Page:Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness.djvu/36

 28 and gentle scholarship. 'Great tranquillity of heart hath he who careth neither for praise nor blame,' said the wise à Kempis, who knew whereof he spoke; and I have many times heard Dr. Furness quote with approval those stern and splendid lines in which Dr. Johnson, confiding his dictionary to the public, expresses his frigid insensibility as to its reception.

Indifference to dates was but one feature of that serene unconcern with which Dr. Furness regarded the hidden personality of Shakespeare. He was not merely content, he seemed glad to know no more of the poet over whom he had spent his life; and because 'every assertion connected with Shakespeare is accompanied, as a ground-tone, by the refrain "it is not unlikely," he found such assertions to be little worth his while. 'We cannot tell whether Shakespeare was peevish or gentle,' he wrote, 'sedate or mercurial, generous or selfish, dignified or merry; whether he was a Protestant or a Catholic, whether he loved his home or liked to gad abroad, whether he was jocund or sombre, or whether he was all these things by turns, and nothing long.'

Even the Sonnets afforded to Dr. Furness's mind no key to the enigma. He held that Shakespeare followed the fashion of his day, a fashion borrowed from Italy, which made of the sonnet a personal thing (no Italian would have dreamed of writing a sonnet on Venice and the Rialto as Wordsworth wrote one on London and