SHAKSPEARE,
The most highly endowed of human intelligences, was under as great necessity of learning the vocabulary of the English tongue as the very commonest mind. He, like all other men, however inferior to him in understanding or imagination, was born without any innate knowledge of things, or their natures, words, or the rules for fashioning them in order, or combining them with grace and harmony, eloquence and strength. Every author of the first class was in the same predicament mentally at birth; they had everything to learn, and the perfection of their learning depended on their own effort. It may be equally affirmed, then, of the highest poet and the greatest linguist, of Shakspeare and Sir William Jones, that neither had any “royal road” for gaining his peculiar eminence.
The little we know of the personal history of Shakspeare renders it necessary for us to attribute a very ample measure of his unrivalled excellence to that quality of the mind which we are insisting upon as requisite for the performance of great and exalted labours. If it be true that schoolmasters taught him little, how indefatigable must have been that perseverance which enabled him, not simply to equal, but so immeasurably to transcend his more learned contemporaries and fellow-workers, in the wealth of his language, and in the beauty and fitness of its application! If his helps were few, so much the more astonishing is the energy and continuity of effort which issued in securing for him who exerted it the highest name in the world’s literature. Nor can minds of primal order be satisfied with a passing ovation that may be forgotten; they thirst to render their triumphs monumental. Our grand dramatist piled effort upon effort, until he left to the world the priceless legacy of his thirty-seven plays. His mind had none of the sickly quality which views a settled form of composition as irksome, and indulges its unhealthy fantasies in irregular and useless essays. He wrought out his magnificent and self-appointed task to the end; he made his own monument worthy of himself.
Birthplace of Shakspeare.