Porson.—With more; although at Cambridge we rather discourse on Bacon, for we know him better. He was immeasurably a less wise man than Shakespeare, and not a wiser writer: for he knew his fellow-man only as he saw him in the street and in the Court, which indeed is but a dirtier street and a narrower; Shakespeare, who also knew him there, knew him everywhere else, both as he was and as he might be.
Southey.—There is as great a difference between Shakespeare and Bacon as between an American forest and a London timber-yard. In the timber-yard the materials are
sawed and squared and set across; in the forest we have the natural form of the tree, all its growth, all its branches, all its leaves, all the mosses that grow about it, all the birds and insects that inhabit it; now deep shadows absorbing the whole wilderness; now bright bursting glades, with exuberant grass and flower and fruitage; now untroubled skies; now terrific thunderstorms; everywhere multiformity, everywhere immensity.
“Southey and Porson.” Imaginary Conversations. Works, 1846, i. pp. 12-13.
This is from the enlarged edition of the Imaginary Conversations. It does not appear in the original Southey-Porson “Conversation” published in 1824.
WILLIAM SCHWENCK GILBERT, 1868
An Unfortunate Likeness
(b. 1836)
I’ve painted Shakespeare all my life,
“An Infant” (even then at “play”!)
“A boy” with stage-ambition rife,