no sign of any
borrowing in the work itself: we can detect no foreign influences, no
second-hand touches, nothing to suggest that any part of the thing had
ever been thought of before; what he took being so thoroughly
assimilated with what he gave, that the whole seems to have come
fresh from Nature and his own mind: so that, had the originals been
lost, we should never have suspected there were any.

Shakespeare generally preferred to make up his plots and stories out
of such materials as were most familiar to his audience. Of this we
have many examples; but the fact is too well known to need dwelling
upon. Though surpassingly rich in fertility and force of invention, he
was notwithstanding singularly economical and sparing in the use of
it. Which aptly shows how free he was from every thing like a
sensational spirit or habit of mind. Nature was every thing to him,
novelty nothing, or next to nothing. The true, not the new, was always
the soul of his purpose; than which nothing could better approve the
moral healthiness of his genius. Hence, in great part, his noble
superiority to the intellectual and literary fashions of his time. He
understood these perfectly; but he deliberately rejected them, or
rather struck quite above or beyond them. We rarely meet with any
thing that savours of _modishness_ in his workmanship. Probably the
best judgment ever pronounced upon him is Ben Jonson's, "He was not of
an age, but for all time." For even so it is with the permanences of
our intellectual and imaginative being that he deals, and not with any
transiencies of popular or fashionable excitement or pursuit. And as
he cared little for the new, so he was all the stronger in that which
does not grow old, and which lives on from age to age in the
perennial, unwithering freshness of Truth and Nature. For the being
carried hither and thither by the shifting mental epidemics of the
day, what is it, after all, but a tacit confession of weakness or
disease? proving, at the least, that one has not strength of mind
enough to "feel the soul of Nature," or to live at peace with the
solidities of reason. And because the attractions of mere novelty had
no force with Shakespeare; because his mind dwelt far above the
currents of intellectual fashion and convention; therefore his dramas
stand "exempt from the wrongs of time"; and the study of them is,
with but a single exception, just our best discipline in those forms
and sources of interest