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But the present resemblance is not a matter of first impressions. The fact is patent historically. The men whom Japan reveres are much less removed from the common herd than is the case in any Western land. And this has been so from the earliest times. Shakspeares and Newtons have never existed there. Japanese humanity is not the soil to grow them.
The last night of this short-lived holiday-time, the party, after staying out on the lake to a later hour than usual, stood lingering still on the lawn of the villa; and their host, who was rather addicted to superficial studies of the positive sciences, including, of course, the most popular of all, astronomy, kept his guests politely listening to speculative conjectures on the probable size of the inhabitants of Sirius, that very distant and very gigantic inhabitant of heaven who has led philosophers into mortifying reflections upon the utter insignificance of our own poor little planet, capable of producing nothing greater than Shakspeares and Newtons, Aristotles and Caesars, mannikins, no doubt, beside intellects proportioned to the size of the world in which they flourish.
Our own reading and deciphering of the whole case is as follows. The Shakspeares were a handsome family, both father and sons. On these grounds, direct or circumstantial, we believe ourselves warranted in assuming that William Shakspeare was a handsome and even noble looking boy.
Russia may produce many Karasmins to write glowing histories of her wars and conquests, but her Burkes, her Pitts, and her Foxes will be few, and her Shakspeares and her Bacons fewer still. Her Pascal's Reflections will be tinged with Siberian horrors; her Young's Night Thoughts will be of the dancing damsels of St.
"I never could quite make out what kind of fishes these are," said the Rev. John Stalworth. "They are certainly not pike which formed the emblematic blazon of the Hotofts, and are still grim enough to frighten future Shakspeares on the scutcheon of the Warwickshire Lucys." "I believe they are tenches," said Mr. Mivers.
Her Bacons arid Shakspeares, her Miltons and Newtons, with all the truth which they have revealed, and all the generous virtues which they have inspired, are of inferior value when compared with the subjection of men and their rulers to the principles of justice; if, indeed, it be not more true that these mighty spirits could not have been formed except under equal laws, nor roused to full activity without the influence of that spirit which the Great Charter breathed over their forefathers."
These heroisms have I, though rather shy of exhibiting them. These; and something withal of the huge beaver-faculty of our Arkwrights, Brindleys; touches too of the phoenix-melodies and sunny heroisms of our Shakspeares, of our Singers, Sages and inspired Thinkers all this is in me, I will hope, though rather shy of exhibiting it on common occasions.
There was, perhaps, a learned and vigorous monarch, and there were Cecils and Walsinghams, and Shakspeares and Spensers, and Sidneys and Raleighs, with many other powerful thinkers and actors, to render it the proudest age of our national glory.
Slavery, polygamy, and human sacrifices have been practiced among Europeans in by-gone days; and when Tyndall tells us that out of savages unable to count to the number of their fingers and speaking only a language of nouns and verbs, arise at length our Newtons and Shakspeares, I do not see that the negro could not have learned our language and received our religion without the intervention of ages of slavery."
The "age of miracles" had been, or perhaps had not been; but it was not any longer. An effete world; wherein Wonder, Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell; in one word, a godless world! How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time, compared not with the Christian Shakspeares and Miltons, but with the old Pagan Skalds, with any species of believing men!
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