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He was gone, and Cecil was not sure that he had not presumed to laugh at her. Strangers in court do take her for the queen. Shakespeare The first Sunday of Julius Charnock's ministry was spent in an unexpected manner. In the darkness of the autumn morning there was a knock at the door, and a low hurried call in Anne's voice at the bedroom door: "Rosamond! Julius, pray look out!
Madelon, as she knitted, ever measured the distance between her brother and herself with her great black eyes, training her nerves and muscles for what she had to do as she would have trained a bow and arrow. Eugene turned a leaf in his Shakespeare book.
All they know is, that sometimes this name is spelled on the back of one fat volume, sometimes on three, sometimes on a dozen or more, but of the inside they know almost nothing, and when they hear persons say that Shakespeare is the greatest writer that ever lived, they wonder about it.
In narrating them he invested familiar and commonplace facts with something of the fascination of romance. "Human life," he would say, "is the same everywhere. If we could but get at the truth, we should find that all the tragedy and comedy of Shakespeare have been reproduced in this little village.
Shakespeare was an intellectual ocean whose waves touched all the shores of human thought, within which were all the tides and currents and pulses upon which lay all the lights and shadows, and over which brooded all the calms, and swept all the storms and tempests of which the soul is capable.
And what he observed he had the art of communicating in two widely different ways. He could describe virtues, vices, habits, whims, as well as Clarendon. But he could do something better. He could call human beings into existence, and make them exhibit themselves. If we wish to find anything more vivid than Addison's best portraits, we must go either to Shakespeare or to Cervantes.
"But why has Shakespeare such a long face?" said Max; "has camping out caused a reminiscence of rheumatism!" "Bad dreams, horrible dreams!" answered Browne, shaking his head solemnly, "which came of lying staring at the moon last night, until I fell asleep:" then throwing himself into an attitude, he commenced declaiming with a tragic air
But it was from none of these that Shakespeare took the story, but from the chronicle of a man named Holinshed who lived and wrote in the time of Queen Elizabeth, he in his turn having taken it from some one of the earlier sources.
"No, indeed," I answered, nettled at his words and manner. "It would take me until to-morrow to name all the great men I have ever heard of. I suppose you have heard the names of Napoleon, Wellington, Nelson, Dante, Luther, Calvin, Bismarck, Voltaire?" He still shook his head. "Well, then," I continued, "Homer, Socrates, Alexander the Great, Confucius, Zoroaster, Plato, Shakespeare."
One small book of criticism which he produced about this time was entitled, "Account of the English Poets." A significant feature of the work is that Shakespeare is not mentioned, even once, while Dryden is placed as the standard of excellence, just as in "Modern Painters," Ruskin takes Turner and lets him stand for one hundred, and all other artists grade down from this.
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