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Updated: June 22, 2025
Jasper Mayne's opinion, that 'In thee Ben Jonson still held Shakspeare's style'; or that he possest 'Lucan's bold heights match'd to staid Virgil's care, Martial's quick salt, joined to Musaeus' tongue. The specific gravity of the poems, so to speak, is far greater than that of any of his contemporaries; everywhere is thought, fancy, force, varied learning.
The pride of what has been called the existing maturity of human intensity, has come to a miserable end; and the structures erected by those pedagogues of the human race have fallen to pieces like the baby-houses of children. With regard to the tone of society in Shakspeare's day, it is necessary to remark that there is a wide difference between true mental cultivation and what is called polish.
This tale is fabulous, and rotten to its core; yet even this does less dishonor to Shakspeare's memory than the sequel attached to it. A sort of scurrilous rondeau, consisting of nine lines, so loathsome in its brutal stupidity, and so vulgar in its expression, that we shall not pollute our pages by transcribing it, has been imputed to Shakspeare ever since the days of the credulous Rowe.
One can discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased him; his delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let Antonio the merchant answer for his great heart. So far from Shakspeare's being the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history, known to us.
He fully experienced the truth of Shakspeare's saying, "Conscience does make cowards of us all"! As soon, therefore, as he thought his horse was in a condition again to take to the road, he started up, and paying his score, walked out to the stables. The landlord followed him, and touched him on the shoulder.
The Antony of Shakspeare, immortal for its execution, is found, after all, as regards the primary conception, in history. Shakspeare's delineation is but the expansion of the germ already preexisting, by way of scattered fragments, in Cicero's Philippics, in Cicero's Letters, in Appian, &c. But Cleopatra, equally fine, is a pure creation of art.
Of course Shakspeare's omniscience included all natural phenomena; but the rest, great or small, associate themselves with some special aspects, and not with the daily atmosphere.
With these instancies of his dying mother almost a voice from the tomb still tingling in his ears, the position of young Charles of Orleans, when he was left at the head of that great house, was curiously similar to that of Shakspeare's Hamlet.
Regarding the three as one harmonious and united performance, altogether not so long as one play of Shakspeare's, they are certainly not surpassed in greatness of thought, in loftiness of conception, and in sustained vigour of execution, by any poem in the compass of literature; nor, observing their simple but compact symmetry as a whole, shall we do right to subscribe to those who deny to Aeschylus the skill of the artist, while they grant him the faculty of the poet.
I should consider it unfair to quit Shakspeare's house without the frank acknowledgment that I was conscious of not the slightest emotion while viewing it, nor any quickening of the imagination. This has often happened to me in my visits to memorable places.
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