liberty and
Protestantism beside the ditches and mounds of Holland; and the genius
of these two men bears impress of the awful period in the world's
history which had been reserved for their birth. They were both animated
by the struggle in which the whole earth was engaged. Lope did battle
for the church--the Pope--and, if need be, would have done so--for the
devil, if he had worn a mitre; he wrote plays where the heretics
required an immense quantity of rosin and blue lights to do justice to
their appalling situation. He preached, and prayed, and excommunicated,
and stirred up men's minds to enjoy the splendours of an _auto-da-fe_;
and, for all these, he was honoured by Pope and Caesar; was created a
knight of Alcantara; and, as the acme to his glory, was made a
_familiar_ of the Holy Inquisition. Shakspeare no less felt the
influence of the time. The old oppressive bonds under which bone and
sinew were compressed in order to make jolly old England a footstool for
the gouty toes of a wicked old man at Rome, (unless you choose rather to
consider him an unfortunate female, clothed in scarlet, and sitting on
seven hills,) had been snapt asunder. Henry VIII. (to borrow your own
classical expression, my dear Smith, as applied to your stage manager,
"the regularest beast as ever was," but the most useful beast mentioned
in any natural history I have ever met with) had determined to sit on
the seven hills himself; and little Edward had built a nice villa on the
sunny slope of one of them; and Mary had tried to tumble it down again;
and Elizabeth had planted round it, and laid out the grounds for
national recreation and use--like the park at Battersea, whenever that
scheme is carried into effect; and all men's minds were in a flurry.
Some drank themselves to death; some took to privateering; and many took
to having visions and dreaming dreams; and, in the midst of it,
Shakspeare rushed in a fury to his pen, and wrote play after play--very
noble, very bright, very wonderful--but mad--decidedly mad--the whole
time. Every body was mad; Essex galloped through London streets,
thinking, by mere dint of hard riding, to rouse the peaceful citizens to
take up arms in his behalf, as if the very stones would rise and
mutiny--a very mad idea, you will grant; Raleigh set off to seize as
much wealth as would have bought the fee-simple of a moderate kingdom,
with scarcely a sufficient force to follow the heroic Widdicombe at the
battle of W