“Cotgrave’s English Treasury of Wit and Language,” 1655. He neglected to furnish the names of the dramatic writers from whom he drew the passages. Oldys, with singular diligence, succeeded in recovering these numerous sources, which I transcribed from his manuscript notes. Oldys’ copy should now repose in the library of Mr. Douce, given to the Bodleian.
A collection incomparably preferable to all preceding ones is “The British Muse, or a Collection of Thoughts—Moral, Natural, or Sublime—of our English poets who flourished in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” by Thomas Hayward, gent. 1732, in three volumes. It took a new title, not a new edition, as “The Quintessence of English Poetry.” Such a title could not recommend itself. The prefatory matter was designed for a critical history of all these Anthologies, and was the work of Oldys; but it was miserably mangled by Dr. Campbell, then the Aristarchus of the booksellers, to save print and paper! Our literary antiquary has vented, in a manuscript note, his agony and his indignation. He had also greatly assisted the collector; the circuit is wide and copious, and there is not a name of note which does not appear in these volumes. The ethical and poetic powers of our old dramatic poets, as here displayed, I doubt could be paralleled by our literary neighbours. We were a thoughtful people at the time that our humour was luxuriant—as lighter gaiety was from the first the national inheritance of France.
Of this collection, says Oldys, “Wherever you open it, you are in the heart of your subject. Every leaf includes many lessons, and is a system of knowledge in a few lines. The merely speculative may here find experience; the flattered, truth; the diffident, resolution, &c.” For my part, I think of these volumes as highly as Oldys himself.
But what has occasioned the little success of these collections of single passages and detached beauties, like collections of proverbs, is the confusion of their variety. We are pleased at every glance; till the eye, in weariness, closes over the volume which we neglect to re-open.
Charles Lamb’s “Specimens of English Dramatic Poets” is of deeper interest. He was a nobler workman, and he carries us on through whole scenes by a true unerring emotion. His was a poetical mind labouring in poetry.
SHAKESPEARE.
The vicissitudes of the celebrity of Shakespeare may form a chapter in the philosophy of literature and the history of national opinions. Shakespeare was destined to have his dramatic faculty contested by many successful rivals, to fall into neglect, to be rarely acted and less read, to appear barbarous and unintelligible, to be even discarded from the glorious file of dramatists by the anathemas of hostile criticism; and finally, in the resurrection of genius (a rare occurrence!) to emerge into universal celebrity. This literary history of Shakespeare is an incident in the history of the human mind singular as the genius which it relates to. The philosopher now contemplates the phenomenon of a poet who in his peculiar excellence is more poetical than the poets of every other people. We have to track the course of this prodigy, and if possible to comprehend the evolutions of this solitary luminary. It is knowledge which finally must direct our feelings in the operations of the mind as well as in the phenomena of nature. We are conscious that even the anomalous is regulated by its own proper motion, and that there is nothing in human nature so arbitrary as to stand by itself so completely insulated as to be an effect without a cause.
Shakespeare is a poet who is always now separated from other poets, and the only one, except Pope, whose thoughts are familiar to us as household words. His eulogy has exhausted the language of every class of enthusiasts, the learned and the unlearned, the profound and the fantastical. The writings of this greatest of dramatists are, as once were those of Homer, a Bible whence we receive those other revelations of man, and of all that concerns man. There was no excess of wonder and admiration when Hurd declared that “This astonishing man is the most original THINKER and SPEAKER since the days of Homer.”