The great, ever-living, dead man.
Ibid.
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.