The Praise of Shakespeare: An English Anthology

PART II "GOOD SENTENCES"

Sir Sidney Lee

Good sentences.

Merchant of Venice, I. ii. 11.

Brief, short, quick, snap.

Merry Wives, IV. v. 2.

In the quick forge and working-house of thought.

Henry V. V. prol. 23.

A good swift simile.

Taming of the Shrew, V. ii. 54.

“GOOD SENTENCES”

Shakespeare, we must be silent in thy praise,
’Cause our encomions will but blast thy bays,
Which envy could not, that thou didst so well,
Let thine own histories prove thy chronicle.

Anonymous. Epig. 25. Witts Recreations. 1640, printed 1639.

To-day we bring old gather’d herbs, ’tis true,
But such as in sweet Shakespeare’s garden grew.
And all his plants immortal you esteem,
Your mouths are never out of taste with him.

John Crowne (d. 1703?). Prologue to Henry the Sixth, the First Part. Adapted from Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI. 1681. Sig. A2.

Shakespeare (whom you and every playhouse bill
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will)
For gain, not glory, wing’d his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despite.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Imitations of Horace. Bk. II. ch. i. ll. 69-72. 1737.

Thrice happy! could we catch great Shakespeare’s art,
To trace the deep recesses of the heart;
His simple plain sublime, to which is given
To strike the soul with darted flame from heaven.

James Thomson (1700-1748). Prologue to Tancred and SigismundÂ. 1745. Sig. A4.

Let others seek a monumental fame,
And leave for one short age a pompous name;
Thou dost not e’en this little tomb require,
Shakespeare can only with the world expire.

Epitaph on a Tombstone of Shakespeare. Gentleman’s Magazine. June 1767, vol. xxvii. p. 324.

Shakespeare came out of Nature’s hand like Pallas out of Jove’s head, at full growth and mature.

George Colman (1733-1794), before 1767.

George Colman, who advocated the theory that Shakespeare had some classic learning, commenting in the Appendix to the second edition of his translation of the comedies of Terence (1768) on Richard Farmer’s Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (1767), which maintains that Shakespeare got his knowledge of the ancients from translations, says: “Mr. Farmer closes these general testimonies of Shakespeare’s having been only indebted to Nature, by saying, ‘He came out of her hand, as some one else expresses it, like Pallas out of Jove’s head, at full growth and mature.’ It is whimsical enough, that this some one else, whose expression is here quoted to countenance the general notion of Shakespeare’s want of literature, should be no other than myself. Mr. Farmer does not choose to mention where he met with this expression of some one else; and some one else does not choose to mention where he dropped it.” Colman’s “Appendix” was printed in the “Variorum” editions of Shakespeare, and that of 1785 gave an anonymous note, stating that Young “in his Conjectures on Original Composition (vol. v. p. 100, ed. 1773) has the following sentence: ‘An adult genius comes out of Nature’s hands, as Pallas out of Jove’s head, at full growth and mature.’ Shakespeare’s genius was of this kind.” Young’s Conjectures appeared in 1759, so perhaps Colman borrowed, though, as he says (Prose on Several Occasions, 1787, ii. p. 186), “The thought is obvious, and might, without improbability, occur to different writers.” At any rate, his form of the thought is better than Young’s, so he has here been given the credit for it.

To mark her Shakespeare’s worth, and Britain’s love,
Let Pope design, and Burlington approve:
Superfluous care! when distant times shall view
This tomb grown old—his works shall still be new.

Richard Graves (1715-1804). “On erecting a Monument to Shakespeare under the direction of Mr. Pope and Lord Burlington.” Euphrosyne, 1776.

This refers to the monument erected by public subscription in Westminster Abbey in 1741. The design was by William Kent, and the statue of Shakespeare, which was part of it, was executed by Peter Scheemachers.

Our modern tragedies, hundreds of them do not contain a good line; nor are they a jot the better, because Shakespeare, who was superior to all mankind, wrote some whole plays that are as bad as any of our present writers’.

Horace Walpole (1717-1797). Letter to Sir Horace Mann, Oct. 8, 1778. Letters. Ed. Peter Cunningham, 1858, vol. vii. p. 135.

Write like Shakespeare, and laugh at the critics.

Daniel Webb (1719?-1798). Literary Amusements, 1787, p. 22.

Shakespeare,...
Lord of the mighty spell: around him press
Spirits and fairy forms. He, ruling wide
His visionary world, bids terror fill
The shivering breast, or softer pity thrill
E’en to the inmost heart.

W. L. Bowles (1762-1850). “Monody on the Death of Dr. Warton,” 1801. Poems, 1803, vol. ii. pp. 141-2.

Is there no bard of heavenly power possess’d,
To thrill, to rouse, to animate the breast?
Like Shakespeare o’er the sacred mind to sway,
And call each wayward passion to obey?

F. D. Hemans (1793-1835). “England and Spain,” 1807.

Our love of Shakespeare, therefore, is not a monomania or solitary and unaccountable infatuation; but is merely the natural love which all men bear to those forms of excellence that are accommodated to their peculiar character, temperament, and situation; and which will always return, and assert its power over their affections, long after authority has lost its reverence, fashions been antiquated, and artificial tastes passed away.

Francis Lord Jeffrey (1773-1850). Edinburgh Review, Aug. 1811, vol. xviii. p. 285.

Shakespeare had the inward clothing of a fine mind; the outward covering of solid reading, of critical observation, and the richest eloquence; and compared with these, what are the trappings of the schools?

George Dyer (1755-1841). “The Relation of Poetry to the Arts and Sciences,” in The Reflector, 1811. Reprinted in Poetics, 1812, ii. p. 19.

Shakespeare has been accused of profaneness. I for my part have acquired from perusal of him, a habit of looking into my own heart, and am confident that Shakespeare is an author of all others the most calculated to make his readers better as well as wiser.

S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834). “Outline of an introductory Lecture on Shakespeare,” 1812.

Let no man blame his son for learning history from Shakespeare.

Id. Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton. Ed. J. P. Collier, p. 19.

The greatest genius that, perhaps, human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded[232:1] Shakespeare.

Id. Biographia Literaria, 1817, chap. xv.

The great, ever-living, dead man.

Ibid.

Humanity’s divinest son,
That sprightliest, gravest, wisest, kindest one—
Shakespeare.

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). Thoughts of the Avon on 28 Sept. 1817.

His plays alone are properly expressions of the passions, not descriptions of them. His characters are real beings of flesh and blood; they speak like men, not like authors.

William Hazlitt (1778-1830). “On Shakespeare and Milton,” Lectures on the English Poets, 1818, p. 98.

In trying to recollect any other author, one sometimes stumbles, in case of failure, on a word as good. In Shakespeare, any other word but the true one, is sure to be wrong.[234:1]

Ibid., p. 108.

Shakespeare was the least of a coxcomb of any one that ever lived, and much of a gentleman.

Ibid., p. 111.

... Divinest Shakespeare’s might
Fills Avon and the world with light,
Like omniscient power which he
Imaged ’mid mortality.

P. B. Shelley (1792-1822). “Lines written among the Euganean Hills,” October 1818.

Shakespeare led a life of allegory: his works are the comments on it.

John Keats (1795-1821). Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 18 Feb. 1819.

If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.

William Hazlitt (1778-1830). Table Talk, 1821, vol. i. p. 177.

... Shakespeare, who in our hearts for himself hath erected an empire

Not to be shaken by time, nor e’er by another divided.

Robert Southey (1774-1843). A Vision of Judgment, 1821, ix. ll. 17, 18.

I look upon him to be the worst of models, though the most extraordinary of writers.

Lord Byron (1788-1824). Letter to Murray, 14 July 1821. Moore’s Life of Byron.

Schiller has the material sublime: to produce an effect, he sets you a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old tower. But Shakespeare drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow.

S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834). Table Talk, 29 Dec. 1822.

An immortal man,—
Nature’s chief darling, and illustrious mate,
Destined to foil old Death’s oblivious plan,
And shine untarnish’d by the fogs of Fate,
Time’s famous rival till the final date!

Thomas Hood (1799-1845). The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, cv. 1827, p. 53.

Who knows or can figure what the Man Shakespeare was, by the first, by the twentieth, perusal of his works? He is a Voice coming to us from the Land of Melody: his old brick dwelling-place, in the mere earthly burgh of Stratford-on-Avon, offers us the most inexplicable enigma.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, “Goethe.” Reprinted from Foreign Review, No. 3, 1828.

Students of poetry admire Shakespeare in their tenth year; but go on admiring him more and more, understanding him more and more, till their threescore-and-tenth.

Ibid.

No one can understand Shakespeare’s superiority fully until he has ascertained, by comparison, all that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely Shakespeare’s own.

S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834). Table Talk, 12 May 1830.

His was the wizard spell,
The spirit to enchain:
His grasp o’er nature fell,
Creation own’d his reign.

“Poetical Portraits” by A Modern Pythagorean in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. xxvii. 1830, p. 632.

It is not too much to say, that the great plays of Shakespeare would lose less by being deprived of all the passages which are commonly called the fine passages, than those passages lose by being read separately from the play. This is, perhaps, the highest praise which can be given to a dramatist.

Lord Macaulay (1800-1859). Edinburgh Review, June 1831, vol. liii. pp. 567-8.

I believe Shakespeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local allusions of no consequence. And I said, he is of no age—nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind: his observation and reading, which were considerable, supplied him with the drapery of his figures.

S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834). Table Talk, 15 March 1834.

I would be willing to live only as long as Shakespeare were the mirror to Nature.

Id., Letters, etc., 1836, i. 196.

Than Shakespeare and Petrarch pray who are more living?

Whose words more delight us? whose touches more touch?

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). “Blue-stocking Revels; or, the Feast of the Violets.” Canto III. Monthly Repository, 1837.

In the gravest sense it may be affirmed of Shakespeare, that he is among the modern luxuries of life.

T. De Quincey (1785-1859). “Shakespeare,” EncyclopÆdia Britannica, 7th ed., 1842. Written 1838.

Produce us from any drama of Shakespeare one of those leading passages that all men have by heart, and show us any eminent defect in the very sinews of the thought. It is impossible; defects there may be, but they will always be found irrelevant to the main central thought, or to its expression.

Id. “Pope,” EncyclopÆdia Britannica, 7th ed., 1842. Written 1839.

Shakespeare, a wool-comber, poacher, or whatever else at Stratford in Warwickshire, who happened to write books! The finest human figure, as I apprehend, that Nature has hitherto seen fit to make of our widely diffused Teutonic clay. Saxon, Norman, Celt or Sarmat, I find no human soul so beautiful, these fifteen hundred known years;—our supreme modern European man.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). “Geschichte der Teutschen Sippschaft,” translated by Carlyle in Chartism, 1839. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.

It is to be doubted whether even Shakespeare could have told a story like Homer, owing to that incessant activity and superfoetation of thought, a little less of which might be occasionally desired even in his plays;—if it were possible, once possessing anything of his, to wish it away.

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). “What is Poetry?” Imagination and Fancy, 1844. Ed. A. S. Cook, 1893, p. 65.

Now, literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakespearised. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see.

R. W. Emerson (1803-1882). “Representative Men.” Shakespeare; or the Poet, 1844.

Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb
The crowns o’ the world: O eyes sublime,
With tears and laughter for all time!

E. B. Browning (1809-1861). A Vision of Poets, 1844.

A rib of Shakespeare would have made a Milton: the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever since.

W. S. Landor (1775-1846). “Imaginary Conversations.” Works, 1846, ii. p. 74.

In poetry there is but one supreme,
Tho’ there are many angels round his throne,
Mighty, and beauteous, while his face is hid.

Id. “On Shakespeare.” “Poems and Epigrams.” Works, 1846.

A long list can be cited of passages in Shakespeare, which have been solemnly denounced by many eminent men (all blockheads) as ridiculous: and if a man does find a passage in a tragedy that displeases him, it is sure to seem ludicrous: witness the indecent exposures of themselves made by Voltaire, La Harpe, and many billions beside of bilious people.

T. De Quincey (1785-1859). “Schlosser’s Literary History.” Tait’s Magazine, Sept., Oct., 1847.

A thousand poets pried at life,
And only one amid the strife
Rose to be Shakespeare.

R. Browning (1812-1889). Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, xvi., 1850.

When I began to give myself up to the profession of a poet for life, I was impressed with a conviction, that there were four English poets whom I must have continually before me as examples—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. These I must study, and equal if I could; and I need not think of the rest.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Memoirs. By Christopher Wordsworth, 1851, vol. ii. p. 470.

I cannot account for Shakespeare’s low estimate of his own writings, except from the sublimity, the superhumanity of his genius. They were infinitely below his conception of what they might have been, and ought to have been.

Ibid.

... Matchless Shakespeare, who, undaunted, took
From Nature’s shrinking hand her secret book,
And page by page the wondrous tome explored.

D. M. Moir (1798-1851), before 1851. “Stanzas on an Infant.” Poetical Works, 1852, vol. ii. p. 50.

Shakespeare’s glowing soul,

Where mightiness and meekness met.

Ibid., p. 341, “Hymn to the Moon.”

Kind Shakespeare, our recording angel.

T. L. Beddoes (1803-1849). “Lines written in Switzerland.” Poems, 1851, vol. i. p. 215.

Kinder all earth hath grown since genial Shakespeare sung!

Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton (1805-1873). “The Souls of Books,” i. l. 21. Works, 1853, vol. iii. p. 282.

Shakespeare...
... Wise and true,
Bright as the noon-tide, clear as morning dew,
And wholesome in the spirit and the form.

Charles Mackay (1814-1899). “Mist.” Under Green Leaves, 1857.

I care not how Shakespeare is acted: with him the thought suffices.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), c. 1860.

I am always happy to meet persons who perceive the transcendent superiority of Shakespeare over all other writers.

R. W. Emerson (1803-1882). “Culture.” Conduct of Life, 1860.

We may consider Shakespeare, as an ancient mythologist would have done, as “enskied” among “the invulnerable clouds,” where no shaft, even of envy, can assail him. From this elevation we may safely predict that he never can be plucked.

Cardinal Wiseman (1802-1856). William Shakespeare, 1865, p. 28.

To say truth, what I most of all admire are the traces he shows of a talent that could have turned the History of England into a kind of Iliad, almost perhaps into a kind of Bible.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). “Shooting Niagara: and After?” Macmillan’s Magazine, August, 1867.

Shakespeare! loveliest of souls,

Peerless in radiance, in joy.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). “Heine’s Grave.” New Poems, 1867, p. 198.

If Shakespeare did not know the ancients, I think they were at least as unlucky in not knowing him.

J. R. Lowell (1819-1891). Among my Books, 1870, p. 190.

Shakespeare recognised both our human imperfections and our human greatness.... A woman is dearer to Shakespeare than an angel; a man is better than a god.

Edward Dowden (b. 1843). Shakespeare: His Mind and Art, 1875, p. 346.

Shakespeare frequently has lines and passages in a strain quite false, and which are entirely unworthy of him. But one can imagine his smiling if one could meet him in the Elysian Fields and tell him so; smiling and replying that he knew it perfectly well himself, and what did it matter?

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). “Preface to Poems of Wordsworth,” 1879. Essays in Criticism, 2nd ser., p. 135.

All Castaly flowed crystalline

In gentle Shakespeare’s modulated breath.

D. G. Rossetti (1828-1882). “On certain Elizabethan Revivals.” Recollections of D. G. Rossetti. By T. Hall Caine, 1882, p. 256.

Conception, fundamental brain work, that is what makes the difference in all art. Work your metal as much as you like, but first take care that it is gold, and worth working. A Shakespearean sonnet is better than the most perfect in form, because Shakespeare wrote it.

Ibid., p. 249.

I close your Marlowe’s page, my Shakespeare’s ope,
How welcome—after gong and cymbal’s din—
The continuity, the long slow slope
And vast curves of the gradual violin!

William Watson (b. 1858). Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature, 1884, vii.

Shakespeare illustrates every phase and variety of humour: a complete analysis of Shakespeare’s humour would make a system of psychology.

G. Moulton (b. 1849). Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, 1893, p. 285.

From Shakespeare, no doubt, the world may learn, and has learnt, much; yet he professed so little to be a teacher, that he has often been represented as almost without personal opinions, as a mere undisturbed mirror, in which all Nature reflects herself. Something like a century passed before it was perceived that his works deserved to be in a serious sense studied.

J. R. Seeley (1834-1895). Goethe reviewed after Sixty Years, 1894, p. 98.

Shakespeare and Chaucer throw off, at noble work, the lower part of their natures as they would a rough dress.

John Ruskin (1819-1900). Fors Clavigera. Letter XXXIV., 1896, ii. 235.

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