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The following, quoted by Charles Knight in his biography of Shakspere, might almost have suggested the simile in the last-mentioned lines.
Throughout his life something of the spirit of the age which he was the last to touch lived on in Dryden. He loved and studied Chaucer and Spenser even while he was copying Molière and Corneille. His noblest panegyric was pronounced over Shakspere.
"Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? The familiar tradition that Shakspere as a boy was a poacher on the preserves of his aristocratic neighbor, Sir Thomas Lucy. See Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare.
We feel a reverence almost amounting to superstition, for the poet who deals with nature. And who is more capable of understanding the human heart than the poet? Who has better known the human feelings than Shakspere; better painted than Milton, the grandeur of Virtue; better sighed than Byron over the subtle weaknesses of Hope?
It almost seems as if only that feudalism in Europe, like slavery in our own South, could outcrop types of tallest, noblest personal character yet strength and devotion and love better than elsewhere invincible courage, generosity, aspiration, the spines of all. Here is where Shakspere and the others I have named perform a service incalculably precious to our America.
Such are the characters of Shakspere. The manner in which types are arrived at and made recognizable in other arts opens the subject more fully and throws light upon their nature.
We can all point in excuse to Shakspere, who was a very rough-and-ready person, and whose methods would shock Flaubert. Indeed, the amateurishness of Shakspere has been mightily exposed of late years. But nobody seems to care. If Flaubert had been a greater artist he might have been more of an amateur. Of this poor neglected matter of technique the more important branch is design or construction.
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine. and we see the young Shakspere, keen-eyed, observant, reveling in the beauty of nature. In Macbeth we read This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses.
The tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on Shakspere, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own somewhat narrow way, one has but to compare his Phedre, or Iphigenie, with Dryden's ranting tragedy of Tyrannic Love.
On the devoted head of Shakespeare who is also called Shakspere and Chaxpur he would have piled a load of rubbish, among which the crude and vigorous old tragedy under discussion shines out like a veritable diamond of the desert.
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