two after the death of Shakespere's daughter, drew up that famous and
memorable eulogy which ought to be familiar to all, and which, long before
any German had spoken of Shakespere, and thirty years before Voltaire had
come into the world, exactly and precisely based the structure of
Shakespere-worship. Pope edited Shakespere. Johnson edited him. Coleridge
is acknowledged as, with his contemporaries Lamb and Hazlitt, the founder
of modern appreciation. It must be a curious reckoning which, in face of
such a catena as this, stretching its links over the whole period,
maintains that England wanted Germans to teach her how to admire the writer
whom Germans have done more to mystify and distort than even his own
countrymen.

The work of Shakespere falls into three divisions very unequal in bulk.
There is first (speaking both in the order of time and in that of thought,
though not in that of literary importance and interest) the small division
of poems, excluding the _Sonnets_, but including _Venus and Adonis_, _The
Rape of Lucrece_, and the few and uncertain but exquisite scraps, the
_Lover's Complaint_, _The Passionate Pilgrim_, and so forth. All these are
likely to have been the work of early youth, and they are much more like
the work of other men than any other part of Shakespere's work, differing
chiefly in the superior sweetness of those wood-notes wild, which Milton
justly, if not altogether adequately, attributed to the poet, and in the
occasional appearance of the still more peculiar and unique touches of
sympathy with and knowledge of universal nature which supply the main
Shakesperian note. The _Venus_ and the _Lucrece_ form part of a large
collection (see last chapter) of extremely luscious, not to say voluptuous,
poetry which the imitation of Italian models introduced into England, which
has its most perfect examples in the earlier of these two poems, in
numerous passages of Spenser, and in the _Hero and Leander_ of Marlowe, but
which was written, as will have been seen from what has been already said,
with extraordinary sweetness and abundance, by a vast number of
Elizabethan writers. There are extant mere _adespota_, and mere "minor
poems" (such as the pretty "Britain's Ida," which used to be printed as
Spenser's, and which some critics have rather rashly given to Phineas
Fletcher), good enough to have made reputation, if not fortune, at other
times. There is no reason to attribute to Shakespere on the one han