atises, and prove, that, whatever the extent of his
learning, the range and accuracy of his knowledge were beyond precedent
or later parallel, are really outside the province of an editor.

That Shakspeare did not edit his own works must be attributed, we
suspect, to his premature death. That he should not have intended it is
inconceivable. That the "Tempest" was his latest work we have no doubt;
and perhaps it is not considering too nicely to conjecture a profound
personal meaning in it. Is it over-fanciful to think that in the master
Prospero we have the type of Imagination? in Ariel, of the
wonder-working and winged Fantasy? in Caliban, of the half-animal but
serviceable Understanding, tormented by Fancy and the unwilling slave
of Imagination? and that there is something of self-consciousness in
the breaking of Prospero's wand and burying his book,--a sort of sad
prophecy, based on self-knowledge of the nature of that man who, after
such thaumaturgy, could go down to Stratford and live there for years,
only collecting his dividends from the Globe Theatre, lending money on
mortgage, and leaning over his gate to chat and bandy quips with
neighbors? His thought had entered into every phase of human life and
thought, had embodied all of them in living creations;--had he found
all empty, and come at last to the belief that genius and its works
were as phantasmagoric as the rest, and that fame was as idle as the
rumor of the pit? However this may be, his works have come down to us
in a condition of manifest and admitted corruption in some portions,
while in others there is an obscurity which may be attributed either to
an idiosyncratic use of words and condensation of phrase, to a depth of
intuition for a proper coalescence with which ordinary language is
inadequate, to a concentration of passion in a focus that consumes the
lighter links which bind together the clauses of a sentence or of a
process of reasoning in common parlance, or to a sense of music which
mingles music and meaning without essentially confounding them. We
should demand for a perfect editor, then, first, a thorough
glossological knowledge of the English contemporary with Shakspeare;
second, enough logical acuteness of mind and metaphysical training to
enable him to follow recondite processes of thought; third, such a
conviction of the supremacy of his author as always to prefer his
thought to any theory of his own; fourth, a feeling for music, and so
mu