ourselves on the
enlargement of our understanding when we read the
decisions of grave law-courts in cases of supposed
witchcraft; we smile complacently over Raleigh's story
of the island of the Amazons, and rejoice that we are
not such as he--entangled in the cobwebs of effete
and foolish superstition. The true conclusion is the
opposite of the conclusion which we draw. That
Raleigh and Bacon could believe what they believed,
and could be what they were notwithstanding, is to
us a proof that the injury which such mistakes can
inflict is unspeakably insignificant: and arising, as they
arose, from a never-failing sense of the real awfulness
and mystery of the world, and of the life of human
souls upon it, they witness to the presence in such
minds of a spirit, the loss of which not the most perfect
acquaintance with every law by which the whole creation
moves can compensate. We wonder at the grandeur,
the moral majesty, of some of Shakespeare's characters,
so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves can
imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the
genius of the poet who has outstripped nature in his
creations; but we are misunderstanding the power
and the meaning of poetry in attributing creativeness
to it in any such sense; Shakespeare created, but only
as the spirit of nature created around him, working
in him as it worked abroad in those among whom he
lived. The men whom he draws were such men as he
saw and knew; the words they utter were such as he
heard in the ordinary conversations in which he joined.
At the Mermaid with Raleigh and with Sidney, and
at a thousand un-named English firesides, he found
the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlandos,
his Antonios, his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer
personal acquaintance which we can form with the
English of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are
satisfied that Shakespeare's great poetry is no more
than the rhythmic echo of the life which it depicts.

It was, therefore, with no little interest that we
heard of the formation of a society which was to employ
itself, as we understood, in republishing in accessible
form some, if not all, of the invaluable records compiled
or composed by Richard Hakluyt. Books, like everything
else, have their appointed death-day; the souls
of them, unless they be found worthy of a second birth
in a new body, perish with the paper in which they
lived, and the early folio Hakluyts, not from their
own want of m