Page:A study of Shakespeare (IA cu31924013158393).pdf/54

 haste and as little of labour as might be possible to an impatient and uncertain hand. Now all tragic poets, I presume, from Æschylus the godlike father of them all to the last aspirant who may struggle after the traces of his steps, have been poets before they were tragedians; their lips have had power to sing before their feet had strength to tread the stage, before their hands had skill to paint or carve figures from the life. With Shakespeare it was so as certainly as with Shelley, as evidently as with Hugo. It is in the great comic poets, in Molière and in Congreve, our own lesser Molière, so far inferior in breadth and depth, in tenderness and strength, to the greatest writer of the "great age,"