses all others alike in breadth and
delicacy of perception, in sweep and subtilty of thought, in vastness
of grasp and minuteness of touch, in fineness of fibre and length and
strength of line; so all these are faithfully reflected in his use of
language. There is none other so overwhelming in its power, none so
irresistible in its sweetness. If his intellect could crush the
biggest and toughest problems into food, his tongue was no less able
to voice in all fitting accents the results of that tremendous
digestion. Coleridge, the profoundest of critics, calls him "an
oceanic mind," and this language, as expressing the idea of
multitudinous unity, is none too big for him; Hallam, the severest of
critics, describes him as "thousand-souled," and this has grown into
common use as no more than just; another writer makes his peculiarity
to consist in "an infinite delicacy of mind"; and whatsoever of truth
and fitness there may be in any or all of these expression's has a
just exponent in his style.

All which may suffice to explain why it is that Shakespeare's style
has no imitators. He were indeed a very hardy or else a very imbecile
man, who should undertake to imitate it. All the other great English
poets, however, have been imitated in this respect, and some of them
with no little success. Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_, for example,
is an avowed imitation of Spenser; and that, I think, is Thomson's
best poem. Beattie's _Minstrel_, too, is another happy imitation of
the same great original. I cannot say so much for any of Milton's or
Wordsworth's imitators