The ministry of Confession is provided to satisfy the natural desire for some relief from the load of grief. Here, as in so many other respects, the Church of Rome adapts herself with consummate skill to our nature, and is strong by our weaknesses. Almost all her errors and corruptions are abuses of what is good.
I think Buchanan's 'Maiae Calendae' equal in sentiment, if not in elegance, to anything in Horace; but your brother Charles, to whom I repeated it the other day, pointed out a false quantity in it[257]. Happily this had escaped me.
When I began to give myself up to the profession of a poet for life, I was impressed with a conviction, that there were four English poets whom I must have continually before me as examples—Chaucer, Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton. These I must study, and equal if I could; and I need not think of the rest[258].
I have been charged by some with disparaging Pope and Dryden. This is not so. I have committed much of both to memory. As far as Pope goes, he succeeds; but his Homer is not Homer, but Pope.
I cannot account for Shakspeare's low estimate of his own writings, except from the sublimity, the superhumanity, of his genius. They were infinitely below his conception of what they might have been, and ought to have been.
The mind often does not think, when it thinks that it is thinking. If we were to give our whole soul to anything, as the bee does to the flower, I conceive there would be little difficulty in any intellectual employment. Hence there is no excuse for obscurity in writing.
'Macbeth,' is the best conducted of Shakspeare's plays. The fault of 'Julius Caesar,' 'Hamlet,' and 'Lear,' is, that the interest is not, and by the nature of the case could not be, sustained to their conclusion. The death of Julius Caesar is too overwhelming an incident for any stage of the drama but the last. It is an incident to which the mind clings, and from which it will not be torn away to share in other sorrows. The same may be said of the madness of Lear. Again, the opening of 'Hamlet' is full of exhausting interest. There is more mind in 'Hamlet' than in any other play, more knowledge of human nature. The first act is incomparable.... There is too much of an every-day sick room in the death-bed scene of Catherine, in 'Henry the Eighth'—too much of leeches and apothecaries' vials.... 'Zanga' is a bad imitation of 'Othello.' Garrick never ventured on Othello: he could not submit to a blacked face. He rehearsed the part once. During the rehearsal Quin entered, and, having listened for some time with attention, exclaimed, 'Well done, David! but where's the teakettle?' alluding to the print of Hogarth, where a black boy follows his mistress with a teakettle in his hand.... In stature Garrick was short.... A fact which conveys a high notion of his powers is, that he was able to act out the absurd stage-costume of those days. He represented Coriolanus in the attire of Cheapside. I remember hearing from Sir G. Beaumont, that while he was venting, as Lear, the violent paroxysms of his rage in the awful tempest scene, his wig happened to fall off. The accident did not produce the slightest effect on the gravity of the house, so strongly had he impregnated every breast with his own emotions.
Some of my friends (H.C. for instance) doubt whether poetry on contemporary persons and events can be good. But I instance Spenser's 'Marriage,' and Milton's 'Lycidas.' True, the 'Persae' is one of the worst of Aeschylus's plays; at least, in my opinion.
Milton is falsely represented by some as a democrat. He was an aristocrat in the truest sense of the word. See the quotation from him in my 'Convention of Cintra.'[259] Indeed, he spoke in very proud and contemptuous terms, of the populace. 'Comus' is rich in beautiful and sweet flowers, and in exuberant leaves of genius; but the ripe and mellow fruit is in 'Samson Agonistes.' When he wrote that, his mind was Hebraized. Indeed, his genius fed on the writings of the Hebrew prophets. This arose, in some degree, from the temper of the times; the Puritan lived in the Old Testament, almost to the exclusion of the New.
The works of the old English dramatists are the gardens of our language.