will you not admit that it compares favourably with that?’
‘I consider it, my dear Samuel,’ was the solemn reply, ‘a decided improvement.’
He spoke in a tone of conviction, which admitted of no question; sudden as his conversion was (for in praising what in fact he had believed to be his son’s composition he had gone to the extreme limit that his conscience would permit), it was perfectly genuine.
There are only a very few people in the world who form an independent judgment on anything upon its intrinsic merits. Most of us are the slaves of authority, or what is supposed to be authority, in matters of opinion. In letters men are almost as much victims to a name as in art. The scholar blind to the beauties of a modern poem can perceive them in an ancient one even where they do not exist. He cannot be persuaded that Æschylus was capable of writing a dull play; the antiquary prefers a torso of two thousand years old to a full-length figure by Canova. This may not be good sense, but it is human nature.
‘I need not ask you,’ continued Mr. Erin, after a pause, during which he gazed at the manuscript like Cortez, on his peak, at the Pacific, ‘whether this precious document came from the same treasure house as the rest?’
‘Yes, sir; it almost seems as if there were no end to them. I have not yet explored half the curious papers on which my patron seems to set so little store.’
The antiquary’s eyes sparkled under his shaggy brows; if the young man had read his very heart he could not have replied to its secret thoughts more pertinently. An hour before he had hardly dreamt of the existence of such a prize, but, now that it had been found, it at once began to suggest the most magnificent possibilities. This was the first, but why should it be the last? If the manuscript of the ‘Lear’ had survived all the accidents of time and chance, why not that of the ‘Hamlet’ also—the ‘Hamlet,’ with its ambiguous utterances, so differently rendered by the Shakespearean oracles, and which stood so much in need of an authoritative exponent?
When a man (for no merit of his own beyond a little bribery at elections) is made a baronet, he is not so enraptured but that he beholds in the perspective a peerage, and even dreams that upon a somewhat ampler waistcoat (but still his own) may one day repose the broad riband of the Garter.
‘What is very remarkable in the present manuscript,’ continued William Henry, ‘is that it is free from the ribaldry which but too often disfigures the plays of Shakespeare.’