Page:Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.djvu/94

, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought.… He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives—as well those that they knew, as those that they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves."

Through this rhapsody how shall we approach the man Shakspere with human faults of speech and conduct; or how shall we see the roots of his genius in any faculty that is ours?

This school of criticism might be called the philosophical adoration of Shakspere. In the soberer end of the nineteenth century we have had the scholarly adoration, a milder but no less devoted flame, as befits much telling of syllables and