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Rh the nightingale has this great advantage practically all to itself. I cannot help thinking that it owes to this that easy and unquestioned superiority which has been accorded to it in popular estimation over all our other song-birds, especially such glorious ones as the skylark, thrush, blackcap, blackbird, etc.

It will be said that I cannot appreciate the song of the nightingale, though I am trying only properly to appreciate that of other members of the choir. Yet if I were to say that Shakespeare was full of imperfections, that Julius Cæsar was a dull play, King Lear a—I forget what, something uncomplimentary—play, and Richard III. such a one as allowed "the discerning admirer" (a nom de plume) to see the author's quill-driven expression whilst writing it; that, moreover, the seven ages of man was by no means a fine passage, and that Hamlet's soliloquy had been much over-rated, it would not be said, on this account, that I was unable to appreciate Shakespeare. I judge so, because others who make these and similar statements (whether they or the Baconians are the more pestilent, I find it difficult to decide) pass, apparently, for the appreciative persons, which, I suppose, they think themselves to be. Yet how they can think so puzzles me, for people who write in this way must be, really, as much bored by Shakespeare as Shakespeare would have been by them, had an introduction been possible—and surely they must have found this out. I wish the poor, gullible